Most Players Don’t Finish Games

I basically only want to play a game if it has a good ending... otherwise it's just not worth it. Same with TV shows... which is why I wait until the season is over to get into things. I mean, I really LOST a lot of hours watching that crummy show...
 
Majinhoju said:
Lack of free time is my excuse.

Full time job (some part time work on the side), wife, 2 kids, etc... i'm sure many of you know the drill, lol.
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Exactly this. I also have a lot of other media that I'd like to catch up on, like TV series, movies and books. My DVR is nearly full of things I plan to get to, but never seem to have the time or energy at the end of the day. Let's forget about the Netflix queue for the time being, and the stack of games that are waiting to be played, and the PC games I bought in the late '90s that haven't even seen an install yet, etc., etc.

Had a week off last week, but I spent it painting bathrooms and doing things with my family. I managed to get about 2 hours of gaming in on Friday, and that's about it.
 
I totally agree with other comments here. I play most games through to the end, I rarely even look at the achievements. I rarely even pay attention when I do unlock an achievement. I have kids, a job, etc and just don't have time to sit there farming.
 
frelled said:
I totally agree with other comments here. I play most games through to the end, I rarely even look at the achievements. I rarely even pay attention when I do unlock an achievement. I have kids, a job, etc and just don't have time to sit there farming.
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Yes, but you do get an achievement for just completing the game without the need to even try for it, which is what the data is based on: that single achievement... :rolleyes:
 
I'll very rarely finish games these days. The only games I've played recently were Blizzard games (SC2, D3), and although I finish those, it means virtually nothing. Anything else, I lose interest fairly quickly. The reason? It's a waning disinterest with gaming as a whole, which sucks because it was a huge part of my identity while growing up.
 
The problem with the Steam stats is, people now buy games they know fully well they'll never even start, let alone finish, because of all the sales they have. The games are so cheap, you think, 'boy, one day when I actually have time, it would be great to play this! Maybe I'll do that when I retire in a few decades!'. It, of course, never happens, so 'most people don't finish games' according to Steam because their stats are not based in reality. All this is going to wind up doing is ruining gaming for people who DO finish games, and buy them to actually play!

I really hope that someone in the gaming industry has the brains to realize this, but, again, I'm all too familiar with the reality of things. Get ready for games to become even worse.

Oh, again, the achievements mentioned here are for storyline achievements, not 100% complete on all. People are still responding as if it's the later, not the former.
 
dgingeri said:
I barely even played my free version of Arkham. I think I made it halfway through the original Mario Brothers. Many games, I'll play until it gets too hard to go on easily, and then quit, just because it's too much trouble.

Games are supposed to be fun, not work. When they get too hard, or have too many chores, I don't want to deal with them. I deal with enough of that at work or having to do my chores at home. I want a game to be a way to get my mind off the real world, not dig my head further into it.

Perfect example: World of Warcraft. Back in the original version, I played casually, but when it came to raiding, I didn't want to deal with it so much, and certainly not 12 hours on weekends. I did anyway because my guild needed my priest for main healer. It wasn't too bad, because I didn't have to have twitch-quick reaction times. I'd start a greater heal at a given time, and it could finish within half a second of the right time and we'd be fine. BC made tanking easier, especially for a pally, so I started tanking. Wrath was the greatest for both healing and tanking. It was fun to run through these things, even repeatedly, and get new stuff. Cataclysm made it a little harder, but it was still fine, and I was able to still raid. MoP made both healing and tanking much harder. They need twitch-quick reaction times and perfect timing for getting off the next ability. If you're .2 seconds slow, you lose and have to start over. You have to interrupt every cast of certain things or the whole thing goes sideways and we have to start over. On top of that, these stupid, impatient kids are pushing for faster and faster runs, so that there isn't even a chance to stop and recover a little after a boss fight before moving on to the next part of the run. There's not enough time to even look over the stats of the loot to see if it might be useful, let alone equip, gem, and enchant a new piece to use on the next fight. It sucks. I haven't bothered to play WoW is months.

I get enough work from work. I want to play and relax a little. I'm too old to have twitch-quick reaction times. I pre-plan things and patiently waiting for the right timing for pulling things. After a boos fight, I like to actually look at the loot to decide if I want to roll on it, and take some time to gather my head together to prepare for the next part of the run.

I like casual gaming, not being forced to stress out over getting things perfectly right. Gaming is not supposed to be more stressful than real life. I know I'm not alone on that.
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With Wow's new LFR and LFG, casual runs become very simple, it's only once you reach heroics and actual Raiding that things are still this way. But they have tailored the game for both types of gamers now. Me personally, I love a challenge. I like playing my games on the hardest difficulty so I am forced to learn the physics engine in and out. If I can't beat it on the hardest difficultly I don't see a point in continuing.
 
I can only recall two games that I just put down in disgust due to bugs or just simply bored to tears and deleted. Skyrim was one due to just the awful game engine and Darksiders 2. I could not take another stupid inane puzzle with its shoehorned puzzle mechanics.
 
Darksiders was tough, it felt like a reskinned Zelda. Although pretty, it felt old quick, never finished.

I've been playing Deus Ex: HR recently, but i lost interest, i think i badly needed a respec option, but the game wasn't worth my time to start over. I got the director's cut for $5 so i got my money's worth out of it hours wise.

Morrowind. No, leveling system was awful.

Oblivion. No, leveling system was even worse. I don't believe in mod's fixing a game. Nobody ain't got no time for that.

Only recent standouts for me.

Lately my obsession when i have time is Planetside 2 and Orion: Dino Horde.
 
I guess it would depend on the type of game, the immersion, and the gameplay itself.

Some notable games I've completed numerous times:
Fallout 3/NV
Far Cry 1 and 3
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
GTA 3/SA/4
Batman AA/AC
Sid Meier's Pirates
COD MW
NFS MW BE
Star Wars X-wing/Tie Fighter/Alliance/Dark Forces series/Jedi Knight series/Academy/FU series
Wing Commander series
Freelancer
Castle Wolfenstein series
Quake series
Tomb Raider series
...damn, and the list could go on and on and on.
 
I'm just now about to finish Half Life 2 for the first time. It's been nine years in the making, but I'm finally getting to the end. I got it right before I headed off to college in 2006, and life commitments kept me from playing and finishing it. Now that I'm about to finish it - I wonder what all the hype was about? It's a decent shooter, but not a masterpiece by any stretch of the name... Would it help if I played Half Life 1 first? Who knows...
 
The ones I usually don't finish are the ones requiring a stupid combination of repetitive moves to beat a 'boss', that kind of gets boring and makes me lose interest. Mostly the games I have a hard time caring about finishing are the ones with the console like commands and menus. You know what, I play PC games, if at all, not consolized garbage.
 
#1 reason for not finishing a game? It's bad. That's mostly steam sale stuff I took a chance on for cheap.

#2 reason for not finishing a game is grind. Japanese RPGs? Yeah, there's only so many times I'm willing to fight the fucking house with boxing gloves in order to find the pixel in some scene on a giant map I have to click on to get some infinitesimal plot progression. Even if I like the art and story.

#3 Fighting the interface. I can love a game, but there is only so many times I'm going to attempt that jump that needs to be timed to the pixel before I say fuck you and never buy any similar games form your studio again.

#4 Awesome but massive. I've got limited time, and some games are really good but huge, and you KNOW decent dlc is coming, so I start them, wait for the GOTY sale or something, then forgot where I was, which is far enough in that I feel like I'm wasting my time starting over. They eventually get played, but the delay can be quite long. Fallout new vegas suffered this fate.
 
DonInKansas said:
There's a difference between finishing games and 100% completion. I'll play through story mode and side missions, but finding 1,000 hidden doodads just for an achievement doesn't interest me.
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Ditto. I feel exactly the same way. If I REALLY like the game, I may come back some day when I'm bored to see if I can find more accomplishments, but then it would have to be a pretty damned good game.
 
jbltecnicspro said:
I'm just now about to finish Half Life 2 for the first time. It's been nine years in the making, but I'm finally getting to the end. I got it right before I headed off to college in 2006, and life commitments kept me from playing and finishing it. Now that I'm about to finish it - I wonder what all the hype was about? It's a decent shooter, but not a masterpiece by any stretch of the name... Would it help if I played Half Life 1 first? Who knows...
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I think the game still holds up pretty well. You may have thought more of it if you played through it when it was released 9.5 years ago, though. I actually never finished playing through it myself until a couple of years ago when I decided to play through HL2->Ep1->Ep2. I still thoroughly enjoy playing Half-Life 2 and will go back to it every once in a while when some new game pisses me off.
raz-0 said:
#1 reason for not finishing a game? It's bad. That's mostly steam sale stuff I took a chance on for cheap.

#2 reason for not finishing a game is grind. Japanese RPGs? Yeah, there's only so many times I'm willing to fight the fucking house with boxing gloves in order to find the pixel in some scene on a giant map I have to click on to get some infinitesimal plot progression. Even if I like the art and story.

#3 Fighting the interface. I can love a game, but there is only so many times I'm going to attempt that jump that needs to be timed to the pixel before I say fuck you and never buy any similar games form your studio again.

#4 Awesome but massive. I've got limited time, and some games are really good but huge, and you KNOW decent dlc is coming, so I start them, wait for the GOTY sale or something, then forgot where I was, which is far enough in that I feel like I'm wasting my time starting over. They eventually get played, but the delay can be quite long. Fallout new vegas suffered this fate.
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#3 really speaks to me. This happened a lot when I was trying to complete all the events in Forza 4 and starting over. Pro tip for all you developers out there: please for the love of whatever deity you pray to, do not program your user interfaces in Flash :mad:. I know UI designers are generally not programmers nowadays, so let the programmers code and integrate your design without involving that piece of crap software.
 
I have certainly moved away from the "one game until I beat it" mentality of my youth and NES and SNES games. Now I almost never finish a game, just play it until my interest is gone. Certain games I will go back and beat to get...closure I guess you could call it.
 
I got all the way to the last battle on the ship in Bioshock Infinite and after 10 times or more of failing to get past that I deleted the game and watched the ending on youtube.

As I get older this occurs more frequently especially in FPS type games. The final battles in games now are ridiculous and when it no longer becomes fun, then its toast.
 
I bought the first two metroid prime games in 2004 and stopped playing them both after getting a third of the way through. 10 years later I have now beaten both of them and I feel like a fool for not realizing how great they were when I was younger.
 
Mister Natural said:
I got all the way to the last battle on the ship in Bioshock Infinite and after 10 times or more of failing to get past that I deleted the game and watched the ending on youtube.

As I get older this occurs more frequently especially in FPS type games. The final battles in games now are ridiculous and when it no longer becomes fun, then its toast.
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I've done that with numerous games.
 
DonInKansas said:
There's a difference between finishing games and 100% completion. I'll play through story mode and side missions, but finding 1,000 hidden doodads just for an achievement doesn't interest me.
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This plus infinity.

In GTA:VC & SA, doing those "menial" tasks actually gave you some advantage, extra health/armor/sprint/fireproof/etc AND they really weren't highlighted as some "Achievement", with GTA4 (not sure about 5 haven't played that) they had all these achievements and if you completed something? Nothing. I think if you got 100% you are allowed to buy as much ammo as you want. Seriously WTF, I spent how long shooting all those fucking pigeons and I got fuckall for doing that?

I finish games just fine, unlocking everything isn't finishing.
 
I have 2 reasons .. I have had up to 13 games sittig on my shelf because they turned out to be horrible. I have 3 games I never opened because I found out they had draconian DRM.

These days I blame steam. With the great deals, I now have over 100 games. So I play here and there on all the different games. I expect that one day I will have finished them all.

but lastly too, I love multi-player games like team fortress 2 ...they have no ending :)
 
sfsuphysics said:
This plus infinity.

In GTA:VC & SA, doing those "menial" tasks actually gave you some advantage, extra health/armor/sprint/fireproof/etc AND they really weren't highlighted as some "Achievement", with GTA4 (not sure about 5 haven't played that) they had all these achievements and if you completed something? Nothing. I think if you got 100% you are allowed to buy as much ammo as you want. Seriously WTF, I spent how long shooting all those fucking pigeons and I got fuckall for doing that?

I finish games just fine, unlocking everything isn't finishing.
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The continuing level of reading comprehension in this thread (or lack thereof...) is not surprising in the least :rolleyes:.
 
Armenius said:
The continuing level of reading comprehension in this thread (or lack thereof...) is not surprising in the least :rolleyes:.
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I totally agree because you did not read WTF I was responding to, and you don't comprehend how what I wrote was a perfectly valid response to the quoted line.
 
I always Finnish video games because I'm Russian right through them to the end. Then I go back and take my time to do all the fun stuff like uncover secrets and bonuses and whatnot.
 
potency said:
I always Finnish video games because I'm Russian right through them to the end. Then I go back and take my time to do all the fun stuff like uncover secrets and bonuses and whatnot.
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What's Russian like? Is that where you have someone over your shoulder yelling in your ear and a bottlef of vodka infringe if you while you game?
 
potency said:
I always Finnish video games because I'm Russian right through them to the end. Then I go back and take my time to do all the fun stuff like uncover secrets and bonuses and whatnot.
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I bet European all over yourself for your cleverness. :D
 
Trimlock said:
What's Russian like? Is that where you have someone over your shoulder yelling in your ear and a bottlef of vodka infringe if you while you game?
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It means that if I can't handle the game then Russia annexes part of my HDD space.



Phoenix333 said:
I bet European all over yourself for your cleverness. :D
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:D

I'm actually kinda mad that I didn't come up with that myself!
 
I don't get why people have to finish all the dumb achievements in a game at all. I mean the point of a game is to have fun so if that means all you do in a game like Fallout 3 is stand around in a vault while the camera spins around your character because you think that's fun, then whatever...mission accomplished. Achievements are just a way to get ultra competitive little boys to have another reason to bash their tiny reproductive organs against one another. It's just like saying you got five billion-jallion-forkillions of points playing Super Angry Bubble Pop Fighter 3 Turbo Maximum Orange Juice Edition when you're standing in the lunch line at school. Sooo dumb, but it gets people talking about a game and maybe it sells more copies, I guess. Still its kinda sad to see so many people so easily exploited because they're dumb.
 
I play through the game but disregard most challenges. Mass Effect 3 is the only exception because of an obsession with multiplayer.
 
I view achievements as a way for jobless/friendless/wifeless people to avoid justifying their own existence.
 
My steam library has close to 400 games now.

I've gotten most of them for a few dollars, certainly almost all for less than $10.

So, why don't I finish? Because I only started the games because I was curious most of the time, and when they turn out to not be compelling, I don't finish them.

I also have limited time, so I like to play a few games that I really like for a long time instead of trying to find some new thing.

I'll say this though, I've played every Valve game to death. They have a way of making games that are really fun and stay fun over and over again.
 
I'll also add that I'm pretty sure they are defining "finish" as just beating the story, and not getting every achievement. Many games have an achievement for beating the main story line.
 
DonInKansas said:
There's a difference between finishing games and 100% completion. I'll play through story mode and side missions, but finding 1,000 hidden doodads just for an achievement doesn't interest me.
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Couldn't agree more.

I'm about 425 hours into Civilization V and I've only done ~27% of the achievements.
 
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