Poll: Can you play a game based on the promise that it will get interesting later on?

[AD-Stu]

I'd like to say yes, but at the same time, I have limits.

I managed to drag myself through the first Assassin's Creed on the promise that you could skip everything other than the main plot, and that the second game was infinitely better. Thankfully that was true.

The Witcher killed me though. A lot of people told me it was good, it gets better towards the end, and the second game is even better again. But after 30 hours I just couldn't take any more. Gave up and never returned to the game.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

That depends on what is meant by "later on." If I have to endure 3+ hours of boring before I get to the good part then no.

 

[thejackyl]

If it's the type of game or story that needs/benefits from a slow start, I can manage, but I shouldn't have to beat enough of the game to finish a standard game before the game gets good. (6-8 hours, before I'm going to be interested?, No.)

If the game intrigues me enough, the story premise or the game play is unique, than I can usually put up with it.

Resonance of Fate is a decent example: The story doesn't get good until about 6 to 8 hours in, but the game play was different/fun enough for me to put up with the slow story.

On the opposite spectrum: Deadly Premonition. It plays like a poor PS2 game (which I believe it was going to be a budget PS2 game originally), but the mystery and the Twin Peaks like town made me want to play it through, and by the time the games story jumped the shark, I was already committed to beating it.

 

[Lokis Maliki]

No, any form of media has to be well done. Too damn busy to deal with mediocre crap.

I distinguish this from sharp learning curve. No issues with hard. Not doing boring.

 

[Dire Trout]

If this poll had come up before Final Fantasy XIII, the answer would probably be yes. But I kept hearing "it gets good twenty-five hours in!", and I couldn't last for ten. That was utterly unjustifiable, seeing as so many other games are good from the very beginning. So I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the entire game to be good--especially not if I paid sixty dollars for the fucking thing.

 

[vIRL Nightmare]

Depends. If the game just has a slow start then yeah I can be ok with that. If it is because we need to pay for content after the game was bought, or have to wait for an update months later then no, that is a disrespectful business model.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

In general terms, I'll give a game at most, a few hours after which if I'm bored I will call it a day. Some games get even less than that.

- GTA4: I got as far as a mission to chase a guy out of a laundrette I believe, in a van. After being thoroughly bored until that point, repeating this mission over and over, only to fail each time was the last straw. It was uninstalled swiftly after. Boring combat, boring driving, boring characters, boring city, boring boring. After playing Saints Row III, I've lost my ability to tolerate shitty sandbox games. I even tried spawning a helicopter to try and see more of the city, then got blown out of the sky. F**k. That. Shit.

- Mirror's Edge: I think I played about 2-3 chapters, but the game was so awful in almost every way I removed it from my hard drive and returned it for a refund. When asked for my reason for the return, I said it was one of the worst games I've ever played.

- Kingdoms of Amalur: I gave this one about 5-6 hours, based solely on a handful of posts that acclaimed the action oriented combat. Considering how boring, tedious and uninteresting everything else was, I waited to try the combat properly. It was so boring I wanted to cry. I cheated to give myself all the interesting sounding abilities; it was still thoroughly boring. Uninstalled.

- Hitman: Absolution: I got as far as the nunnery before I gave up on this one. There was one brief glimmer of Hitman gameplay, but it was largely mired down by a shitty console game with shitty checkpoints, a fu****g score of all things, a stupid "intuition" mechanic and no fun to be had. Considering gunplay defeated the object of Hitman and "stealth" was shit, I'm amazed I lasted as long as I did. I laid down my vengeful fury in a hail of bullets against those who commited murder in a holy place, then uninstalled the game. Only saving grace is that I paid £5 for it so didn't waste any more money. (This game is also the reason I haven't pre-ordered Thief 4, since it's brought into doubt Squeenix's ability to make a good game in an old series (DE:HR withstanding).

- State of Decay: This game lasted 15 minutes (according to Steam). If I had known it was an XBLA game first that got ported, I wouldn't have bought it. As it was, after finding that I seriously did in fact have to hold down "E" to search through containers, instead of just pressing it, that it wasn't just my imagination, I uninstalled it. I couldn't abide such banal and inane mechanics.

- Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood: After playing Gunslinger (my first foray into the series) and thoroughly enjoying it, I thought I'd give BiB a go, especially as Yahtzee liked it. Upon discovering there was absolutely no way to change the shitty FoV, I uninstalled it. Steam says 19 minutes, but most of those were spent configuring the GFX options which kept resetting, entering the first level and finding out that my attempt at changing the FoV failed. I will never buy another Ubisoft game again if I cannot find evidence that it's possible to have a useable FoV. I'm tired of only getting shitty console ports.

Mars: War Logs: If I remember rightly, which I cannot be certain of, there were just too many issues with this title. It looked and sounded good on it's steam page, but in-game a mixture of shitty controls, unmappable keys, stupid design and mechanics and sub-par production values meant this game was uninstalled 62 minutes after installing it.

 

[Last Hugh Alive]

I would say yes I can/would play a game that only gets interesting later on, since there are there games I like that could fit that description. Red Dead Redemption for example.

 

[TheEvilCheese]

Game by game basis of course, but 90% of the time I'll play it to completion, or at least close to it before I even think about a final verdict.

If that doesn't happen, the game didn't engage me enough. Even after an extended play.

 

[RedDeadFred]

No, the beginning of the game needs to be very interesting, otherwise I will lose interest and regret my purchase. This is what happened for me with Guild Wars 2. Still haven't left the starting area...

 

[Therumancer]

This comes from a discussion I just finished having with a friend of mine, centered on the game Persona 3. I bought it, played it three times and then dropped it because the high school atmosphere didn't appeal to me, the social links felt like a chore and the gameplay was too easy. He said that I should continue playing because later on it becomes challenging and more plot-interesting.

While that may be true, the point is, why should I go on playing something for a promise? Books don't have that luxury. Either they keep you entertained all the time, or you just drop them. Why should I give the benefit of that to something that takes away even more of my time when there are other games out there that manage to hook me and never let go?

My ideal game -my ideal everything in entertainment, actually- it's something like a bonfire that keeps you warm all the time while slowly getting bigger and hotter and ends up in a RAGING INFERNO OF AWESOMENESS!

My friend's answer was: 'go back to SNES, then'. He may be right. But if I have to choose, I prefer an entertaining game/story with a WTF?! finale that I'll hate to something that'll bore me most of the way for the sake of one third of interesting things.

What about you?

My basic opinion is that certain things, RPGs in particular, need to start out fairly humble and slow, and build gradually towards a climax, typically when you look back the slow beginning usually adds to the experience, especially if things that happened there wound up having later meaning or development. That's arguably part of the entire premise.

With books, and even movies, they do have that luxury as the whole point of a "potboiler" is specifically to take it time and slowly build pressure until things explode in the finale, at which point all of that yawnworthy stuff you endured up until that point takes on a whole different meaning.

Granted, not everyone can appreciate this, which is why they make different kinds of games, books, and movies. Indeed things like "shooter" games that drop you right into the middle of "exciting stuff happening, right now" proliferate largely because most people are... dare I say it... shallow enough for this kind of entertainment to appeal to them, as even those who can appreciate slower builds can get into this kind of thing at times as well.

Persona 3 follows the typical pattern of things starting out slowly and following a routine, for some very specific reasons. As time goes on things get progressively crazier, which happens in sync with the protagonist also becoming stronger. You begin to realize your on a very strict time table, and what you do has an increasingly profound effect on your options and what abilities your going to have, when your schedule is likewise broken and you lose time that could be spent training due to special events/holidays/etc... you likewise feel the impact. Now, in theory it's possible to max out everything if you know EXACTLY what your doing (and presumably using a guide) but playing as intended that isn't likely to happen, and as easy and "routine" as the game convinces it is to begin with you rapidly become to understand see how the phrase "Memento Mori" inspired it.

But that said, there is nothing wrong with not liking games like this.

Oh, and one thing I will also say is that while the individual fights are easy when your first learning the game, it also gets into a situation where to avoid an auto-fail condition your forced to make X amount of progress before a certain date. As the monsters increase in strength you can wind up with some problems because of limited resources, especially seeing as every night you spend hitting the dungeon results in a night you can't be working on your S. Links and base stats which means access to less ultimate forms when things get towards the end, and not being able to succeed at certain pass/fail events that depend on having specific stats.

 

[ecoho]

I always play a game to the end (unless you know the controls are broken) so I tend to enjoy these gems.