Close, but Guess Who.
ANYHOO.
My time limit varies wildly. If I like the art, the milieu, the pacing, etc., I’ll complete a game even if it isn’t particularly successful as a game, per se. The time spent thinking about how the game works (or doesn’t work) is enjoyable.
If I’m not crazy about the setting or the mechanics, I’ll uninstall and move on the moment I feel any irritation.
I’m pretty similar to Telefrog’s response here. Cheap games that I clearly don’t like I willing to give up pretty fast. If the game gets good word of mouth, or isn’t bad but not that great? Then I have a harder time just saying I’m done and will probably play for many hours past what I should have.
Steam started getting crabby with me for asking for too many refunds. Which was foolish, because that policy was the only thing that had me purchasing directly from them as opposed to gmg or cd2keys. So the answer for me is less than 2 hours. You have that much time to hook me. Almost all of my refunds are because of my loathing for the control schemes and the story not grabbing me. Mafia 3 was the game where Steam told me I need to start reading more reviews and shit before purchasing games.
I’m gonna quote someone from another thread for a game I’m struggling with (has been heroes) that I’ve just started, but only put an hour or so into, and am currently failing massively at.
I’m planning on struggling a bit longer with this because it certainly looks fun, but I’m just awful at it.
That said, it’s funny how I feel like I don’t have the attention span I used to. The Chick parabola is all about learning game systems, where the enjoyment is in learning the system and getting better at the game (and you travel back down the other side of the parabola as you understand how to abuse those systems enough to make a game overly trivial.) Quitting early in some cases is just not investing the time necessary to understand a game’s systems…and in other cases it’s learning a game just doesn’t have fun/interesting systems in the first place.
I just don’t have 5 hours in me anymore to give a game a chance. When I was younger I’d force myself to play on because I’d invested my money, and maybe the time to go pick up the game, but not anymore.
So if a Dark Souls come along, would you guys quit when it becomes frustrating, when frustration is part of the frustration-trial-and-error-get-better gameplay? Sure everybody’s tolerance level is different, but like a lot of things, struggle or boredom sometimes brings meaning. (The operative word here is “sometimes”.)
I’m going to truck out the Chick parabola but let’s not bring in the big gun so soon…
Probably the best example I have of sticking with it, and it paying off, is Last of Us. The first parts of the game are just so hard. No ammo, low health. I almost quit. But I love Naughty Dog’s stuff, and enough people told me it was a great game that I kept at it.
Turns out, it is one of the few games I had played that I remember most of the story points to.
That said, it was a genre I liked by a Dev I like so I’ll give that a long lead time.
Dishonored 2 though, is one that just didn’t grab me yet. I’m not a fan of 1st person, so that one is on the “later” list.
Good lord yes. I loathe Dark Souls and that frustration-style gameplay. Even in my youth I would’ve passed on that.
Just because something is challenging doesn’t mean it isn’t fun or enjoyable. The problem is a lot of us have a couple hour time limit where if it’s not fun then we will drop the game, and I’d say that Dark Souls is successful not because it’s challenging, but because it has managed that challenge well with while keeping the game enjoyable and fun (to those who enjoy that level of challenge).
I don’t understand the reputation of Dark Souls at being a frustrating game. I am very bad at games (repeated game over on the first level of Super Mario bad) which means usually I proceed slowly, and this may be why I haven’t found Dark Souls to be that difficult a game. But if I were to trust the ghostly glimpse sin-game, there were hoards of people sillily running and gunning, who were having a much harder time than I did. I didn’t hit any wall in Dark Souls (Smaug and Einstein was close, though), so I didn’t quit.
The first Dark Souls grabbed me and didn’t let me go. Its pseudo-sequel, that one I gave up on quickly, after noticing it was litterally deleting enemies I hadn’t mastered but I had killed so many times over and over over my own innumerable deaths. It was that weakly designed attempt at alleviating some “frustration” I was supposed to feel (and didn’t) that actually made me leave that game alone.
Is that an actual word?
I mean, I guess it could be, as it gets the meaning across, I’ve just never seen it before.
I would say complete the intro tutorial and at least 2 missions / levels. That seems fair to me.
17 days.
You can really trim down the time if you watch a video or two (skipping liberally through them). Basically it opens up once you have the basics of knowing:
Match up the 1x, 2x, and 3x heroes to peel off stamina/ armor
Use 3x hero to only peel armor
Use 1x hero for most damage (usually)
Use utility spells to peel armor
Pay attention to attack recharge times on different heroes (clock icon on left)
I’d always thought that mechanic was meant to stop you farming souls from the trash mobs over and over?
Most games I give around 30-60 minutes before I stop if they don’t grab me. I can imagine a whole psychology at play, particularly from a developer perspective of ensuring their game story or mechanics are fleshed out in a way that make their game appealing to the player from the outset. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to carry through too well in modern design. Looking back to my younger self, there is no way I would have given Blizzard’s Warcraft 1 and 2 the time of day if I followed this mindset I employ now, but back then, I was heavily engaged in the game. The trickling in of new units and the slow, protracted complexity that was introduced in the campaign would have made modern me leave those games for another day.
As it stands, I don’t uninstall games anymore. The good thing about that is I have a game immediately available if I ever feel the urge to play that particular game. The drawback is that I am typically confronted with analysis paralysis when I view my steam library wanting to play a game and having no idea what I want to play. Part of the reason for not uninstalling is that I remain hopeful at some point in the future I will go back and play that game again. It is a wholly illogical reasoning that my life circumstances will suddenly change and I’ll have hours of free time that I can devote to gaming. Instead the backlog grows longer.
It depends on why I bought it. If it was in a bundle or only cost a few dollars, maybe 20 minutes? I think the last game I bought like that was Salt, which I played long enough to explore the first island, sail to the next island and explore that. That took about 20 minutes and I feel I got my $4.95 worth and saw most of what the game had to offer. I might go back to it one day if more content is added.
If it’s a more expensive game, and not a wargame or a strategy game, then one or two hours. That’s about where I am with Rise of the Tomb Raider and Mass Effect Andromeda. I won’t uninstall them just yet, but deep down I know I’m probably not going back to them and they will be the first against the wall when I need disc space.
If it’s a wargame or hardcore strategy game, I’m willing to sink several hours into it to work out the system and will never uninstall it.
I went back and did this for Agents of Mayhem and I went from 27 minutes to 64 minutes played. So “about an hour”? I mean, what’s the average duration of a singleplayer experience in a typical big budget videogame? 10 hours? 12 hours?
I’d say I give a game maybe 1-2 hours. Depends on how long the tutorial is, but after the tutorial/prologue, I give it a bit more time just to get a sence of the REAL game.
A lot of games have crappy starts and become somewhat catching after you get a hang of it.
(For example - I would NEVER have continued playing MGSV - Phantom Pain, if I’d judged it from the horrifying tutorial).
What is this “uninstalling” of which you speak?