Time Limit

Along with another thread I posted, the concept of playing time is something I want to explore a bit more here. When you're young, at least for me, you were lucky if you got one new game to play every few weeks or month or if you just rented a bunch from Blockbuster (RIP). If a game wasn't very good, we had little choice but to plow through if we wanted to keep playing at all since our choices were limited, though inversely, we had plenty of time to really dig into.

As we have gotten older though, things have reversed drastically. Now, the choices are endless but the amount of gaming time we have has lessened. Thus, I pose to you, how long will you give a game now before you stop playing it and move on to a new one? I mean in terms of giving up on a game, not taking a break from one but with plans to return to it later.

Is it after the first few hours? After the first couple of levels? Or can you sometimes tell right away, if say the opening cutscenes are boring or the voice acting is terrible and you can't fathom sitting through it?

For me, I usually like to give a game about 2 hours of play-time. Not straight away but total time. If by about the 2 hour mark, the game hasn't hooked me, I will most likely not play it any more. It's unscientific but 2 hours more or less feels like the equivalent of what a pilot episode of a TV show would do: introduce the world, key characters, some plot, themes and enough mystery to get the story going.

Do you find you give a game more leeway than a TV show to find its feet or do you use the same standards?

I also find myself to be much more selective about what games I play, so my hit rate has gotten higher but there are still some that I give a whirl only to not get into them.


Take care all.

I'm actually struggling to think of a game I've actually tried that I haven't enjoyed. I guess some I stop enjoying at a certain point, get distracted by other things instead and just forget about rather than actively intending to stop. That can happen at pretty much any point of a game for me.

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Originally Posted by Loony BoB

I'm actually struggling to think of a game I've actually tried that I haven't enjoyed. I guess some I stop enjoying at a certain point, get distracted by other things instead and just forget about rather than actively intending to stop. That can happen at pretty much any point of a game for me.

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Very fair point.

For me, one recent example was the latest Mass Effect game which I just could not get into at all.

It depends for me, but if I abandon a game it's more often then not because I got sidetracked and didn't get around to continuing it. I try to give any game at least one hour of play-time, more for RPGs.

This is very much me, I bought Yakuza Kiwami and could tell immediately it was not my cup of tea. But I gave it a few hours and it felt like a chore to slog through the stiff dialog and bland characters. So I returned it. Same with Technomancer. I usually know when I'll like a game. And sadly there are way too many I try to get through. The market is not only saturated with games but saturated with good games. And I try too hard to make time for all that I own

I am usually very generous with giving time to a game I eventually stop playing. Granted, I've very picky about what games I pick up so I'll usually stick to a game cause there was something about it that intrigued me to begin with. I'll even finish a game if I don't like it if I learn I'm not far from the end such as FFXIII or Revenant Wings.

I'm usually nicer to games than TV. I sometimes will drop a show mid-pilot episode if I get bored. Games have the luxury of having multiple ways of entrapping me such as the plot and the gameplay and if one of those elements is strong enough, I can usually see myself to the end unless the other element is truly atrocious. The only two games I've abandoned recently on purpose and not simply because I got distracted by something more shiny have been Drakengard and FFX-2.

Drakengard has some interesting characters and narrative, but the gameplay is abysmal and unfortunately taps into my OCD in ways that make it even worse for me. I would like to think I will finish it someday, but it will likely be awhile. I did get about a third of the way through before I called it quits.

X-2 is just... ugh. I honestly can't fathom what people see in this game. Even the much hailed combat isn't really that great, and the story is just painful to watch. I was running around my second or third dungeon before I convinced myself that there had to be some other game in my backlog that I could slog through that would be better and sure enough there was. I faintly remember that it took me two years or so to finish my original playthrough of the game.

I drop a lot of games quite quickly but then tend to cycle through them in an attempt to complete them, which I rarely do. I've got a ton of games sitting on my HDD that I assume I'll finish one hypothetical day but keep amassing more and more. I agree that there are a lot of games vying for your attention these days and due to them tending to all be very long, it's pretty hard to get through them once you find another to play. And I have more free time than most. Some of the games from the past that I consider my favourites I haven't even finished. xD