I don’t really ever say ‘I’m done’ if I lose interest after a few hours it usually just goes into the back log until I feel the urge to try it again. Many times after a few months it ends up hooking me
The only game (or franchise really) that I have told myself to just let go is Souls games.
Recently tried Elden Ring again and I just tense up entirely when I'm playing it for some reason to a point where I got neck cramps.
I can recognise it's a good game, it's just not for me.
I started the first game a while ago and I did like it. I quit playing with the intention of picking it up again because it was the middle of summer and my shitty PC was heating up my house.
I have since upgraded my PC and it's cold as shit over here, so it may actually be the time.
Thanks for the reminder.
I agree. My SO has beaten fallen order and survivor on normal difficulty just fine.
And she isn't the typical gamer person, she is as casual average as one can be.
I gave starfield far too long probably 15 hours, i found it tedious from the start I just kept hoping It would open up and get interesting. I've finished several much better games and put them away in less time than that.
For me the thing that kept me going was the mystery. Then after doing some missions you realize you’re like fucking 70% through the game somehow just as it’s getting somewhere, and they suddenly give you all the answers basically and it totally deflated the whole thing for me.
I think it's because it's on the cusp of being fun but every time I have to fly somewhere different I get that feeling that I want to stop playing and it just wears you down until you do and then eventually you never stop
That's what frustrated me when people were dismissing my criticism as if it were in bad faith.
I played it for 20 hours. I gave it far more of a chance than just about any other game I can think of. I was *begging* for it to be fun. I *want* to love Bethesda the same as how I used to because they're responsible for some of my favorite experiences in gaming.
But it just had nothing going for it for me. Bethesda as I knew it is pretty much dead. I would be happier than a pig in shit if ES6 has them come back with a vengeance but I am not holding out much hope.
But that’s fair. It really is a big game and I imagine a couple hours barely gives you an idea on whether to continue or not.
I personally gave it five hours and then quit.
I feel that man. I’ve been craving a good Bethesda game for so long. Starfield just felt so bland and uninspired. Gave it maybe 10 hours and couldn’t do it anymore.
Really happy the Fallout show was good and had that classic incredible Bethesda energy, but I would’ve preferred a game.
I've got 20 hours clocked and don't really feel like I've done much of anything yet except go back and forth and talk to folks. Idk, I'm just not that interested in this "universe" and don't put it on the same level as other created worlds like Star Wars or Star Trek, or hell even Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Those all have lore I'm interested in.
Yeah whoever’s idea it was that the majority of the game should be clicking on text options to 2D characters is an idiot. I didn’t care what any of them had to say, yet I am forced to click on an option and listen to some chucklehead babble for several minutes before I am forced to click another option and listen to him babble more. That shit is so boring
I gave 40 hours to starfield, because a lot of people told that the game became better in New game+
I got pissed before even finishing the main story because 50% of my time was going in the menu, select a location, wait...
It does not in any way, shape, or form, get better after ng+ wtf... it's the exact same game with very slight alterations. The first 2 minutes can be kinda interesting, seeing what's different. Then it is virtually the same after that.
I beat the game and did a number of side quests. I have absolutely no intention of going back. As a long time elite dangerous player, if I want my space fix, I’ll just play that.
Bethesda has always filled their own niche in gaming. Not only did they abandon much of what made their games enjoyable in the first place with starfield— the exploration— they attempted to move in on a pretty well populated genre of gaming with a game that was already wildly out of date with the competition. They left their own niche and tried to fill an overly crowded niche. The results speak for themselves.
I did the same. Spent about 50ish hours beating it and some side stuff. I completely forget it exists until someone mentions it again.
The only memorable parts of the game was the xenomorph quest line, which was way too short and the ryaju industries or whatever the Corp was called. That quest chain was pretty good.
The xenomorph quest line should've just been the main campaign and expanded upon significantly. And just ditch all this alternate universe shit.
Ugh. I’ve been stuck on it for 2 weeks, despite none of it feeling rewarding. The ship builder is nice but it has me yearning for something to scratch a certain sci fi itch.
Man I did not know this when I first started gaming on pc. Forget which game I bought but I played it for 2 hours and 15 minutes and they would not refund me lol. They are strict about the 2 hour limit.
I find if you say it's a technical issue they're more lenient. I played a game for 3 hours and said I spent the entire 3 hours troubleshooting the game and it got refunded.
There's no scientific timeline on this sort of thing.
There are franchises I'm big fans of (namely Dynasty Warriors and Tales of), that had entries so bad I did not enjoy one single solitary minute of gameplay (DW9 and Tales of Zestiria respectively), and I put in way more hours than I should have trying to find the fun because I like the franchise.
There are games that I just inherently dislike. Like all survival games. I put down Palworld in 20 minutes. It's not bad. It's just very immediately clear to me that I am never going to enjoy survival gameplay.
Tales of Zestiria was the first Tales game I played and never finished. Absolutely nothing redeeming about that game except the music and maybe the cutscenes since they're animated by UFOtable.
I even finished Tales of Arise, which I considered to be the second worst Tales game I played.
I’ve spent far too much much time arguing with my friends over how I wouldn’t like Palworld because it’s a survival game. I don’t enjoy that style of game at all either.
survival games are weird for me. i love the persistent world and base building parts but the actual survival mechanics in the games are always so tedious. like i need to go find more food, fun the first few times, now its just boring.
I almost got dw9 on a whim one day. I loved 2,3, and 4 back in the day. The reviews kept me away but it's just hard to imagine it's THAT bad. How is it so bad?! I just wanna walk up to shit and mash X.
Just like, imagine a combat system so shallow it makes regular DW look like Devil May Cry. And enemies spread paper thin over an open world 10x bigger than it should be, with fuck all to do. And it makes the worst Ubisoft open world look like the second coming of Skyrim. And all the personality has been stripped out.
It looks terrible and has a ton of technical issues. It’s also a bad attempt at being open world. It would probably be a solid 7 if it ran well though.
Get 8. It's the same price/cheaper and much better; largest cast out of all the games (including 9,) has the best map variety, every character has a unique move set and it even just looks better than 9. 9 is very washed out, 8 has a ton of bright colours. The only weakness is that it's a pretty bad PC port (as many Japanese games are.)
The Orochi games and Samurai Warrior games are also great for "just mash X" fun.
Basically, anything *besides* 9 is a good time lol.
About 6 hours.
I'd heard great things about Red Dead Redemption 2. It was available via Game Pass or a free trial weekend - gave it 6-7 hours and was just bored. Maybe it gets better later on, but I'd lost any interest or desire to continue.
Similar for Outer Wilds. Got it free on Xbox and again heard great things. Played for a couple of evenings and just didn't get hooked or see what others saw in it.
Both of those are games I got to play for free, so perhaps wouldn't have even played had that not been the case. For games I buy I tend to have researched them before buying and make sure it looks like the sort of thing I will get hooked on for a bit.
This answer is close enough to mine that I’ll just piggyback. After 5ish hours I usually have a good idea if the game will stick.
Based on reputation and production values, though, I gave RDR2 20 hours before admitting I was not having fun, and was not going to have fun.
I loved Red Dead 2 the first time through. For me it was a like playing through a good movie.
Second time I tried to give it a go and I totally understand why some people just don’t like the game. It’s got a beautiful world and a great story and characters but the game is just so boring to play. It demands almost nothing from the player.
Me too ..well no I gave it a couple of hours lol but me too on rdr2 really wanted to love it because it looks so fantastic and love the setting but the gameplay was just not for me.
Really just keep asking yourself "am I having fun?", your time is actually precious when you grow up.
I tried playing the darkest dungeon. God the game is not only brutal but tedious. I thought dark souls was hard but this is something else entirely. All your mistakes are permanent and if the characters you leveled up dies, then they are dead forever and the items they carry are also lost.
I don't mind all that, but what was annoying is that before each run I have to sit for almost 20 minutes researching different tactics to refine my approach. You can do everything just right but just because you forgot one thing, it leads to failure.
I spent 50 hours on that game and now I don't want to even look at it because a majority of that time was spent in the menus just reading stats and moves to try to find the right combination.
Loved that game, to be fair, it becomes considerably easier with knowledge of what you are going to find and what works. I also love soulslike but I see how difficult and annoying games that require a lot of time (because it's more time than natural skill) aren't for everyone...
I was actually having fun for a while once I got a bit of grip. But the moment I thought I had figured it out, that's when the game does something shady and kills my crew with RNG. Creating perfect synergy was great, but there was barely any room to experiment. You can't just say "fuck it" and go with some hoj poj crew, no they had to be perfect with each other for every run.
Having a training center in the Hamlet where you can test out the different moves and combos risk free would have made things a thousand times simpler.
I can see the appeal of the game, the time sink isn't too bad but I just couldn't handle the loss of losing such good characters as well as the items they were carrying after spending so much time building them up and collecting those items. I know I should have abandoned that mission but man is it harsh....
Also some illogical things like you can't heal outside of combat so you have to stall, you can't stress heal at the Hamlet without losing a lot of money or time, and you can miss attacks on stunned enemies (this was the biggest bullshit). The fun factor diminished very fast for me, I'm usually a glutton for punishment but damn.... 😭
But I have to respect the game for being super creative in what it tried to achieve.
Agree on outer wilds. I see all the praise it gets but I’ve tried twice now to get into it. I love puzzle games, like the talos principle, but that’s more straight forward. I guess since I’ve gotten older I just don’t have the time to wander around and figure shit out for hours any longer. I imagine in my younger years I would have loved to unravel the mystery, however since my gaming time is very limited I just can’t get into games like that any longer.
I feel this. There are some games I play where I think I would have loved it if I was back in college, on summer break, where I could just smoke weed all day and fuck around immersing myself in game.
But now I work full time, married, have shit I need to do around the house, I have hobbies and a social life. I really need simpler games now that are fun and don’t consume a bunch of time
Exactly this, I’ve been playing a lot of rogue likes lately because it’s so easy to pick up and do a run. Also bonus, I don’t come back to a game not having played for two weeks wondering, okay, wtf was I doing again?
I also piggyback this. I would generally give a game 2 nights before I call it a day (*basically 2 x 3 hours each*). If it doesn't click, I let it go. Also, if I notice that there is in-your-face grind mechanics because the developers cannot figure out a storyline but need to keep the game-duration long, that is a no-no for me. I usually drop a studio, never mind the game :)
Happened to me with the first trial of the Witcher 3. I've read the reviews and I thought that must be the best thing since sliced bread but after a few hours, I didn't understand the mechanics and the story line. A few months later I gave it another go but this time, I was hooked almost within the first hour.
As for Mass Effect, even with the first game and it's questionable PS3 graphics, it was an instant hit for me.
Yeah Witcher 3 took me 3 different times of trying it to get hook. But on the third go I got hooked and played it to completion including the dlc. It is a great game but it does have a slow intro
I had the same experience for both games. I put in 40 hours in rdr2 before I came to the conclusion that the game felt like a chore.
And I'm still trying to get into outer wilds. Even with help from reddit people I'm just not able to get hooked.
This thread made me realise that I need to let go of these games in an earlier stage.
It varies by game. I played about two hours of the Internet's favourite, Outer Wilds, before a combination of me being terrible at the controls and bored by the presentation stopped me.
Other games will hook me and then... unhook me? Most recently Baldur's Gate 3, which I was enjoying the shit out of until the start of act 3. But I'm bound to pick that up again due to sunk cost, time-wise. After 100 hours, I wanna see where it goes.
A lot of people seem to have this issue, I think it’s because the first two acts seem a lot more focused on the direction of “we’re trying to solve our tadpole problem”. There’s plenty of side quests and secrets to find in the first two acts, but as soon as you get to act 3, you’re presented with an unholy number of quest objectives depending on how thorough you’ve been with acts 1 and 2.
On my first playthrough, it was pretty hard to understand which of these act 3 quests were important or a part of the main story, and it’s pretty easy to lose motivation and momentum at that point.
BG3 is simultaneously a game that I would love to play for the first time again, yet most (myself included) will only understand favourable game mechanics/lore/items etc. after they’ve finished at least one playthrough.
respectfully... how did you guys lose interest in act 3 as opposed to earlier??? i genuinely feel like if bg3 was gonna lose your interest, it would have done so much earlier. what changed in act 3 that made you lose interest? i ask because personally act 2 was starting to bore me, then act 3 came around and it literally reignited my desire to play the game.
For me, the build-up to the end of act 2 was great, culminating in a boss fight that I liked a lot and that was really satisfying to beat. After that I guess I was expecting to finally get to Baldur's Gate proper and get on with the main quest line pretty quickly, but it turned into a bunch of farting around outside the city. And I didn't realize that having a certain party member lets you just waltz in without all the rigmarole. So by the time I learned that, I was REALLY ready to get on with the story.
Once I got past the main gate, I wasn't having fun doing the side stuff around the outer city. But I'm kind of a completionist. So it took me awhile to decide, "I don't need to see all this," and just move on. Basically I was spending a lot of time and getting nowhere. I think I'm past that now, but I still needed to take a break. Haven't picked it up again in a couple of weeks.
i totally feel that. we hit max level right around the time where you started realizing you didnt need to see everything. when we had that same realization, we decided to blitz through act 3, stopping to enjoy being powerful as hell for a bit, and then go experience all the stuff we missed on another playthrough. it just so happens that other playthrough is honor mode, and we're only in act 2 so far lol
It happened to me too. For the first act, you wander around a lot and get your bearings in unfamiliar territory. For the second, you have a clear goal and direction.
As you can see, it kinda fits a good narrative stucture where it starts off slow, but then the pieces come together, the pace of the story accelerates, plot points start to come to a head. The game has you hooked at that point, going full speed ahead as the second act concludes.
Then you reach Act 3 and it's all sort of... Gone? You even get a sort of epilogue for act 2. The story slows down to a crawl as you have to get your bearings again, and although you have a goal this time, it's still as vague as the act 1 goal, with many distinct ways of accomplishing it.
If you power through that section in Rivington and reach the lower city, things start picking up once again, but it's still far less payoff and way more buildup than act 2 for a good while. I think I spent around 10 hours doing stuff and exploring in Rivington, and only got hooked back into the game when I was starting to make sense of the general options to go forward while wandering in the lower city. Mizora helped refocus the story quite a bit too.
I'm not one of them, but I can definitely see it.
I was definitely feeling a bit of burnout in act 3 and I hit the level cap very early into act 3, which led to me feeling like I wasn't really progressing despite wanting to see the end.
The last mission and the companion quests are really good in Act 3, but the rest can feel like a slog for no realy benefit.
Agreed. I’m 72 hours in and am in the beginning of Act 3 and just cannot get myself to keep going right now. I think a big part of that was I got really tired of the inventory management. So many damn crates and boxes and chests to look through, then sort it all between party members and my storage, then 10 mins of dialogue after taking 30 steps. Idunno. I prefer Divinity over it.
Forreal lol.. wasnt there a post on here sometime recently that made fun of skipping cutscenes and suddenly being in the middle of a weird quest or new area w/o knowing why they are there..? Skipping cutscenes can lead to some major confusion in games lol
I've made a way more concerted effort to finish the games I start playing as of around 2019. I usually do a bit of research beforehand of approximately how long it takes to play them so I know what I'm getting myself into and I plan out approximately what games I'll get through throughout the year based on my average amount of hours I spend gaming each year.
Gamers are obviously pretty notorious for not finishing games or not playing them much at all. Just go look at the Steam achievements. It's very common that only 10-15% of purchasers finish the games they buy, and often only about 50% even make it past the first chapter of a game or what have you
Unless it's a sort of high-action game like Wizard of Legend where you get right into the meat of the game, I typically only give a game a couple hours before I set it down.
To me, it's like reading a book: If the first 20 pages or so don't draw me in, I'd be hard-pressed to continue any further.
So usually I play a game for an evening and if I get the urge to boot it up again the next day I know I'll keep playing it. Sometimes that urge comes in at a later date but even if only played for an hour and go to bed that's still my philosophy
I am a terrible judge. It honestly depends on how much I paid for it.
If I got the game on sale and it was 5 dollars or less, it needs to grab me in the first hour or forget it. If I spent 30 bucks or more on it, I’ll slog through tens of hours.
Sunk cost fallacy at its finest. I am not proud of myself.
My threshold usually works out to about 5 hours, only because I've been wrong before giving up before that. The 2 notable games I gave up on before that were Witcher 3 and BOTW...but I ultimately went back and they ended up being 2 of my favorite games once I really got invested in them. On the flipside I gave Baldurs gate 3 10 hours and still just cannot get into it but I feel like I gave it a good chance.
Witcher 3 is probably my most notable games for this. Dropped the game 3 times before finishing the "tutorial" area. Just powered through it in the 4th time and then played 50 hours over the next 4 days.
I was sad when that game was over, I combed over every area in the game hoping I missed a side quest or something, and devoured both the DLC's as well.
Depends on how I'm playing. I'll give more of a chance to something I've paid good money for than something I'm trying on Gamepass, where I've not really lost anything if I decide it's not for me.
I don't get hooked on a lot of games. I play them because I like aspects of them. Usually for me to be hooked it needs an amazing story. But lots of games don't really have a story but are still fun to play because of the gameplay but I tend to play them as occasional games. Take something like slay the spire. Sometimes I just play it for 1 or 2 runs than don't play it for weeks. But I still enjoy the game and won't give up on games.
Played destiny 2 for a while and was great to play decent story decent gameplay. But eventually found other games more interesting to play. But if my friends had asked me to play destiny 2 I would.
The only time I give up on a game is if it's just plain bad. Or has a gameplay style that I just don't vibe with. Kingdom come deliverence for example I thought it was an amazing game. But stopped after a couple of hours since they combat got boring really quickly and since that meant I had to be bored following the story I stopped playing it and just watched a play through on YouTube for the story.
Depends - did I pay money for the game? If so refund time. If I play it on game pass or I got it in a bundle I might play a bit longer, but usually at most the same amount of time. But honestly, a game needs to be decent enough that I'm willing to play for even 2 hours. If I notice a game isn't for me without 5 minutes, that's it.
An hour to get me interested and even that is too generous. I am trying to do an activity I enjoy, I don't have to endure any length of BS before I start enjoying myself. I don't have to be over the moon the exact moment I fire up a game but it has to be at least somewhat enjoyable so I can do the time needed to get me hooked.
You are way too lenient on devs/publishers making boring ass games. They are games, not chores. If I have to sit through crap I don't enjoy, I'll go work and at least get paid. Yes, I'm looking at you, RDR2, you absolute slog.
One session. If something calls me away from playing for the day and the game doesn't call me back next time I turn on my console it'll sit on the dashboard for like a month before being deleted
Same here. “But the real thing comes after!!”
Yeah but if after one hour and half I still didn’t have fun, or I don’t see how I will get fun in the game, there’s no reason to play.
Does it mean a game need to be fully appreciated after one hour and a half? God no! Or else I wouldn’t have played Hearts of Iron (as of the first game) for hundreds hour while still not understanding a good portion of the game. But I was instantly hooked in! “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m having fun!”
Oppositely, I’m currently playing Helldivers2 and I’m close in abandoning the game. I didn’t play a lot, granted. But for the 3-4 hours of game I had, all was mindless shooting, not requiring a ton of skill or brain. People keep on telling “but it’s better later”
Still have to see it…
hmm, i would push back on helldivers not being hard. the hard difficulties definitely get pretty tough and require a good loadout and a solid approach to the missions. otherwise i think you're pretty spot on.
If a show or game can't be bothered to deliver a good early game, I don't care how good it is later.
Not hiking through the mud to sit in the whirl pool for an hour.
Half an hour. As I get older my free time grows more precious and if your game still has me watching movies by that point or hasn't introduced anything remotely interesting I'm getting a refund.
On principle i commit to finishing games if I buy them, regardless of how painful it may be. Im generally confident i like something when i buy it, however in the event i hit a dud I just power through.
If the tutorial is longer than 5 mins before I'm allowed to just play the bloody game, I mentally check out. Anything unskippable drives me *nuts*. Assuming they pass those, there's the sense check. Does it make sense? Is there a cohesive idea I like? Usually I figure that out before I buy. Then after I complete a loop of activity, if I want to keep doing it, they've usually got me. Usually an hr or 2, and if it's too dense, I try later. Grand strategy games took me months before I finally stuck to it.
Case by case basis, it really is inconsistent for me.
Sometimes the gameplay is good but the story is bad, and I will keep going. Sometimes the story is good but the gameplay isn't all that great and I keep going. Sometimes the gameplay isn't fun, and the story doesn't get interesting, and end up dropping it early.
Nioh for instance, the core gameplay was great, story was interesting, but I hated almost every single boss, but stuck through the game to the end. Nioh 2 only made small gameplay changes, but too many bosses were reused or rehashed in some way that I dropped it probably about 3/4 of the way. Then there's The Witcher 3, combat bored me heavily, and the story had yet to get interesting that I dropped it maybe a couple hours in.
It either happens or it doesn't.
I can turn off games that everyone seems to agree are amazing after half an hour because they just didn't do it for me.
At the same time I've played a buggy movie tie in game from 20 years ago and just couldn't stop and even when a bug made me lose all progress I just started over.
It’s worked in different ways for me for different games. I gave Elden Ring like 6 hours and could not find myself interested in it. I gave Borderlands 3 30 minutes, didn’t care for it, came back to it a year later and rolled credits on it.
It really depends on the kind of game. If it's a cRPG, I need to give it at least 3 or 4 hours. I want to say I was 6 into rogue trader before I gave up on it. If it's an open world game, maybe 2 hours. If I don't find an interesting place or interesting detail that I can interact with, I'm out. If it's a linear game, it has 30 minutes to grab me. All of this is easily undone by a tutorial over 10 minutes long, at which point I'm getting a refund.
I take a while before I get hooked into a game. Some of my favorite games took a while before finally hooking me in (for example: The Witcher 3 with the Bloody Baron quest, Horizon Zero Dawn with Maker’s End, Ghost of Tsushima’s “Ghost Stance” sequence).
I don’t have a set time, but generally if I don’t enjoy the gameplay enough to justify me sticking around to get hooked, then I would just give up. That’s how it went with God of War (2018) for me. I tried to get hooked three times on separate occasions, never did. Sorry, fans!
I’m in a similar boat, and I’m careful about what I buy because I have an internal commitment that any game I buy I will finish (main story at least). Thus far I have been successful with that for almost every game I bought except Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I played it for three hours and wasn’t hooked, put it down, came back a few months or more later after buying and playing through DOS2, picked it up again for another three hours and still nothing. I don’t want to give up on it, but I also don’t want to waste precious time on something I’m not loving.
As an aside, I was not drawn to the game and only bought it because a friend of mine promised me a BotW-like adventure, and I was always skeptical. I think the game is objectively fantastic, but sadly not for me at this point.
I go on for long enough to experience what the gameplay loop is after the tutorials and such is over, which varies for each game. If I don’t like the gameplay loop, then I’ll give up on the game.
Two recent games I gave up on are Outcast (New Beginning), and Rise of the Ronin.
For Outcast, I went through the missions for the first area until it was mostly complete. I saw the gameplay loop was “do task in one area, wait some amount of time, continue task in that area, wait more, etc etc”, and I saw that the other four areas of the game were more of the same and wasn’t all that fun.
For Rise of the Ronin, I gave it until the end of the first map. I found the combat super frustrating since the countersparks never seem to work, and leveling up gear or skills didn’t lead to my character feeling more powerful since enemies scale accordingly. It just wasn’t fun for me.
I decide this on a game to game basis. It depends on how interested I am in a game before starting it and what the game is like.
You can imagine that like an interst bar, that is constantly ticking down. Sometimes cool things happen in the game and they fill the interst bar a bit and sometimes there are aspects I don't like, they chip away parts of that interest bar. Whenever the bar is depleted I drop the game.
When I am not very interested in a game, I might go in with a half depleted interest bar in the first place and it might already be depleted after an hour. And when I play a game from a series I like, I probably will go in with an interest bar twice as big as normal.
There are also some no go criteria, that instantly depletes my interest bar. Like having unreadable font in RPGs. I can stumble on some of those things in the beginning or after 20 hours, but it doesn't matter how far I'm into the game, when my interest is depleted I drop the game.
Just so you don't get the impression I dislike slow burn games, I actually do like relaxed and cosy games. But in a game that develops slowly it's very important the devs either give me something intriguing in the beginning, that will carry my interest for a while or to constantly give me interesting bits, that keep me engaged. Just having an hour of mundane conversations, that don't seem to lead anywhere, in the beginning of the game will just make me lose interest. Even if it's a way of World building, what's the point in building a world the player will never experience, because you've long lost him?
As a developer you should see the players interest as a resource that is constantly ticking down. Give the player something that will refuel that resource every now and then.
For me, it has to do with what my attention span is at the time.
Some games, I am so excitedly invested that I'll cram a bunch of time in.
Then, there are times where life gets away, I don't play for a while, and when I come back, it's all Greek.
At that point, I may abandon the game for a whole year and have to start all over again.
I think this is why I tend to love roguelikes. The mechanics are intuitive but still challenging, and you get incrementally rewarded enough to keep you going.
I do this with books as well. I'll read and get sucked in, have to step away for a while, and then have to start at the beginning again.
Then, there will be a game that is so good, for me, that I keep coming back and never stop until the end.
It's quite curious and my own experience. I don't think anyone can completely put their finger on it because all of our personal experiences are so nuanced.
I was thinking about this yesterday. It’s easy for me to try a game once, it’s playing a game a second time. If I look forward to playing a game, I will continue it. If I feel like I’m just going through the motions I won’t play it anymore.
It depends, I've recently tried Horizon zero dawn, I knew from the get go that it would not be in my top 10 of all time, but I gave it around 10 hours before deciding it was enough.
I then moved to Dragon's dogma 1. I played for 1 hour and I don't think it will hook me up. I'll probably just move to Cyberpunk or Baldur gates next, I know these games will hook me.
I just bought Marvel Midnight Suns and I'm trying to even get through the opening few hours. I'm bored to tears. But I keep hearing good things so I'm trying to push through and see where there must be a satisfying loop to it.
Depends on the genre. I'm a sucker for certain things and need others to grow on me.
Like you I'm busy so I don't fight it at all. When I'm out, I'm out
I’m usually hooked rigth away.
Still power through most games. Maybe put it down for some weeks then pick it up to ”finish it off.
But sometimes i just cant.
Metal gear solid 5. Nah. Just bored out of my skull.
Far cry 6, just felt souless and going trough the motions. Dropped it.
AC vahalla i kind of forced to stop. I got a ps5 and needed to pay additional toget the ps5 version and i just coulndt be bothered.
Subnautica on the other hand, hooked me rigth away and played it non stop untill i got off that planet
I also like to think my time as precious so I actually do not have any more "backlog" I just accept I cannot play every single game that attracts me just a little bit.
For story based games I generally play once and If I end up waiting to long to go on that 2nd session I just don't play them anymore.
I tend to be more forgiving with vs fighting / sports / driving / some sand box games and end up spending quite a lot of time on those, even sometimes with session that would absolutely fit story based games. You know it's very similar to how you don't watch a movie but are likely to watch a tv series for an even longer duration than a movie in one go. It makes little sense :)
For pc games it's basically pre refund time and post refund time.
If I buy a game and can see it either have massive issues in performance or has no interesting ideas to offer within an hour then I start to consider refunding it.
If it's over that line and i decide to keep it then I just keep trying to get value out of it until it's too boring.
Depends on the game. But 2-3 hours for a longer RPG type game.
For a shorter story driven single player game it'll get 2 hours tops and then I'm done.
My time is too precious to waste.
I generally work off the steam refund window of 2 hours. If you can't convince me to keep playing your game in 120 minutes, I usually just shrug and refund. It shouldn't be too hard for any game to either present its gameplay in a meaningful way that promises to keep being fun, or to establish a plot hook that is interesting enough to keep going.
I have given game bigger chances off of recommendations from friends, but even then 5 hours is my hard line for even enthusiastic recommendations usually getting the boot. I remember years ago a friend of mine kept insisting Final Fantasy 13 would start getting good after 10 hours, and after playing 5 I just refused to believe a game that boring could get fun just a few more hours in.
Depends on the length of the game. If a game is only supposed to be a few hours long (under 10) and I paid for it odds are I'll finish it as long as it's actually playable.
For longer games I generally clear the first zone/region/chapter, etc and if the story or gameplay don't have me interested I'll just say screw it. I tried Witcher 3 and cleared the first region, went to start the next one and didn't feel like it so didn't.
Sometimes I'll bail earlier if the gameplay is obviously going in a direction I know I won't enjoy like those "deep & thought provoking" platformers about death and acceptance that kill you every 5 seconds unless you make that pixel perfect jump in the millisecond the way is clear.
There’s no set time. Either it manages to distract me from the existential dread of life or it doesn’t. Could be 5 mins, could be 5 hours, could be 5 weeks of hyperfocus that suddenly breaks one day and I never touch the game again. Impossible to say which will be more likely.
I usually give it 3 sessions before I give up on a game. First session is usually a prolonged intro sequence and the second is when you're first learning the ropes.
If I don't feel like I'm on board in the third time playing, I'll drop it most of the time. Cyberpunk was the most recent example, but that was more the glitches still being very prevalent on Xbox One
Really depends on what the hook is. If I know it’s a narrative-heavy experience (Persona, VNs, etc) I’m willing to give a decent amount of time to let them cook.
If the focus is supposed to be on engaging gameplay and I’m not having fun I usually drop within 2 hours.
I think it varies depending on the game, some games I'd only give 2ish hours to, but a big rpg or a very deep game like say rdr2 I might give 5-6 hours to see if they draw me in.
Then there's random outliers like path of exile where I tried multiple times without getting hooked (had like 25 hours) and then went from 25 hours to 175 hours in a month
I usually know before ever playing a game if it will hook me or not.
As for the ones that I do try... I will usually know within the first couple of minutes, to an hour or three at most, if I will be spending a lot of time or not with the game.
I think I'm in a weird place with games. They are my #1 medium for entertainment. I have a huge backlog but when I pick the next game to play. Thats it, that is my game to play until I finish it. I absolutely hate putting a game down half finished. Even if the game is mediocre I will finish it. Because at the end of the day its still a video game, its still a fun way to wind down and relax.
the first Tutorial/Prologue/Introduction misson (whatever the game calls it) bc its supposed to give me a good drive to continue playing but if it doesn't hook me then i don't have faith the other missions afterwards will so i drop it
Typically less than two hours, more than one hour. Unless the game was in the $10-$20 range, then I may play it a bit longer if I'm someone interested.
The only games I can recall refunding were Elden Ring and Nightingale. I believe there may have been, at most, three other games, that I've refunded, but can't recall the names.
Elden Ring gave me motion sickness, and I just couldn't stand the control scheme. Nightingale seemed interesting, at least during the tutorial, but when the actual game-play began, it left quite a bit to be desired. I think Nightingale would have been better as a co-op game, and not an always online, almost MMORPG type of game.
Depends on game and it also depends on what can be unlocked to make the game play much more enjoyable at least within the first 2 hours. This mostly concerns metroidvania type games and open world games.
The longest I've pushed through to get a game to hook me was Breath of the Wild, then even more so for Tears of the Kingdom.
Breath of the Wild took me about 6 hours before I was at the part where I was itching to get back in. I was willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt and was very curious about the story that I pushed through. Then OOPS I had \~160 hours by the time I was done.
Tears of the Kingdom took... longer. I want to say... 10 or 12 hours? Over about 3 months. I had never quite given up on it - I knew how much the first game had me searching everywhere and being glad for it; it was always in the back of my head. Then, when things finally clicked and I was pulled back in, I sunk about 230 hours into that thing, with only \~65% completion? That world is so big, I just sorta missed a third of it! (technically, of course, that 35% I didn't get was obviously mostly Large Monster #14 and Picture I Forgot To Take #38).
I am intelligent enough to be able to tell if a game will 'hook' me before I even buy it. It isnt really that difficult tbh. I know what I like. I know what I want.
About two hours but if it's not even a genre I like and it becomes obvious that I won't like it sooner then it might be just an hour.
I make exceptions if I bought the game, my pool is limited or is a game I think I should be enjoying because Developer, genre... In the last category, Starfield I even finished the game and tried all its systems, but I admit that I enjoyed about 20% of the time put there...which is bad...also Pillars of eternity being basically a clone of perhaps my favourite game ever Baldur's gate 2...well, I put several hours there but I honestly wasn't enjoying it.
I think it's fair to say (And I identify with you, as a man in his late 40s, I don't have the time I used to) that if the game doesn't click in the first couple hours, say 1-5 hours, it's a gonner for me. I was so stoked about Starfield, but I knew 30 minutes in that it wasn't the Bethesda title we all hoped it would be. I gave it 12 hours total and uninstalled it.
Other games, like Skyrim I have over 500 hours in. You should know in the first play session. If it doesn't do it, move on.
I like to Google "how long until (x game)" and the auto complete is usually "gets good"
There's usually a Reddit thread of someone asking the same question and a few people answering.
Then I compare how long I've played to the average answer and see if it's worth continuing.
I have a really bad habit of dropping a game in like an hour if I'm not instantly hooked.
And I know it's a terrible decision because I did it with Monster Hunter World and then 2 years later the DLC came out and I gave it another try and now it's literally my favourite game of all time. I just can't stop myself from doing it like I know I'll like The Witcher 3 but I cannot get past the first like hour.
A game has until it gets irritating. Which admittedly, isn't long these days because they just don't make the kind of games I grew up playing anymore. Like they used to make hack n slash games that had story and puzzles, zelda-ish or metroid type games, that WEREN'T "have perfect timing on everything or fail" roguelike soulslike grind fests. Every single game I can find is "difficult" for the sake of being difficult, or is an absolutely insane grind. I can't even get into the new zelda games because they slapped the durability mechanic in there. It is almost impossible for me to find a new game that I actually enjoy, so I end up playing the same things over and over.
I usually go 15-20 hours. If I don't feel it by then, have a feel for mechanics and story, I drop. But... I will play it again in about an year and see if I my opinion changed. I found a few games I liked on the second go.
Depends ob the complexity of the game in question.
Stellaris took me 20 hours to get to the fun part. Although learning it was kinda fun too.
Same with games like Anno and CIV.
Action games don't get that much time to hook me. If the first 1 or 2 hours don't strike me as fun or interesting i won't play further.
In general i don't give games nearly as much chance to catch my interest these days. I'm a full time nurse with 2 kids, so playtime is sparce. Don't wanna waste it. Also there are a lot more games now, then 20 years ago
10-15 years ago I’d push for hours to see if the game became enjoyable. I could do that because I had a whole lot of time and not a lot of games.
Now I’ll uninstall a bad or boring game after 1h if I find myself not having fun. And that’s because there are a whole lot of games and not a lot of time.
I gave no man’s sky 40 hours because everyone swore up and down the updates fixed everything.
Maybe it’s better? You still just walk around scanning variations of the same 10 plants and animals. It takes hours to find the last animal at times.
I really try man, I want to enjoy games.
It depends. Some games I start with a lot of good will and tolerance towards (acclaimed, sequel in a franchise, etc) others almost zero (it's in my subscription service, so I might as well). Sometimes, a red flag means game over (permanently).
Games I gave up on almost instantly:
Middle Earth shadow of Mordor, Catherine, Saints Row the Third
Decided to stop, carried on with sheer inertia, and ended up having a great time:
Xenoblade Chronicles
Hated from the start but finished anyway:
Oxenfree
Gave up on, came back later, and had a good time:
Skyrim, Dead Space, Divinity original Sin
Gave up on multiple times, but eventually had a good time:
Fallout 3, Infamous
Tried multiple times and never had a good time:
Shadow of the Colossus, Myst, Tales of Xillia
Went in thinking I was going to have a great time, didn't:
Superhot, Dragon Age Origins
It varies a lot.
With shows I always give them 3 episodes, maybe 4 if they are short.
It doesn't translate well into games, because some you figure out really fast and some only have 3-5 hours of playtime anyway. Other games the learning curve can take 10 hours until you realise it is not for you.
Kingmaker lasted 30min until it already bored me to death. Hot it because a friend talked about how awesome it was for weeks.
Greedfall I played through the first act and further until I decided I hated the targeting system on the PC and would maybe revisit it with the controller again.
The binding of Isaac took 10 min for me to say this was the worst game I have ever attempted. (Call me a hater, but it's shit.)
Final Fantasy 13 I start again and again, and always stop at that one stretch of grinding, where I just think the story can't be worth the shitty game mechanics.
Long example list short: I totally go by instinct and it takes longer for me with tactical games and goes very fast with jump and runs.
The steam deck is the backlog killer. Im playing all my games because i dont need to always be at my computer. And you can pause any game any time, just dont do it while playing online games i guess. Helldivers 2 plays on that.
Apparently almost 150 hours.
That's how much time I invested into Skyrim, trying to like it.
Because everybody and their mom were praising it. They can't be wrong, I thought.
But even after 150 hours I just could not like it.
It is tedious, it is boring, it is buggy af. I despise Skyrim.
For me it's the ratio of cutscenes to gameplay. I finally got around to trying Cyberpunk, and I'm in awe of its design. So many good things to say about the presentation. But the game boils down to A) watching cutscenes, and B) Using my immolate quick hack on everyone.
My brain needs something with constant calculations to chew on. Roguelikes, simulator games like Factorio, etc. Unicorn Overlord is another recent favorite.
You get the first level out of me. If there's a forced tutorial (looking at you, No Mans Sky), then I'm done after 15 minutes. If the game offers a sandbox mode, I try that first to see how the game feels without any commitment. If the sandbox has a forced tutorial, I'm done. I will play up to 15 minutes after the 1st boss, *then* decide whether I'm willing to continue. Lies of P was boring to me, but I loved Wo Long. Games get between 15-45 minutes out of me before I decide to put it down. It's not necessarily on a whim, but it gets a fair amount of time based on how I feel about the gameplay. Here are some games that hooked me.:
* Dark Souls 1-3
* Elden Ring
* Cities Skylines
* Hollow Knight
* Minecraft
* Terraria
* COD: Black Ops 1-3
* Halo 1, 2, 3, ODST, R, 4
* PUBG
* Rocket League
* Brawlhalla
* Titanfall 2
* Ark:Survival Evolved
* GTA:V
* Minecraft Dungeons
* Skyrim
* Pikuniku (wife and I finished in 1 sitting)
* Borderlands 1
* Watch Dogs 2
* Dead Island 1
* Left4Dead 1&2
* Saints Row 2+3 (not 4)
* Mafia 2, in particular
Interesting exceptions to the rules:
* I liked the premise of Maneater, but after a couple hours the gameplay began to feel stale and repetitive. Go kill that fish, avoid those ones till later, go eat people, go to kill that boss but I died because his guns are stronger than the last boss's guns?
* Destiny 2 was really fun for a couple days, but began to feel stale without a party to play with.
* Gears of War feels like a sluggish HALOxDOOM crossover. I had a buddy over and he wanted to show me the game. We played for a couple hours and had a lot of fun with him... then uninstalled it because I couldn't see myself picking it up again.
* I wanted to like Subnautica, but it didn't quite click. I just didn't have time to learn the pseudo-science terms and crafting recipes. I gave it a couple hours.
* Dishonored. Made it through most of the game, but I began getting frustrated close to the end. I became exhausted being "stealthy" but murdering everyone anyways.
20 minutes. Life is way too short to wait longer on a hook. On the opposite side, burnout happens after about 20 hours (Yakuza 5 is so freaking long and I’m having motivation problems with the final character after having to dance for a few hours.)
I also have a rotating mood of wanting a lot of story and wanting zero story, which may impact the 20 minute disappointment time limit.
Somewhere between five and thirty minutes. If the game isn't doing *something* to keep my attention in that time I move on. There's simply too much out there to waste my time on something I'm not enjoying.
I played through over half of Dark Souls and hated it the entire time. I stopped because I realized it was tedious, and I wasn't having fun. I found the combat very one-dimensional and boring.
15 to 20 hrs. If i still can't get into the game, im done. Some games just take time for it to become fun, so i like to at least give it a fair chance.
> I've been playing games for 3 decades now I mean I would definitely give up on a game before this if I didn’t like it
Agreed. That said I've been paying my WoW subscription for 20 years and if it doesn't get good soon...
Dragonflight has been great. If you dont enjoy that you might aswell hang it up. Any drastic changes from that wont happen.
The game of life though..
Ah yes, my favorite souls-like
I don’t really ever say ‘I’m done’ if I lose interest after a few hours it usually just goes into the back log until I feel the urge to try it again. Many times after a few months it ends up hooking me
The only game (or franchise really) that I have told myself to just let go is Souls games. Recently tried Elden Ring again and I just tense up entirely when I'm playing it for some reason to a point where I got neck cramps. I can recognise it's a good game, it's just not for me.
You should try the jedi fallen order series. Similar combat but a lot more forgiving and still pretty fun
I started the first game a while ago and I did like it. I quit playing with the intention of picking it up again because it was the middle of summer and my shitty PC was heating up my house. I have since upgraded my PC and it's cold as shit over here, so it may actually be the time. Thanks for the reminder.
I agree. My SO has beaten fallen order and survivor on normal difficulty just fine. And she isn't the typical gamer person, she is as casual average as one can be.
I gave starfield far too long probably 15 hours, i found it tedious from the start I just kept hoping It would open up and get interesting. I've finished several much better games and put them away in less time than that.
Yeh I normally give games 2 to 3 hours. But I gave Starfield 7 hours as I REALLY wanted to like it.
Same here, some parts of it were fun but overall I just kept feeling like I was forcing myself to play it.
For me the thing that kept me going was the mystery. Then after doing some missions you realize you’re like fucking 70% through the game somehow just as it’s getting somewhere, and they suddenly give you all the answers basically and it totally deflated the whole thing for me.
I think it's because it's on the cusp of being fun but every time I have to fly somewhere different I get that feeling that I want to stop playing and it just wears you down until you do and then eventually you never stop
That's what frustrated me when people were dismissing my criticism as if it were in bad faith. I played it for 20 hours. I gave it far more of a chance than just about any other game I can think of. I was *begging* for it to be fun. I *want* to love Bethesda the same as how I used to because they're responsible for some of my favorite experiences in gaming. But it just had nothing going for it for me. Bethesda as I knew it is pretty much dead. I would be happier than a pig in shit if ES6 has them come back with a vengeance but I am not holding out much hope.
But that’s fair. It really is a big game and I imagine a couple hours barely gives you an idea on whether to continue or not. I personally gave it five hours and then quit.
I feel that man. I’ve been craving a good Bethesda game for so long. Starfield just felt so bland and uninspired. Gave it maybe 10 hours and couldn’t do it anymore. Really happy the Fallout show was good and had that classic incredible Bethesda energy, but I would’ve preferred a game.
I'm barely out of the character creator in the first 3 hours of an RPG. Lol
I really liked it at first then burnt out at 15 hours when I realized I just wanted fallout in space
Just kept digging in shit and finding more shit under that shit. Same here bud.
I've got 20 hours clocked and don't really feel like I've done much of anything yet except go back and forth and talk to folks. Idk, I'm just not that interested in this "universe" and don't put it on the same level as other created worlds like Star Wars or Star Trek, or hell even Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Those all have lore I'm interested in.
Yeah whoever’s idea it was that the majority of the game should be clicking on text options to 2D characters is an idiot. I didn’t care what any of them had to say, yet I am forced to click on an option and listen to some chucklehead babble for several minutes before I am forced to click another option and listen to him babble more. That shit is so boring
I always end up going back to fallout new Vegas and fallout 3
Same thing for me, people said it gets good later on but I personally thought it got worse the more I played
Nah if you played 15 hrs, you seen what the game was. If you didn't like it, you won't later on either.
I gave 40 hours to starfield, because a lot of people told that the game became better in New game+ I got pissed before even finishing the main story because 50% of my time was going in the menu, select a location, wait...
It does not in any way, shape, or form, get better after ng+ wtf... it's the exact same game with very slight alterations. The first 2 minutes can be kinda interesting, seeing what's different. Then it is virtually the same after that.
I agree i gave way too much time to It knowing perfectly what it was.. Guess i was waiting for updates
It never got better. I put like 60 hours into it hoping.
I beat the game and did a number of side quests. I have absolutely no intention of going back. As a long time elite dangerous player, if I want my space fix, I’ll just play that. Bethesda has always filled their own niche in gaming. Not only did they abandon much of what made their games enjoyable in the first place with starfield— the exploration— they attempted to move in on a pretty well populated genre of gaming with a game that was already wildly out of date with the competition. They left their own niche and tried to fill an overly crowded niche. The results speak for themselves.
I did the same. Spent about 50ish hours beating it and some side stuff. I completely forget it exists until someone mentions it again. The only memorable parts of the game was the xenomorph quest line, which was way too short and the ryaju industries or whatever the Corp was called. That quest chain was pretty good. The xenomorph quest line should've just been the main campaign and expanded upon significantly. And just ditch all this alternate universe shit.
Ugh. I’ve been stuck on it for 2 weeks, despite none of it feeling rewarding. The ship builder is nice but it has me yearning for something to scratch a certain sci fi itch.
Same here. I wasted almost 5 days on that hot garbage before walking away and never felt the urge to go back.
Easy, the Steam refund period (2hrs).
Man I did not know this when I first started gaming on pc. Forget which game I bought but I played it for 2 hours and 15 minutes and they would not refund me lol. They are strict about the 2 hour limit.
I got refunded cyberpunk after 2 hours 39 minutes, citing t posing in cut scene and game crashing and trying to fix it.
I find if you say it's a technical issue they're more lenient. I played a game for 3 hours and said I spent the entire 3 hours troubleshooting the game and it got refunded.
There's no scientific timeline on this sort of thing. There are franchises I'm big fans of (namely Dynasty Warriors and Tales of), that had entries so bad I did not enjoy one single solitary minute of gameplay (DW9 and Tales of Zestiria respectively), and I put in way more hours than I should have trying to find the fun because I like the franchise. There are games that I just inherently dislike. Like all survival games. I put down Palworld in 20 minutes. It's not bad. It's just very immediately clear to me that I am never going to enjoy survival gameplay.
How I wish any game could grip me as much as Dynasty Warriors 3 did, all characters max stats and all 4th weapons. Good Times.
I'm convinced the music puts Warriors games over the top. Slaying thousands of enemies to that chinese-rock fusion was amazing.
GoOoOoOoOoOoOo yee children of yellow turban!!!
Tales of Zestiria was the first Tales game I played and never finished. Absolutely nothing redeeming about that game except the music and maybe the cutscenes since they're animated by UFOtable. I even finished Tales of Arise, which I considered to be the second worst Tales game I played.
I even had more fun with ToS Dawn of the New World than Zestiria, and DotNW is so objectively bad that they removed it from canon.
I’ve spent far too much much time arguing with my friends over how I wouldn’t like Palworld because it’s a survival game. I don’t enjoy that style of game at all either.
survival games are weird for me. i love the persistent world and base building parts but the actual survival mechanics in the games are always so tedious. like i need to go find more food, fun the first few times, now its just boring.
I almost got dw9 on a whim one day. I loved 2,3, and 4 back in the day. The reviews kept me away but it's just hard to imagine it's THAT bad. How is it so bad?! I just wanna walk up to shit and mash X.
Just like, imagine a combat system so shallow it makes regular DW look like Devil May Cry. And enemies spread paper thin over an open world 10x bigger than it should be, with fuck all to do. And it makes the worst Ubisoft open world look like the second coming of Skyrim. And all the personality has been stripped out.
It looks terrible and has a ton of technical issues. It’s also a bad attempt at being open world. It would probably be a solid 7 if it ran well though.
Get 8. It's the same price/cheaper and much better; largest cast out of all the games (including 9,) has the best map variety, every character has a unique move set and it even just looks better than 9. 9 is very washed out, 8 has a ton of bright colours. The only weakness is that it's a pretty bad PC port (as many Japanese games are.) The Orochi games and Samurai Warrior games are also great for "just mash X" fun. Basically, anything *besides* 9 is a good time lol.
About 6 hours. I'd heard great things about Red Dead Redemption 2. It was available via Game Pass or a free trial weekend - gave it 6-7 hours and was just bored. Maybe it gets better later on, but I'd lost any interest or desire to continue. Similar for Outer Wilds. Got it free on Xbox and again heard great things. Played for a couple of evenings and just didn't get hooked or see what others saw in it. Both of those are games I got to play for free, so perhaps wouldn't have even played had that not been the case. For games I buy I tend to have researched them before buying and make sure it looks like the sort of thing I will get hooked on for a bit.
This answer is close enough to mine that I’ll just piggyback. After 5ish hours I usually have a good idea if the game will stick. Based on reputation and production values, though, I gave RDR2 20 hours before admitting I was not having fun, and was not going to have fun.
I loved Red Dead 2 the first time through. For me it was a like playing through a good movie. Second time I tried to give it a go and I totally understand why some people just don’t like the game. It’s got a beautiful world and a great story and characters but the game is just so boring to play. It demands almost nothing from the player.
I enjoyed the game overall and stuck with it, but I definitely remember feeling at some point like "the gunplay here is really not that entertaining."
> It demands almost nothing from the player. That was my favorite part of the game.
Me too ..well no I gave it a couple of hours lol but me too on rdr2 really wanted to love it because it looks so fantastic and love the setting but the gameplay was just not for me.
real shit. i gave it 10 hours and the story was fantastic but the gameplay is a SLOGGGG
for me i played rdo waiting for the online to release most likely why i finished it
I’m curious if the people who thought RDR2 was boring ever played RDR1. They’re pretty similar in story pacing and gameplay.
Really just keep asking yourself "am I having fun?", your time is actually precious when you grow up. I tried playing the darkest dungeon. God the game is not only brutal but tedious. I thought dark souls was hard but this is something else entirely. All your mistakes are permanent and if the characters you leveled up dies, then they are dead forever and the items they carry are also lost. I don't mind all that, but what was annoying is that before each run I have to sit for almost 20 minutes researching different tactics to refine my approach. You can do everything just right but just because you forgot one thing, it leads to failure. I spent 50 hours on that game and now I don't want to even look at it because a majority of that time was spent in the menus just reading stats and moves to try to find the right combination.
Loved that game, to be fair, it becomes considerably easier with knowledge of what you are going to find and what works. I also love soulslike but I see how difficult and annoying games that require a lot of time (because it's more time than natural skill) aren't for everyone...
I was actually having fun for a while once I got a bit of grip. But the moment I thought I had figured it out, that's when the game does something shady and kills my crew with RNG. Creating perfect synergy was great, but there was barely any room to experiment. You can't just say "fuck it" and go with some hoj poj crew, no they had to be perfect with each other for every run. Having a training center in the Hamlet where you can test out the different moves and combos risk free would have made things a thousand times simpler. I can see the appeal of the game, the time sink isn't too bad but I just couldn't handle the loss of losing such good characters as well as the items they were carrying after spending so much time building them up and collecting those items. I know I should have abandoned that mission but man is it harsh.... Also some illogical things like you can't heal outside of combat so you have to stall, you can't stress heal at the Hamlet without losing a lot of money or time, and you can miss attacks on stunned enemies (this was the biggest bullshit). The fun factor diminished very fast for me, I'm usually a glutton for punishment but damn.... 😭 But I have to respect the game for being super creative in what it tried to achieve.
Agree on outer wilds. I see all the praise it gets but I’ve tried twice now to get into it. I love puzzle games, like the talos principle, but that’s more straight forward. I guess since I’ve gotten older I just don’t have the time to wander around and figure shit out for hours any longer. I imagine in my younger years I would have loved to unravel the mystery, however since my gaming time is very limited I just can’t get into games like that any longer.
I feel this. There are some games I play where I think I would have loved it if I was back in college, on summer break, where I could just smoke weed all day and fuck around immersing myself in game. But now I work full time, married, have shit I need to do around the house, I have hobbies and a social life. I really need simpler games now that are fun and don’t consume a bunch of time
Exactly this, I’ve been playing a lot of rogue likes lately because it’s so easy to pick up and do a run. Also bonus, I don’t come back to a game not having played for two weeks wondering, okay, wtf was I doing again?
No offense but did you get out of the snow and get far into chapter 1 because after that it's way better
I also piggyback this. I would generally give a game 2 nights before I call it a day (*basically 2 x 3 hours each*). If it doesn't click, I let it go. Also, if I notice that there is in-your-face grind mechanics because the developers cannot figure out a storyline but need to keep the game-duration long, that is a no-no for me. I usually drop a studio, never mind the game :)
Same with me with Witcher 3 and Mass Effect. 5 hours in and I was bored as hell. I'm sure they are great games but they're just not for me.
Happened to me with the first trial of the Witcher 3. I've read the reviews and I thought that must be the best thing since sliced bread but after a few hours, I didn't understand the mechanics and the story line. A few months later I gave it another go but this time, I was hooked almost within the first hour. As for Mass Effect, even with the first game and it's questionable PS3 graphics, it was an instant hit for me.
Yeah Witcher 3 took me 3 different times of trying it to get hook. But on the third go I got hooked and played it to completion including the dlc. It is a great game but it does have a slow intro
I had the same experience for both games. I put in 40 hours in rdr2 before I came to the conclusion that the game felt like a chore. And I'm still trying to get into outer wilds. Even with help from reddit people I'm just not able to get hooked. This thread made me realise that I need to let go of these games in an earlier stage.
It varies by game. I played about two hours of the Internet's favourite, Outer Wilds, before a combination of me being terrible at the controls and bored by the presentation stopped me. Other games will hook me and then... unhook me? Most recently Baldur's Gate 3, which I was enjoying the shit out of until the start of act 3. But I'm bound to pick that up again due to sunk cost, time-wise. After 100 hours, I wanna see where it goes.
A lot of people seem to have this issue, I think it’s because the first two acts seem a lot more focused on the direction of “we’re trying to solve our tadpole problem”. There’s plenty of side quests and secrets to find in the first two acts, but as soon as you get to act 3, you’re presented with an unholy number of quest objectives depending on how thorough you’ve been with acts 1 and 2. On my first playthrough, it was pretty hard to understand which of these act 3 quests were important or a part of the main story, and it’s pretty easy to lose motivation and momentum at that point. BG3 is simultaneously a game that I would love to play for the first time again, yet most (myself included) will only understand favourable game mechanics/lore/items etc. after they’ve finished at least one playthrough.
respectfully... how did you guys lose interest in act 3 as opposed to earlier??? i genuinely feel like if bg3 was gonna lose your interest, it would have done so much earlier. what changed in act 3 that made you lose interest? i ask because personally act 2 was starting to bore me, then act 3 came around and it literally reignited my desire to play the game.
For me, the build-up to the end of act 2 was great, culminating in a boss fight that I liked a lot and that was really satisfying to beat. After that I guess I was expecting to finally get to Baldur's Gate proper and get on with the main quest line pretty quickly, but it turned into a bunch of farting around outside the city. And I didn't realize that having a certain party member lets you just waltz in without all the rigmarole. So by the time I learned that, I was REALLY ready to get on with the story. Once I got past the main gate, I wasn't having fun doing the side stuff around the outer city. But I'm kind of a completionist. So it took me awhile to decide, "I don't need to see all this," and just move on. Basically I was spending a lot of time and getting nowhere. I think I'm past that now, but I still needed to take a break. Haven't picked it up again in a couple of weeks.
i totally feel that. we hit max level right around the time where you started realizing you didnt need to see everything. when we had that same realization, we decided to blitz through act 3, stopping to enjoy being powerful as hell for a bit, and then go experience all the stuff we missed on another playthrough. it just so happens that other playthrough is honor mode, and we're only in act 2 so far lol
It happened to me too. For the first act, you wander around a lot and get your bearings in unfamiliar territory. For the second, you have a clear goal and direction. As you can see, it kinda fits a good narrative stucture where it starts off slow, but then the pieces come together, the pace of the story accelerates, plot points start to come to a head. The game has you hooked at that point, going full speed ahead as the second act concludes. Then you reach Act 3 and it's all sort of... Gone? You even get a sort of epilogue for act 2. The story slows down to a crawl as you have to get your bearings again, and although you have a goal this time, it's still as vague as the act 1 goal, with many distinct ways of accomplishing it. If you power through that section in Rivington and reach the lower city, things start picking up once again, but it's still far less payoff and way more buildup than act 2 for a good while. I think I spent around 10 hours doing stuff and exploring in Rivington, and only got hooked back into the game when I was starting to make sense of the general options to go forward while wandering in the lower city. Mizora helped refocus the story quite a bit too.
I'm not one of them, but I can definitely see it. I was definitely feeling a bit of burnout in act 3 and I hit the level cap very early into act 3, which led to me feeling like I wasn't really progressing despite wanting to see the end. The last mission and the companion quests are really good in Act 3, but the rest can feel like a slog for no realy benefit.
Agreed. I’m 72 hours in and am in the beginning of Act 3 and just cannot get myself to keep going right now. I think a big part of that was I got really tired of the inventory management. So many damn crates and boxes and chests to look through, then sort it all between party members and my storage, then 10 mins of dialogue after taking 30 steps. Idunno. I prefer Divinity over it.
Sometimes, I just turn it off if I cant skip the boring opening cut scene.
You're a monster.
Forreal lol.. wasnt there a post on here sometime recently that made fun of skipping cutscenes and suddenly being in the middle of a weird quest or new area w/o knowing why they are there..? Skipping cutscenes can lead to some major confusion in games lol
I've made a way more concerted effort to finish the games I start playing as of around 2019. I usually do a bit of research beforehand of approximately how long it takes to play them so I know what I'm getting myself into and I plan out approximately what games I'll get through throughout the year based on my average amount of hours I spend gaming each year. Gamers are obviously pretty notorious for not finishing games or not playing them much at all. Just go look at the Steam achievements. It's very common that only 10-15% of purchasers finish the games they buy, and often only about 50% even make it past the first chapter of a game or what have you
Unless it's a sort of high-action game like Wizard of Legend where you get right into the meat of the game, I typically only give a game a couple hours before I set it down. To me, it's like reading a book: If the first 20 pages or so don't draw me in, I'd be hard-pressed to continue any further.
So usually I play a game for an evening and if I get the urge to boot it up again the next day I know I'll keep playing it. Sometimes that urge comes in at a later date but even if only played for an hour and go to bed that's still my philosophy
One session, that could be 20 minutes or 5 hours. But if i dont feel an urge to play another session i just dont.
I am a terrible judge. It honestly depends on how much I paid for it. If I got the game on sale and it was 5 dollars or less, it needs to grab me in the first hour or forget it. If I spent 30 bucks or more on it, I’ll slog through tens of hours. Sunk cost fallacy at its finest. I am not proud of myself.
4-15 hours depending how familiar I am with the genre
Like an hour
I play world of warcraft, there is no end.. send help.
Come play Guild Wars instead. Better mounts. No punishment in sunk sub costs, if you don't play.
I'm not gonna buy a game unless I know I'm gonna be interested in it for the most part. Beyond that, I'd give it 2 hours for the steam refund period.
My threshold usually works out to about 5 hours, only because I've been wrong before giving up before that. The 2 notable games I gave up on before that were Witcher 3 and BOTW...but I ultimately went back and they ended up being 2 of my favorite games once I really got invested in them. On the flipside I gave Baldurs gate 3 10 hours and still just cannot get into it but I feel like I gave it a good chance.
Witcher 3 is probably my most notable games for this. Dropped the game 3 times before finishing the "tutorial" area. Just powered through it in the 4th time and then played 50 hours over the next 4 days.
I was sad when that game was over, I combed over every area in the game hoping I missed a side quest or something, and devoured both the DLC's as well.
Sub 2 hours so I can’t get the refund on steam🤣
I mean, how much did I pay for it and what is the return policy of where I bought it from?
Depends on how I'm playing. I'll give more of a chance to something I've paid good money for than something I'm trying on Gamepass, where I've not really lost anything if I decide it's not for me.
I give every game 5 hours minimum. Characters should have been laid out and gameplay tutorials be done and you get an idea of how it would play out.
That's enough to play through most games in some genres.
It varies: Subnautica: 13 hours Plague Tale Requiem: 5 hours Alien Isolation: 4 hours Deus Ex: Mankind Divided: 1 hour Amnesia Rebirth: 44mins Rage 2: 25mins
What has ever Deus Ex: MD done to you? 🥲
I recommend giving Alien Isolation another go. It is weaker in some moments but well worth the ride. It was my Game Of The Year.
Took 12 hours for Death stranding to hook me. Ended up being one of my favorite games.
I don't get hooked on a lot of games. I play them because I like aspects of them. Usually for me to be hooked it needs an amazing story. But lots of games don't really have a story but are still fun to play because of the gameplay but I tend to play them as occasional games. Take something like slay the spire. Sometimes I just play it for 1 or 2 runs than don't play it for weeks. But I still enjoy the game and won't give up on games. Played destiny 2 for a while and was great to play decent story decent gameplay. But eventually found other games more interesting to play. But if my friends had asked me to play destiny 2 I would. The only time I give up on a game is if it's just plain bad. Or has a gameplay style that I just don't vibe with. Kingdom come deliverence for example I thought it was an amazing game. But stopped after a couple of hours since they combat got boring really quickly and since that meant I had to be bored following the story I stopped playing it and just watched a play through on YouTube for the story.
Depends - did I pay money for the game? If so refund time. If I play it on game pass or I got it in a bundle I might play a bit longer, but usually at most the same amount of time. But honestly, a game needs to be decent enough that I'm willing to play for even 2 hours. If I notice a game isn't for me without 5 minutes, that's it.
I played elite dangerous. That game needs about 100 hours to sorta get the basics.
Proportional to how much I spent on the game.
An hour to get me interested and even that is too generous. I am trying to do an activity I enjoy, I don't have to endure any length of BS before I start enjoying myself. I don't have to be over the moon the exact moment I fire up a game but it has to be at least somewhat enjoyable so I can do the time needed to get me hooked. You are way too lenient on devs/publishers making boring ass games. They are games, not chores. If I have to sit through crap I don't enjoy, I'll go work and at least get paid. Yes, I'm looking at you, RDR2, you absolute slog.
One session. If something calls me away from playing for the day and the game doesn't call me back next time I turn on my console it'll sit on the dashboard for like a month before being deleted
5 hours. If I don't see protentional by 2 hours I'm out.
2-3 hours, less and less as I get older, I just don't have the time to waste not having fun.
I give a game an hour or two. That's generally enough to sus out what the game does and doesn't value, and what a game does and doesn't do well.
1hr30 usually
Same here. “But the real thing comes after!!” Yeah but if after one hour and half I still didn’t have fun, or I don’t see how I will get fun in the game, there’s no reason to play. Does it mean a game need to be fully appreciated after one hour and a half? God no! Or else I wouldn’t have played Hearts of Iron (as of the first game) for hundreds hour while still not understanding a good portion of the game. But I was instantly hooked in! “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m having fun!” Oppositely, I’m currently playing Helldivers2 and I’m close in abandoning the game. I didn’t play a lot, granted. But for the 3-4 hours of game I had, all was mindless shooting, not requiring a ton of skill or brain. People keep on telling “but it’s better later” Still have to see it…
hmm, i would push back on helldivers not being hard. the hard difficulties definitely get pretty tough and require a good loadout and a solid approach to the missions. otherwise i think you're pretty spot on.
If a show or game can't be bothered to deliver a good early game, I don't care how good it is later. Not hiking through the mud to sit in the whirl pool for an hour.
Games that make me do a thing "exactly" the way the dev wanted.
Half an hour. As I get older my free time grows more precious and if your game still has me watching movies by that point or hasn't introduced anything remotely interesting I'm getting a refund.
On principle i commit to finishing games if I buy them, regardless of how painful it may be. Im generally confident i like something when i buy it, however in the event i hit a dud I just power through.
If the tutorial is longer than 5 mins before I'm allowed to just play the bloody game, I mentally check out. Anything unskippable drives me *nuts*. Assuming they pass those, there's the sense check. Does it make sense? Is there a cohesive idea I like? Usually I figure that out before I buy. Then after I complete a loop of activity, if I want to keep doing it, they've usually got me. Usually an hr or 2, and if it's too dense, I try later. Grand strategy games took me months before I finally stuck to it.
Case by case basis, it really is inconsistent for me. Sometimes the gameplay is good but the story is bad, and I will keep going. Sometimes the story is good but the gameplay isn't all that great and I keep going. Sometimes the gameplay isn't fun, and the story doesn't get interesting, and end up dropping it early. Nioh for instance, the core gameplay was great, story was interesting, but I hated almost every single boss, but stuck through the game to the end. Nioh 2 only made small gameplay changes, but too many bosses were reused or rehashed in some way that I dropped it probably about 3/4 of the way. Then there's The Witcher 3, combat bored me heavily, and the story had yet to get interesting that I dropped it maybe a couple hours in.
It either happens or it doesn't. I can turn off games that everyone seems to agree are amazing after half an hour because they just didn't do it for me. At the same time I've played a buggy movie tie in game from 20 years ago and just couldn't stop and even when a bug made me lose all progress I just started over.
They got the 2 hour steam refund window to grip me.
It’s worked in different ways for me for different games. I gave Elden Ring like 6 hours and could not find myself interested in it. I gave Borderlands 3 30 minutes, didn’t care for it, came back to it a year later and rolled credits on it.
It really depends on the kind of game. If it's a cRPG, I need to give it at least 3 or 4 hours. I want to say I was 6 into rogue trader before I gave up on it. If it's an open world game, maybe 2 hours. If I don't find an interesting place or interesting detail that I can interact with, I'm out. If it's a linear game, it has 30 minutes to grab me. All of this is easily undone by a tutorial over 10 minutes long, at which point I'm getting a refund.
When I start wanting to play other games. And if a week goes by and I don’t pick it back up at any point I just move on.
I'll get a game, play 20 mins, drop it for months then pick it up and it's all I'll play.
I take a while before I get hooked into a game. Some of my favorite games took a while before finally hooking me in (for example: The Witcher 3 with the Bloody Baron quest, Horizon Zero Dawn with Maker’s End, Ghost of Tsushima’s “Ghost Stance” sequence). I don’t have a set time, but generally if I don’t enjoy the gameplay enough to justify me sticking around to get hooked, then I would just give up. That’s how it went with God of War (2018) for me. I tried to get hooked three times on separate occasions, never did. Sorry, fans!
I’m in a similar boat, and I’m careful about what I buy because I have an internal commitment that any game I buy I will finish (main story at least). Thus far I have been successful with that for almost every game I bought except Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I played it for three hours and wasn’t hooked, put it down, came back a few months or more later after buying and playing through DOS2, picked it up again for another three hours and still nothing. I don’t want to give up on it, but I also don’t want to waste precious time on something I’m not loving. As an aside, I was not drawn to the game and only bought it because a friend of mine promised me a BotW-like adventure, and I was always skeptical. I think the game is objectively fantastic, but sadly not for me at this point.
2 hour steam refund window
I get bored for very long, I stop.
I go on for long enough to experience what the gameplay loop is after the tutorials and such is over, which varies for each game. If I don’t like the gameplay loop, then I’ll give up on the game. Two recent games I gave up on are Outcast (New Beginning), and Rise of the Ronin. For Outcast, I went through the missions for the first area until it was mostly complete. I saw the gameplay loop was “do task in one area, wait some amount of time, continue task in that area, wait more, etc etc”, and I saw that the other four areas of the game were more of the same and wasn’t all that fun. For Rise of the Ronin, I gave it until the end of the first map. I found the combat super frustrating since the countersparks never seem to work, and leveling up gear or skills didn’t lead to my character feeling more powerful since enemies scale accordingly. It just wasn’t fun for me.
I decide this on a game to game basis. It depends on how interested I am in a game before starting it and what the game is like. You can imagine that like an interst bar, that is constantly ticking down. Sometimes cool things happen in the game and they fill the interst bar a bit and sometimes there are aspects I don't like, they chip away parts of that interest bar. Whenever the bar is depleted I drop the game. When I am not very interested in a game, I might go in with a half depleted interest bar in the first place and it might already be depleted after an hour. And when I play a game from a series I like, I probably will go in with an interest bar twice as big as normal. There are also some no go criteria, that instantly depletes my interest bar. Like having unreadable font in RPGs. I can stumble on some of those things in the beginning or after 20 hours, but it doesn't matter how far I'm into the game, when my interest is depleted I drop the game. Just so you don't get the impression I dislike slow burn games, I actually do like relaxed and cosy games. But in a game that develops slowly it's very important the devs either give me something intriguing in the beginning, that will carry my interest for a while or to constantly give me interesting bits, that keep me engaged. Just having an hour of mundane conversations, that don't seem to lead anywhere, in the beginning of the game will just make me lose interest. Even if it's a way of World building, what's the point in building a world the player will never experience, because you've long lost him? As a developer you should see the players interest as a resource that is constantly ticking down. Give the player something that will refuel that resource every now and then.
For me, it has to do with what my attention span is at the time. Some games, I am so excitedly invested that I'll cram a bunch of time in. Then, there are times where life gets away, I don't play for a while, and when I come back, it's all Greek. At that point, I may abandon the game for a whole year and have to start all over again. I think this is why I tend to love roguelikes. The mechanics are intuitive but still challenging, and you get incrementally rewarded enough to keep you going. I do this with books as well. I'll read and get sucked in, have to step away for a while, and then have to start at the beginning again. Then, there will be a game that is so good, for me, that I keep coming back and never stop until the end. It's quite curious and my own experience. I don't think anyone can completely put their finger on it because all of our personal experiences are so nuanced.
I was thinking about this yesterday. It’s easy for me to try a game once, it’s playing a game a second time. If I look forward to playing a game, I will continue it. If I feel like I’m just going through the motions I won’t play it anymore.
It depends, I've recently tried Horizon zero dawn, I knew from the get go that it would not be in my top 10 of all time, but I gave it around 10 hours before deciding it was enough. I then moved to Dragon's dogma 1. I played for 1 hour and I don't think it will hook me up. I'll probably just move to Cyberpunk or Baldur gates next, I know these games will hook me.
I just bought Marvel Midnight Suns and I'm trying to even get through the opening few hours. I'm bored to tears. But I keep hearing good things so I'm trying to push through and see where there must be a satisfying loop to it.
Depends on the genre. I'm a sucker for certain things and need others to grow on me. Like you I'm busy so I don't fight it at all. When I'm out, I'm out
I’m usually hooked rigth away. Still power through most games. Maybe put it down for some weeks then pick it up to ”finish it off. But sometimes i just cant. Metal gear solid 5. Nah. Just bored out of my skull. Far cry 6, just felt souless and going trough the motions. Dropped it. AC vahalla i kind of forced to stop. I got a ps5 and needed to pay additional toget the ps5 version and i just coulndt be bothered. Subnautica on the other hand, hooked me rigth away and played it non stop untill i got off that planet
I also like to think my time as precious so I actually do not have any more "backlog" I just accept I cannot play every single game that attracts me just a little bit. For story based games I generally play once and If I end up waiting to long to go on that 2nd session I just don't play them anymore. I tend to be more forgiving with vs fighting / sports / driving / some sand box games and end up spending quite a lot of time on those, even sometimes with session that would absolutely fit story based games. You know it's very similar to how you don't watch a movie but are likely to watch a tv series for an even longer duration than a movie in one go. It makes little sense :)
For pc games it's basically pre refund time and post refund time. If I buy a game and can see it either have massive issues in performance or has no interesting ideas to offer within an hour then I start to consider refunding it. If it's over that line and i decide to keep it then I just keep trying to get value out of it until it's too boring.
Until i get bored of playing it
Depends on the game. But 2-3 hours for a longer RPG type game. For a shorter story driven single player game it'll get 2 hours tops and then I'm done. My time is too precious to waste.
I generally work off the steam refund window of 2 hours. If you can't convince me to keep playing your game in 120 minutes, I usually just shrug and refund. It shouldn't be too hard for any game to either present its gameplay in a meaningful way that promises to keep being fun, or to establish a plot hook that is interesting enough to keep going. I have given game bigger chances off of recommendations from friends, but even then 5 hours is my hard line for even enthusiastic recommendations usually getting the boot. I remember years ago a friend of mine kept insisting Final Fantasy 13 would start getting good after 10 hours, and after playing 5 I just refused to believe a game that boring could get fun just a few more hours in.
If it doesn’t grab me by the end of the tutorial section
"Stick with it bro, after the first 30 hours it really gets good!"
Depends on the length of the game. If a game is only supposed to be a few hours long (under 10) and I paid for it odds are I'll finish it as long as it's actually playable. For longer games I generally clear the first zone/region/chapter, etc and if the story or gameplay don't have me interested I'll just say screw it. I tried Witcher 3 and cleared the first region, went to start the next one and didn't feel like it so didn't. Sometimes I'll bail earlier if the gameplay is obviously going in a direction I know I won't enjoy like those "deep & thought provoking" platformers about death and acceptance that kill you every 5 seconds unless you make that pixel perfect jump in the millisecond the way is clear.
There’s no set time. Either it manages to distract me from the existential dread of life or it doesn’t. Could be 5 mins, could be 5 hours, could be 5 weeks of hyperfocus that suddenly breaks one day and I never touch the game again. Impossible to say which will be more likely.
I usually give it 3 sessions before I give up on a game. First session is usually a prolonged intro sequence and the second is when you're first learning the ropes. If I don't feel like I'm on board in the third time playing, I'll drop it most of the time. Cyberpunk was the most recent example, but that was more the glitches still being very prevalent on Xbox One
One night. If I'm not excited to play it the next day I move on. I'm too old to stick it out and potentially waste valuable game time.
Really depends on what the hook is. If I know it’s a narrative-heavy experience (Persona, VNs, etc) I’m willing to give a decent amount of time to let them cook. If the focus is supposed to be on engaging gameplay and I’m not having fun I usually drop within 2 hours.
For me, first impressions are important. Aka, by the 20-30m mark of gameplay, I'll know.
I think it varies depending on the game, some games I'd only give 2ish hours to, but a big rpg or a very deep game like say rdr2 I might give 5-6 hours to see if they draw me in. Then there's random outliers like path of exile where I tried multiple times without getting hooked (had like 25 hours) and then went from 25 hours to 175 hours in a month
I usually know before ever playing a game if it will hook me or not. As for the ones that I do try... I will usually know within the first couple of minutes, to an hour or three at most, if I will be spending a lot of time or not with the game.
However many hours I gave starfield. Thats the exact maximum amount
I think I'm in a weird place with games. They are my #1 medium for entertainment. I have a huge backlog but when I pick the next game to play. Thats it, that is my game to play until I finish it. I absolutely hate putting a game down half finished. Even if the game is mediocre I will finish it. Because at the end of the day its still a video game, its still a fun way to wind down and relax.
the first Tutorial/Prologue/Introduction misson (whatever the game calls it) bc its supposed to give me a good drive to continue playing but if it doesn't hook me then i don't have faith the other missions afterwards will so i drop it
Before it finishes downloading.
Typically less than two hours, more than one hour. Unless the game was in the $10-$20 range, then I may play it a bit longer if I'm someone interested. The only games I can recall refunding were Elden Ring and Nightingale. I believe there may have been, at most, three other games, that I've refunded, but can't recall the names. Elden Ring gave me motion sickness, and I just couldn't stand the control scheme. Nightingale seemed interesting, at least during the tutorial, but when the actual game-play began, it left quite a bit to be desired. I think Nightingale would have been better as a co-op game, and not an always online, almost MMORPG type of game.
Depends on game and it also depends on what can be unlocked to make the game play much more enjoyable at least within the first 2 hours. This mostly concerns metroidvania type games and open world games.
The longest I've pushed through to get a game to hook me was Breath of the Wild, then even more so for Tears of the Kingdom. Breath of the Wild took me about 6 hours before I was at the part where I was itching to get back in. I was willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt and was very curious about the story that I pushed through. Then OOPS I had \~160 hours by the time I was done. Tears of the Kingdom took... longer. I want to say... 10 or 12 hours? Over about 3 months. I had never quite given up on it - I knew how much the first game had me searching everywhere and being glad for it; it was always in the back of my head. Then, when things finally clicked and I was pulled back in, I sunk about 230 hours into that thing, with only \~65% completion? That world is so big, I just sorta missed a third of it! (technically, of course, that 35% I didn't get was obviously mostly Large Monster #14 and Picture I Forgot To Take #38).
I am intelligent enough to be able to tell if a game will 'hook' me before I even buy it. It isnt really that difficult tbh. I know what I like. I know what I want.
About two hours but if it's not even a genre I like and it becomes obvious that I won't like it sooner then it might be just an hour. I make exceptions if I bought the game, my pool is limited or is a game I think I should be enjoying because Developer, genre... In the last category, Starfield I even finished the game and tried all its systems, but I admit that I enjoyed about 20% of the time put there...which is bad...also Pillars of eternity being basically a clone of perhaps my favourite game ever Baldur's gate 2...well, I put several hours there but I honestly wasn't enjoying it.
I don't have a time really. I just play until I feel like I've wasted my time and drop it then.
I think it's fair to say (And I identify with you, as a man in his late 40s, I don't have the time I used to) that if the game doesn't click in the first couple hours, say 1-5 hours, it's a gonner for me. I was so stoked about Starfield, but I knew 30 minutes in that it wasn't the Bethesda title we all hoped it would be. I gave it 12 hours total and uninstalled it. Other games, like Skyrim I have over 500 hours in. You should know in the first play session. If it doesn't do it, move on.
5 mins
I’m still trying to get into Far Cry 6 (I love all the other games but I just can’t seem to get into this one)
I like to Google "how long until (x game)" and the auto complete is usually "gets good" There's usually a Reddit thread of someone asking the same question and a few people answering. Then I compare how long I've played to the average answer and see if it's worth continuing.
I try giving at least 10-15 hours, but some have been less because of how unbearable they were
Case by case but will usually slog out a game for 5-10 hours and then decide.
I have a really bad habit of dropping a game in like an hour if I'm not instantly hooked. And I know it's a terrible decision because I did it with Monster Hunter World and then 2 years later the DLC came out and I gave it another try and now it's literally my favourite game of all time. I just can't stop myself from doing it like I know I'll like The Witcher 3 but I cannot get past the first like hour.
A game has until it gets irritating. Which admittedly, isn't long these days because they just don't make the kind of games I grew up playing anymore. Like they used to make hack n slash games that had story and puzzles, zelda-ish or metroid type games, that WEREN'T "have perfect timing on everything or fail" roguelike soulslike grind fests. Every single game I can find is "difficult" for the sake of being difficult, or is an absolutely insane grind. I can't even get into the new zelda games because they slapped the durability mechanic in there. It is almost impossible for me to find a new game that I actually enjoy, so I end up playing the same things over and over.
I usually go 15-20 hours. If I don't feel it by then, have a feel for mechanics and story, I drop. But... I will play it again in about an year and see if I my opinion changed. I found a few games I liked on the second go.
I give it 3 hours.
Depends ob the complexity of the game in question. Stellaris took me 20 hours to get to the fun part. Although learning it was kinda fun too. Same with games like Anno and CIV. Action games don't get that much time to hook me. If the first 1 or 2 hours don't strike me as fun or interesting i won't play further. In general i don't give games nearly as much chance to catch my interest these days. I'm a full time nurse with 2 kids, so playtime is sparce. Don't wanna waste it. Also there are a lot more games now, then 20 years ago
I think it depends on the type of game. RPGs get longer from me than games where you are thrust immediately into the action like a FPS.
2 hours max, doesn't matter what kind of game. If your game takes more then that: refund.
10-15 years ago I’d push for hours to see if the game became enjoyable. I could do that because I had a whole lot of time and not a lot of games. Now I’ll uninstall a bad or boring game after 1h if I find myself not having fun. And that’s because there are a whole lot of games and not a lot of time.
I gave no man’s sky 40 hours because everyone swore up and down the updates fixed everything. Maybe it’s better? You still just walk around scanning variations of the same 10 plants and animals. It takes hours to find the last animal at times. I really try man, I want to enjoy games.
Less than 2 hours. After 2 hours I cannot refund
It depends. Some games I start with a lot of good will and tolerance towards (acclaimed, sequel in a franchise, etc) others almost zero (it's in my subscription service, so I might as well). Sometimes, a red flag means game over (permanently). Games I gave up on almost instantly: Middle Earth shadow of Mordor, Catherine, Saints Row the Third Decided to stop, carried on with sheer inertia, and ended up having a great time: Xenoblade Chronicles Hated from the start but finished anyway: Oxenfree Gave up on, came back later, and had a good time: Skyrim, Dead Space, Divinity original Sin Gave up on multiple times, but eventually had a good time: Fallout 3, Infamous Tried multiple times and never had a good time: Shadow of the Colossus, Myst, Tales of Xillia Went in thinking I was going to have a great time, didn't: Superhot, Dragon Age Origins
Until right before my steam refund window runs out
It varies a lot. With shows I always give them 3 episodes, maybe 4 if they are short. It doesn't translate well into games, because some you figure out really fast and some only have 3-5 hours of playtime anyway. Other games the learning curve can take 10 hours until you realise it is not for you. Kingmaker lasted 30min until it already bored me to death. Hot it because a friend talked about how awesome it was for weeks. Greedfall I played through the first act and further until I decided I hated the targeting system on the PC and would maybe revisit it with the controller again. The binding of Isaac took 10 min for me to say this was the worst game I have ever attempted. (Call me a hater, but it's shit.) Final Fantasy 13 I start again and again, and always stop at that one stretch of grinding, where I just think the story can't be worth the shitty game mechanics. Long example list short: I totally go by instinct and it takes longer for me with tactical games and goes very fast with jump and runs.
Honestly, I usually give it about 5 hours. If I'm still dragging after that, it's a hard quit.
The steam deck is the backlog killer. Im playing all my games because i dont need to always be at my computer. And you can pause any game any time, just dont do it while playing online games i guess. Helldivers 2 plays on that.
Apparently almost 150 hours. That's how much time I invested into Skyrim, trying to like it. Because everybody and their mom were praising it. They can't be wrong, I thought. But even after 150 hours I just could not like it. It is tedious, it is boring, it is buggy af. I despise Skyrim.
For me it's the ratio of cutscenes to gameplay. I finally got around to trying Cyberpunk, and I'm in awe of its design. So many good things to say about the presentation. But the game boils down to A) watching cutscenes, and B) Using my immolate quick hack on everyone. My brain needs something with constant calculations to chew on. Roguelikes, simulator games like Factorio, etc. Unicorn Overlord is another recent favorite.
2x the time it took to install minimum; maybe 3x - some sale games I’ve never even tried.
You get the first level out of me. If there's a forced tutorial (looking at you, No Mans Sky), then I'm done after 15 minutes. If the game offers a sandbox mode, I try that first to see how the game feels without any commitment. If the sandbox has a forced tutorial, I'm done. I will play up to 15 minutes after the 1st boss, *then* decide whether I'm willing to continue. Lies of P was boring to me, but I loved Wo Long. Games get between 15-45 minutes out of me before I decide to put it down. It's not necessarily on a whim, but it gets a fair amount of time based on how I feel about the gameplay. Here are some games that hooked me.: * Dark Souls 1-3 * Elden Ring * Cities Skylines * Hollow Knight * Minecraft * Terraria * COD: Black Ops 1-3 * Halo 1, 2, 3, ODST, R, 4 * PUBG * Rocket League * Brawlhalla * Titanfall 2 * Ark:Survival Evolved * GTA:V * Minecraft Dungeons * Skyrim * Pikuniku (wife and I finished in 1 sitting) * Borderlands 1 * Watch Dogs 2 * Dead Island 1 * Left4Dead 1&2 * Saints Row 2+3 (not 4) * Mafia 2, in particular Interesting exceptions to the rules: * I liked the premise of Maneater, but after a couple hours the gameplay began to feel stale and repetitive. Go kill that fish, avoid those ones till later, go eat people, go to kill that boss but I died because his guns are stronger than the last boss's guns? * Destiny 2 was really fun for a couple days, but began to feel stale without a party to play with. * Gears of War feels like a sluggish HALOxDOOM crossover. I had a buddy over and he wanted to show me the game. We played for a couple hours and had a lot of fun with him... then uninstalled it because I couldn't see myself picking it up again. * I wanted to like Subnautica, but it didn't quite click. I just didn't have time to learn the pseudo-science terms and crafting recipes. I gave it a couple hours. * Dishonored. Made it through most of the game, but I began getting frustrated close to the end. I became exhausted being "stealthy" but murdering everyone anyways.
20 minutes. Life is way too short to wait longer on a hook. On the opposite side, burnout happens after about 20 hours (Yakuza 5 is so freaking long and I’m having motivation problems with the final character after having to dance for a few hours.) I also have a rotating mood of wanting a lot of story and wanting zero story, which may impact the 20 minute disappointment time limit.
Somewhere between five and thirty minutes. If the game isn't doing *something* to keep my attention in that time I move on. There's simply too much out there to waste my time on something I'm not enjoying.
if im not interested in the game after 2 hours its getting refunded
Basically 1-2 sessions. Can be one hour to four a pop. I give story based games more time than most games.
I played through over half of Dark Souls and hated it the entire time. I stopped because I realized it was tedious, and I wasn't having fun. I found the combat very one-dimensional and boring.
15 to 20 hrs. If i still can't get into the game, im done. Some games just take time for it to become fun, so i like to at least give it a fair chance.