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Which spoilers made you quit the game?
We all have a lot of video game annoyances, but it usually takes something special to get us to quit and never look back. Maybe you’ll uninstall the game in the stealth section, force you to start over when you’re spotted, a cutscene where you lose a battle you just won, or a quick event. Maybe you don’t have time for games that take a long time to get good, or are too easy, too scary, or too easy to get in your way with things that are easy to overcome in real life.
Which spoilers made you quit the game?
Here are our answers, and some of our answers forum.
Chris Livingston, Featured Producer: It happens much less often than before, but starts the mission with a cutscene, then dies, then the game rewinds to the scene forward After cutscenes instead of cutscenes? Yes, it’s a deal breaker. I can see a small benefit like if I don’t pay attention to the scene (it’s entirely possible) and I fail because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do during the mission. But that’s rare, and games usually give you markers or some on-screen text telling you what the mission is about. But failing over and over and then having to sit through cutscenes over and over is annoying and probably makes me shut down the game.
Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor: I love games that give me the freedom to figure things out on my own, but there is one way to achieve that openness and another that really, really doesn’t.Rune Factory Series only recently Coming to PC, but I tried to play one of these on the Nintendo DS a few years ago and gave up almost immediately. Rune Factory is a spinoff of Harvest Moon that includes all of Stardew Valley’s life and farming sims, but Also Including a richer action RPG combat system. I started Rune Factory 3 and was immediately overwhelmed by everything I could do: I needed to start growing crops, meet all the villagers who were operating on a set schedule, go out and upgrade my character, all on a day/night timer completed on.
I love Stardew Valley, but Rune Factory dumped too much on me all at once. Learning what I should do and when I should do it felt like a grind rather than a fun discovery process. I guess I don’t like learning at my own pace in the game, which makes me worry about whether I’m doing the most effective thing at any given moment.
Jody Macgregor, Weekend/Australia editor: Like Chris, I don’t usually put games where non-skippable cutscenes come after checkpoints. Some types of repetition I’m okay with, others I don’t have the slightest patience for. I’ve forgotten how many games I’ve given up because of not saving in missions, or because there’s that kind of stealth part that starts over from scratch the moment you’re discovered.
Watch Dogs manages to combine these two things in one truly tedious section where you have to do a sort of “car stealth” that’s worse than Black Flag’s “ship stealth” part. You’ll have to navigate the back alleys of Chicago carefully, past patrolling police cars and helicopters, redoing it from scratch every time it sees you, and hearing an NPC repeating the same dialogue every time. Fuck the noise.
Brand Director Tim Clark: Not proud to say that, but if I thought gunplay felt worse than Destiny 2, I (obviously) gave up on shooters pretty quickly. I’ve now made an almost insurmountable hurdle to clear. I remember after seeing Cyberpunk come back at E3, I told then-UK editor-in-chief Samuel Roberts that I could say the fight was going to feel pretty shaky without even touching it. So who is right, Samuel? But honestly, this foresight is both a blessing and a curse. Like the Cyclops in the movie Krull, it can see the future, but only the moment of his own death.
Pifanjr: Forced grinding. I don’t mind grinding my way from time to time, but I don’t care about a game that stops all progress until you fill some arbitrary progress bar with repetition.
Cliff: I generally don’t buy games that put barriers in place to inflate them to 80 hours of “playability”. I’d love to play a game with 80 hours of content, otherwise…
Now, I see most games as the front end of my credit card, and with the advent of NFTs and such, it’s only going to get worse. The constant hand of the wallet is a big reason why I don’t watch a lot of games now.
Kaamos_Flame: I guess if I can’t stand the art style of the game, it’s almost nothing if the game is good or bad. There aren’t many of them, though, and it’s easy to spot before buying, unless it’s an Epic freebie, or something you just happened to grab without actually looking.
If it can’t be played due to a bug, that’s also a big mistake, but it’s easy to avoid by not buying stuff at launch or waiting for reviews first.
Otherwise, it’s all dependent. I get bored if the game’s combat is too simplistic, because shooting galleries, pressing buttons, or holding the trigger while strafing doesn’t appeal to me. But if the same game has an amazing story/characters or great puzzles or something, then I’ll probably live with it. Going through my library, there are a lot of things I’ve faded out, but nothing that I’ve played with and really hated stood out.
Wooden plate: For me, one of the biggest deal breakers is turn-based combat.
DXCHASE: Terrible save system. There are other deal-breakers, but this one has me actually paying and playing the most games. If I have to finish the entire board before saving, I usually leave it or take longer to beat it. This saving doesn’t respect my time, and I often find myself having to end the game abruptly. It’s annoying to do this in a lengthy section that I can’t save. Also, the save system tends to annoy me, saying things like “can’t save in combat”, but I leave where I am, but because something saw me, oops, can’t save yet. These also bore me.
The next one is just out of the release window and is still broken and badly broken buggy games (I’m looking for Outriders, Cyberpunk2077, Wolcen Lords of Mayhem…) all games in and out of these weeks It got bad they released.
McStabStab: I don’t like the game moving the goalposts on an already set mechanism. Examples include: having undeliverable opponents be killed with little prompting late in the game (The Evil Within), enemies taking double turns in turn-based games (XCOM2), and giving players an unfair advantage in competitive games Items (Fortnite – Infinity Gauntlet / BRUTE Mech, Warzone – Juggernaut).
Strong power: One of my closest bug bears was Roguelikes recently. Due to work/life commitments and my ever-growing Steam collection, I have little time or patience for delays in finishing my games. Roguelikes rubbed me the wrong way because luck is the deciding factor in how far you can get. Combined with the repetitiveness of playing the same few levels, my patience waned as I barely progressed or experienced anything different to keep my interest.
Speaking of progress. I’ve never been a competitive multiplayer player, and it’s not appealing to play the same few maps over and over and implement the same tactics. Of course, part of the problem may be because I’m playing solo and not good at them. Joining a losing team in a stacked game isn’t fun, and I remember spending a lot of time online quitting and looking for lobbies to either side with the winning side or find a balanced game. Having said that, if the game is good, I don’t mind losing and I can keep myself in shape, but it’s rare.
And then of course good old fashioned mistakes. If the game keeps crashing or getting game breaking errors, it’s time to quit and leave.
Batman: This is a good question for me as I feel like Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy hits all the “regular”.
* My repeatedly failed burst; followed by a long 30 seconds plus reload retry time
* Slow/lag, especially in hectic battles, exactly when you need it to respond quickly to your commands
I mostly stuck with it because the character writing/voice was spectacular. But even with a bunch of collectibles, lore achievements, etc. that I didn’t find. I definitely don’t want to replay it right now. It’s a shame because I think there’s a great game out there that just died for some kind of optimization.
Salavan: As far as I’m concerned, it’s a poor save system. A while ago, I purchased Wrath: Aeon of Ruin in Early Access. The game itself is very good. The filming is satisfying, the level design is okay, and I really like Quake 1’s engine style. There is one scary aspect to this game, though. This is the game save system. You basically collect tokens for saving games anywhere. While it doesn’t look that bad, it’s actually pretty frustrating. Of course, each level has a limited number of save tokens. This means you have to use them sparingly.
Given the difficulty of the game, it often forces you to replay most of a particular level. This is not Dark Souls, the frequent deaths will prompt the player to try again. In anger, it just discourages continuation. I suspect this save game system is supposed to expand the game, but unfortunately it doesn’t do its job. I’m a big fan of retro shooters, but I almost gave up on this game because of this system.