Gaming FrustrationsWhy do we finish some games but quit others some games way before the end credits have rolled? What makes us give up at a certain point rather than carrying on until the (bitter) end? This is my take on the phenomena of throwing in the towel.
Let me just say I'm not a completist by any means. I have a shelf full half finished or games that have I've not started (some still in the wrapper: Persona 4 for instance), but when I buy a game I do so with the intention of completing it. When I say "complete" I mean finishing the single player game on Normal difficulty.
As a rough estimate I'd say I complete between 10 and 20 percent of the games I buy. So why do I complete some games and not others. Off the top of my head I've come up with the followings reasons.
FrustrationThis is probably the number one reason I give up on certain games, they become frustrating and the frustration outweighs the fun. When an entertainment product leaves you feeling stressed and agitated then that its no longer justifying its existence. This seems to be a big problem with a lot of games. I guess the games developers have to tread a fine line between offering the player a challenge and making game that's too difficulty but sometimes it's not necessarily a case of a game being too tough.
GTA4 is a good example of frustration - which in my opinion could have been easily avoided. At this point I'd like to have a moan about GTA games in general. When GTA3 came out I was blown away by how great the game was. I would sit at work thinking about it, dreaming up plans for my approach on the next mission. With GTA3 I got pretty close to end but a mission became so frustrating that I gave up. The main reason this has happened with every GTA game since then is due to the check pointing and not the lack of quick restarts. Shockingly 7 years after GTA3 this issue has still not been resolved. Yup, this brings me to GTA4. This is a relatively new game yet it still has the same flaws as GTA3, you can't quick restart, you loose all your weapons if you die and most annoyingly of all the missions are not broken down into decent sized checkpoints.
For example, I decided to give GTA4 another blast a few weeks back, after 10 minutes back in the game I was back in love GTA and questioned why I'd not made more progress. After repeating a mission 4 times I soon realised why. This particular mission involved: Step 1 - stealing a police car; Step 2 - lookup a convict on the police computer; Step 3 - track him down to a burger shot; Step 4 follow the baddie back to his hide out; and then finally Step 5 - kill baddie and all his friends. I managed Steps 1 - 4 without a problem, but the shootout ensues at his hideout leaves me dying on the floor in a heap (dead).
As I've not played the game for ages I forget how to take cover (ok this sounds like an excuse but the controls on this game are rather flaky for a 3rd Person action game). So I restart the mission again.. Now why, why, why, do I have to redo Step 1, 2, 3 and 4 all over again? I've already completed these steps flawlessly.. It takes a good few, very dull, minutes to repeat these steps before I can get to the part I messed up. To me this repetition serves no purpose, all it does is drag out - and water down the Fun per Minute ratio. Now maybe there are people who like this kind of punishing restart (the same kind of people that like have pins stuck in their eyes) and get some sense of achievement out of completing a mission in one go without failing anything but I'm not one of them. Why not stick a check point in the game? At least after Step 4 which involves a 2 minute drive from one part of the city to the other! I paid good money for this game but as I'm not prepared to put up with the lack of in mission checkpoints I don't get to see the end game. Personally, my free time is severely limited, to the extent that I need to spend it as wisely as possible. This is probably the reason I loved Saints Row (1 and 2) - there are instants restarts, which are very well implemented. By the way - check out the Saints Row franchise - it's not as polished as GTA but a lot more fun.
Getting Lostwith the sheer number of good games being released at the moment it's tempting to stick a game in and then whip it out as soon as then next hyped up triple A release comes out. This means I often "park" a game for no other reason than something bigger and better that's just dropped through the letter box. So when the hype dies down and I go back to the game I was playing previously I spend a long time trying to remember where I am in the game and what I'm suppose to be doing. Now this is more of a problem on some games rather than others. I would say RPGs are particularly bad offenders as they are all about the story. To get round this problem perhaps there should be a recap" options where the game provides quick catch up of the story and how the game works. To summarise: games need to be easier to get back into after they've not been played for a while - all systems have a date stamp on the game saves so where this is greater than 2 weeks there should be display the recap option. This would avoid the painful hour of wandering around aimlessly hoping something will jog your mammary so you can remember what's going off and how the game works. The fact that I know that I will have to spend this house getting back up to speed means I dont even bother going back to some games.
Getting BoredThere's not just too many games - there's too many long, drawn out games. The demographic of gamers has changed, many of us are older (30s+) and have full time jobs and families. A lot of us don't have the time to spend on games like we once did. I'm not saying I want short games but why make a game 40 hours if you only have enough game play ideas to cover 20? I would sooner have a short game that's of top notch quality rather than a long game where an idea has been stretched too thin. I thought Gears of War 2 was about the right length - the story was good and it was worth getting to the end. The main was the game didn't outstay it's welcome, just as I was starting to loose interest I could see the end in sight and pushed on to the finish line. I feel like I got my monies worth out of the game, there was also plenty of multiplayer action to increase the games longevity for those that want it.
Game difficultyAs I mentioned by default difficulty setting is Normal but sometimes I like of a challenge so start off on hard (My rationale for this is Halo 3 - too easy on Normal - just right on Legendary).. I started Killzone 2 on Hard but it turned out to be too difficult (i.e. rubbish controls - how can I take cover with a shoulder button, zoom in and lean out of a corner with only 2 hands, 8 fingers and 2 thumbs - need at least another one of everything to pull this off). It would be nice to be able to switch difficulty without having to restart the entire game. Or if you get stuck on a section of a game why not have the option to drop down to "Easy" to get through it.
Buying too many gamesI've already mentioned this, and this is my fault, there are just so many good games out now. It seems so easy to buy too many games especially as a lot of the good ones are released in the run up to Christmas. I don't intend to do this but I get sucked in by the hype like everyone else. I say to myself, "I'll skip Far Cry 2 and pick up cheap in the New Year" but then I find myself clicking the Buy button on Amazon.. which means the game I'm half way through gets shelved while I try and get into the latest release.
If games contained less of these problems Im sure I would get more out of the limited time I have to play them and even push up the percentage of games I complete. There will always be certain games that you dont finish, for whatever reason, perhaps I need to devote more time to each game and buy less games overall. Maybe I need to put be more tenacious and not give up so easily :-)
