I'll just kill Alduin n-

[yeti585]

I was playing the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim about five minutes ago. Seeing as I do not have the expansion I decided to finish the main quest that I progressed on and then took a month or two break from the game (See GameInformer's "Every RPG Ever" flowchart for the process). I was just about to fight Alduin for the first time, so I went back to doing that. Alduin flew around, I spammed dragonrend and put about 300 (not joking) iron arrows into him. I looked up at his health bar and saw it was not even scratched. Not a single hit.

So for discussion:
-What has stopped you from finishing a game? was it a bad cutscene? Maybe a terribly hard level?
-What are some of the biggest glitches you've encountered, such as the one I described?

 

[PrinceOfShapeir]

You're fighting Alduin and the best thing you brought to the field is -iron arrows-? Did you consider that maybe you're just not doing any appreciable amount of damage? Also, Dragonrend doesn't actually do damage, it just forces the Dragon to land and I think might mess up their shouting.

 

[gigastrike]

Oh! I got a good one!

Ok, so there's this part in Battlefield 3 single-player where you're climbing along the outside of a subway. The whole thing is pretty much on rails so all you can do is move back and forth and do quick-time events, but there is this one part where you have to jump from one car to the next. You hit the quick-time event as prompted, but every time you try you just go off the rail, miss, and die.

 

[Phasmal]

I had that bug with Alduin, I had to reload the autosave about three times, but then I managed to get it working again.

OT: Often what stops me finishing a game is we no longer have it. Boyfriend finishes games quickly, and then if he spots another one he wants, he'll trade in the other one. And usually I don't care at the time- then a few months down the line I get the urge to play the traded-in game.

Other than that- shitty controls often mean I won't bother completing a game if it feels more like I'm wrestling with the controller rather than playing the actual game. Or if I get really far then the game crashes. Most times when that happens I don't wanna play the game for months after.

 

[Luca72]

See GameInformer's "Every RPG Ever" flowchart for the process

Haha, that's exactly what happens to me in every Elder Scrolls game. I get extremely attached to my character and its role in the world, then take a break for awhile. When I come back I can't remember what I'm doing, what dire threat I'm addressing, what order I was going to do my side quests in, and my inventory is a mess of items that are super important but I can't remember why. This happened time and time again with Morrowind and Oblivion. I always came back to Morrowind though.

I beat Skyrim on my first playthrough and haven't touched in over six months. When I inevitably play it again, I'm just going to have to reroll. Which I'm okay with, I feel like my Khajit thief rising from poverty and shackles to being Riftens' Azura-worshiping number one pimp (plus world savior) is a pretty conclusive story.

 

[Zydrate]

I don't know why you were facing Alduin with iron arrows.

What's kept me from finishing a game is usually a spike in the difficulty curve that I cannot overcome.
It happened once with Assassin's Creed 1, but I've hopped over that spike and have finally been able to actually kill dudes again.

But it's most consistent with pretty much every GTA game I've played. I -think- I beat Vice City once but I don't recall the ending so I might not have.
But for San Andreas and 4, it's always the same flying missions. In the event I can soldier through the "training" (San Andreas), I still can't really do the actual missions.
For 4, I got stopped at a mission where a gay russian guy wanted me to chase someone with "something big and clunky" like an SUV or truck. I have never been able to pass that mission.

It's always something in GTA for me, I haven't beaten any of them that I can remember. Which sucks because I love them.

 

[evilneko]

The first time you fight him? You mean on the Throat of the World? You don't kill him then. You fight him for a while and he runs off.

Well, let's see, things that stopped me dead in my tracks in a game:
* Mass Effect 3's ending stopped me even buying the game trololol
* GTA:SA's shitty controls stopped me... fairly early in the game. Replaced it with Saints Row 2 and never looked back.
* Bully's shitty port stopped me passing certain classes (Shop, I hate you)
* Oblivion's overwhelming blandness, such that even mods could not save it, eventually drained me of all will to continue playing.
* Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor (subtitle included as there seem to be multiple Pool of Radiance games) had a horrible, terrible glitch that made it pretty much impossible to do anything in combat. I ended up uninstalling it only a few hours after installing it, most which were consumed trying to get the combat to work.

Usually though if it's not a bug barring my way I resort to cheats or lowering difficulty if possible.

 

[Scrustle]

I remember a very long time ago I got a second hand copy of Ratchet and Clank 3. It was the only one in the series I'd ever played, and I was having a good time with it. I didn't get very far in to the game though. I came across a bug. It just froze during a cut scene. Every single time. I was really bummed about that one.

I'm also impossibly stuck on a level in Project Sylpheed. There's a time limit in which you have to fend off attacks from enemy fighters. I do a pretty good job (I think) at taking them down, yet I never stand a chance. To borrow a line from Star Wars (Wedge Antilles I think), there's just too many of them. The game was fine up until then, then suddenly I get this huge difficulty spike which is simply impossible. I can't even go back to play older levels to get money to upgrade my ship, it won't let me. I've hung on to the game though since it's an Italian import, so I can't sell it on anywhere anyway.

There's also this one god damned race I can never do on Burnout Paradise. It's the last time trial, for the F1 car. To do it you need to have everything perfect. No crashes and not even the slightest detour. It pretty much just comes down to luck whether there happens to be a car in the way at the wrong time. I must have tried that bloody race a hundred times now, and I've always gotten bad luck. Always a car pulling out of a blind junction. If I just got luck on my side once I'm sure I would be able to do it.

 

[Asita]

Eh, for some reason I can never seem to get around to finishing Dragon Age: Origins. I don't know whether it's the requisite micromanaging in battle, the fact that I played as a rogue, the general atmosphere, or the fact that the game didn't really give us a chance to connect to the world before hell opened up under our feet[footnote]Thereby making it harder to get a feel for exactly what was at stake. What are we fighting for? A return to better days we never saw?[/footnote]

You're fighting Alduin and the best thing you brought to the field is -iron arrows-? Did you consider that maybe you're just not doing any appreciable amount of damage? Also, Dragonrend doesn't actually do damage, it just forces the Dragon to land and I think might mess up their shouting.

While granted, he probably should have been using stronger arrows, Alduin's hp is not so high that the damage would be unnoticeable. What's described seems more like another instance of a well known bug, which renders Alduin incapable of taking damage during that encounter. That in turn renders the quest impossible to complete, as Alduin retreats when his hp hits a certain point. The typical workaround for this is reloading a save prior to using the elder scroll.

 

[yeti585]

You're fighting Alduin and the best thing you brought to the field is -iron arrows-? Did you consider that maybe you're just not doing any appreciable amount of damage? Also, Dragonrend doesn't actually do damage, it just forces the Dragon to land and I think might mess up their shouting.

I was using lower end arrows because I had a massive amount of them. I switched from bow, to sword, to fire spells, then shock spells, then cold spells, and nothing had an effect.

 

[Cheesepower5]

Normally I wind up stuck at a point where I'm literally a boss or two from the end, but I just can't win and see the end on youtube. See: Final Fantasy X for 2 years, Chrono Cross.

Or it just sucks. There's that.

 

[Sean Hollyman]

This happened to me too, jusr restart the mission, it's a glitch

 

[Lilani]

I was playing the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim about five minutes ago. Seeing as I do not have the expansion I decided to finish the main quest that I progressed on and then took a month or two break from the game (See GameInformer's "Every RPG Ever" flowchart for the process). I was just about to fight Alduin for the first time, so I went back to doing that. Alduin flew around, I spammed dragonrend and put about 300 (not joking) iron arrows into him. I looked up at his health bar and saw it was not even scratched. Not a single hit.

So for discussion:
-What has stopped you from finishing a game? was it a bad cutscene? Maybe a terribly hard level?
-What are some of the biggest glitches you've encountered, such as the one I described?

Lol, I wouldn't call that a glitch, I'd call it being poorly equipped. Iron arrows aren't going to do shit to Alduin. Get yourself some Eleven or Ebony arrows, and make sure your bow is the best and the highest quality you can make it. And as someone else pointed out, dragonrend just makes him land, it doesn't actually do damage. Arrows are rarely the best weapons against dragons, especially if you have dragonrend. Just make him land then slash or magic away at him.

Anyway, I started replaying Final Fantasy X-2 for shiggles a few weeks ago, but I got stuck and I haven't been able to get myself out of there since. I'm stuck right before a boss battle with The Magus Sisters (one of Yuna's previous aeons, but gone bad). I went up like 10 levels, got the best abilities on Yuna and Rikku's best dresspheres, and they still get me. It's their stupid rage attack--it brings you to one health, and then even without Haste they always attack like 2 times for every one time you get to attack. Oh, and there are three of them, so by the time you get to act again you've been attacked six times and you are definitely dead. Once I find some time I might just grind another 10 levels to the point where I can blast the motherfuckers out of the water before they even get a chance to do it.

 

[number2301]

* Bully's shitty port stopped me passing certain classes (Shop, I hate you)

I thought that was just me being dense, I'm glad it wasn't. Worst thing was I breezed through that class on Xbox so I knew it was the most useful one to actually pass!

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

You're fighting Alduin and the best thing you brought to the field is -iron arrows-? Did you consider that maybe you're just not doing any appreciable amount of damage? Also, Dragonrend doesn't actually do damage, it just forces the Dragon to land and I think might mess up their shouting.

This. Dragonrend distresses dragons and forces them to land, but in order to actually do any damage you need to switch to some thing else.

Also Iron arrows? Seriously? You couldn't have at least got Elven or Dwarven arrows by now, even if you rushed though the main quest?