What kills your motivation to play a game?

[WeepingAngels]

I was going to put this in the thread titled: "Poll: Has any one comment ever immediately killed your desire to buy a game?" but I didn't think it fit.

So you are about to sit down and play a game that you previously couldn't finish because of a certain annoyance. Suddenly that annoyance comes to mind and you are immediately filled with dread and turn the game off. What "features" quickly turn you off?

For me, and the reason I made this thread: I was sitting down to try and play Earthbound again when I opened my menu and suddenly remembered the horrible inventory system. Oh how I can't stand a severely limited inventory. Even worse is when inventories are tied to characters instead of having a single inventory that all characters can access. Moving items from one character's inventory to another character's inventory is not fun, to put it nicely.

How about you? What kills your motivation so fast that can't hit the power button fast enough?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Okay so, not REALLY a great example, but sort of OT. One thing that KILLS games for me is when they take forever to load up.

Half the time I think my enthusiasm for some games is entirely predicated on whether or not they'll load 30 seconds faster.

 

[WeepingAngels]

Okay so, not REALLY a great example, but sort of OT. One thing that KILLS games for me is when they take forever to load up.

Half the time I think my enthusiasm for some games is entirely predicated on whether or not they'll load 30 seconds faster.

It is a great example and it brought something else to mind. Games that move at a snails pace for no good reason. I have been unable to get far into Final Fantasy 9 since I beat it years ago because the battle speed is incredibly slow and I can see no good reason for it. It could be background loading but that only covers the slow spell animations, everyone just standing around waiting for their ATB meter to fill is just nonsense. It was this game that turned me against the active time battle system. Final Fantasy X went back to turn based and seemed super fast because of it.

 

[Barbas]

You know when you sit down, try to casually cross your legs like an oversexed Roman senator, and accidentally cause one of your testicles to disappear up into your body? Yeah...yeah, that usually does it.

 

[Scarim Coral]

I guess that would be a grind in some way for me especially with Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorn.

The expansion came out like a month ago and I had like what, completed 3/4 of the story so far. A month is enough to complete the story especially when the expansion story! Well ok it's not the story alone that is putting me off, it's the stuff they had to put into the expansion-

Each maps has a series of events all leading up to one big events which can be down in less than two hours.
MANY achivements especially when some is needed to help the progress I mention below (some of which are items you have to buy with the new expansion currency but it's a grind to get all of it!)
Several tiers to unlock in order to progress into the map further like jumping and gliding better (not mandotry per say) which make 100% map complection a chore.

I haven't even mention the revamps they did to the other stuff in the game like the pvp, wvwvw and the fractuals!

At this point it is made clear that I had fallen into the casual group of the game. I missed the stable and even ground terrian environment especially when I am able to get an 100% map complection all on my own (well except the last three maps which needed some people). Also it seen I can't stick into a single map for more than an hour most of the time!

 

[DefunctTheory]

The Batmobile killed Arkham Knight for me with alarming speed. If that game were my girlfriend, then she'd probably suspect I was a closeted homosexual unable to fake it in the bedroom. I waited for the PC patch to come out with barely contained enthusiasm. Finally got to boot it up. Got to fight. 100% joy. Then I jumped into the Batmobile, and every ounce of happiness oozed out of me. I struggled through to the first Riddler challenge, then closed the game. Haven't even entertained the idea of starting it again.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Needless drama. And I mean the bullshit soapbox drama thing where the dude/dudette leaves his/her significant other explaining they "can't go with me" because "this is my fight" and "I will always love you" and blah blah blah. Worse yet, the SO flips their shit and thinks its like a break-up message and it takes them two whole games to get back together because they're dogmatically against getting a beer and discussing their mutual grievances and maybe having really angry hate/make-up sex.

Like, whatever happened to "I'll stab the main bad guy with my knife because he killed my dad, you stay back with a high-powered sniper rifle and kill as many bad guys as you like and we'll meet up late for pizza" compromise that adults in a healthy relationship would do?

I'm also not a huge fan of shoe-horned romance, but I can let it slide as long as their is no shoe-horned drama. Like a Space Marine hooking up with an Eldar? That's a no. But if like two resistance soldiers want to share a bunk, hey go for it as long as you leave out the cliche pseudo-breakup over a misunderstanding that any reasonable, rational person could have cleared up in a goldfish's memory.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Bad enemy placements/erratic behaviour.

I can't really explain it, I can only give examples of two games that do this; Max Payne 3 and The Evil Within. These two games seem to just haphazardly throw enemies across a level, making it frustratingly hard to anticipate them or their attacks. They'll just pop up out of nowhere and kill you instantly, or take the majority of your health, without even giving you the chance to properly react. There's more to it than that, like the camera not responding accordingly, and/or not giving you the appropriate view, but it basically comes down to badly designed enemy encounters. Uncharted 1 suffered from this quite a bit as well.

And ever since Fallout 4, also the radiant quest system.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

Inability to save mid-mission. Only one game has really done this to me that I can think of, and they claim they're going to add the feature later. Anyway, 'Warmachine: Tactics' is the guilty party here; you can't save during missions and there are no checkpoints. This wouldn't be too huge of a deal, except that because of the game's story, it's not uncommon for you to have 5 different units you have to keep alive, and if any of them die it's game over. Nothing more frustrating than playing through an entire mission, and then an enemy gets a lucky critical and kills one of your VIPs.

System Shock 2 had 2 of them for me: respawning enemies, and the fact that when you pick up guns they break after about 5 shots, but when the enemy has those same guns they always work no problem.

Pretty much any old-school RTS games. I love RTS games, but trying to play 90's era RTS games is almost impossible because many of them lack the UI features we're now used to. Shift and ctrl clicking for unit selection, unit grouping, setting up queues for buildings, etc. They're just too frustrating now.

 

[tippy2k2]

Wasting my time

If I feel like the game is wasting my time (ie Grinding, "it gets better 10 hours in", stupid mandatory "side" quests, stupidly powerful boss battles), it is the quickest way to kill my desire to play. Generally I will try to power through, especially if the story has its hooks in my brain but I've put games down that I wanted to finish because I got so sick of wasting my time.

 

[Lufia Erim]

People. I like multiplayer games. I really do. But sometimes a community is so toxic it kills as motivation to play the game.

This happens a lot on fighting games. I recently (re)tried to get into blazblue since it was on sale for black friday. And i actually sat down and tried to figure out the mechanics for this game. I even picked the poster boy(Ragna) of the game so i can learn the fundamentals properly. Only to get elitists counter picking my ragna with lamba 13 , which is his absolute worst match up. Getting double perfected, and then having the guy send me messages about how im Free.

Well no shit i just got the game , have 10 matched under my belt and you go out of your way to counter pick me just to show your superiority. Thanks FGC.

 

[Fappy]

And ever since Fallout 4, also the radiant quest system.

Radiant quests sounded great on paper, but they honestly suck ass. I really hope they leave them out of TES VI, or at least improve them significantly.

 

[FillerDmon]

You could have said "Have you guys ever experienced an Indigo Prophecy Moment" (ie something that happens in game, as opposed to before the game, that makes you go from being willing to play it to wanting to break it).

For the record, in Indigo Prophecy... honestly, I can't even begin to explain it. There's a moment in which the game goes from being weird as hell to being absolute shit in terms of what the hell's going on. It's worth looking up just to enjoy the spectacle.

Hm... when I was younger, I used to be too much of a baby to play through Ocarina of Time upon reaching the Shadow Temple, because 2spooky4me. I've since gotten over it, but I certainly remember it.

One game I watched a friend play until they got turned off by some of the religious imagery used in it was ZombiU. The angels of death purifying the city; the elixer of life, the panacea; the kkk getting a reference. Apparently after a while enough was enough. (Said friend is a bit... too sheltered.)

I can't think of a game that had something happen in it that made me decide to stop playing it and never finish it. Hell, I've played I Wanna Be The Guy all the way through thrice over back when that meant something.

Hell, I've put myself through all of Sonic 2006.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

For the record, in Indigo Prophecy... honestly, I can't even begin to explain it. There's a moment in which the game goes from being weird as hell to being absolute shit in terms of what the hell's going on. It's worth looking up just to enjoy the spectacle.

Haha, I remember that game. At some point it turned from "suspenseful Hitchcock-esque psychological horror game" into "Dragon Ball Z".

 

[Bix96]

The end.
No joke for some reason I hate finishing games and the closer I get to the end the less and less I want to play it.

 

[Zhukov]

- Lack of clear objectives.

This happens in open world or sandbox games a lot which tend to be extremely weak when it comes to overarching story threads. Sidequests are fine and all, but if I lose sight of that end goal I rapidly stop giving a shit about helping out Generic NPC #7739 or chasing that 2.5% damage upgrade. The best games are ones where all the little side objectives somehow tie into the main one, either narratively (Mass Effect 2+3) or mechanically (XCOM).

- Respawning enemies.

Few things kill a world for me like walking past an already cleared area and finding that the ten bandits/monsters/aliens/whatever have magically reappeared as if nothing happened. It makes me feel like I'm having no impact on the world, not even the satisfaction of clearing an enemy base. Plus it makes the world feel artifical and unreal. The repetition of having to kill the same enemies over again is the big boring cherry on top. I remember this being a big part of what killed Dark Souls and Dragon's Dogma for me. (Hello to the three other people who remember Dragon's Dogma).

 

[SweetShark]

Difficulty.
And I am saying that while one of my favourite games is Dark Souls.
It is not a nice realization when you stop early in the game and start again only to discover it was the EASY part of the game!
A very educational example is "Wings of Vi"....MYGOD!

 

[Dornedas]

The end.
No joke for some reason I hate finishing games and the closer I get to the end the less and less I want to play it.

I'm with you on this one.
Years of games with really shitty boss battles made me reluctant to enter the last room/area in games.
Just a few examples for games with horrible bosses.
Gothic 1/2
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
And the worst of all "boss battles": Oblivion
This was so bad that I needed around 8 years between first time reaching Act V and first time beating Bhaal in Diablo 2.

Something else that can kill a game for me, but is thankfully relatively rare:
The Illuminati. And I don't mean that they use their evil chem-trail technology.
I mean the mention of them.
Deus Ex did this and I had to take 6 months vacation from this game.
I mean I know why they did this. They wanted to have some nebolous evil behind everything.
But the Illuminati are a running joke in Germany.
Because we once had a TV-show whose job it was to make fun of other shows. Pretty common, right?
Well one show they regularly made fun of was Galileo Mistery. A show whose stated goal it was to find the cause behind misteries. So the show was just manure.
But every joke about them startend with the Moderator saying:
Why is this happening?
Who is causing it?
And what have the Illuminati got to do with it?
So it's not really the game's fault, but I just can't take it serious.

 

[joest01]

Lots of things. Bad mechanics, not knowing where to go next, a frustrating (boss)battle, a long boring stretch.

But always combined with an already low motivation to play the game. In a game I am commited to none of the above are a problem.