Patrick's Policy on Finishing Games and how it Compares to You

Patrick's talks about how he plays through (just about) every game he gets his hands on regardless of quality. Recently, past year or two, I decided to kinda except this way of playing where prior to college I would get a game, didn't grab me in the first hour, set it on the shelf and eventually sell it. I just couldn't do that anymore as I got older and now just about every game once I start it, I try to finish it. Now it's easier for me to slog through a game if the story is engaging me (PL: Curious Village the recent example of me being sick of the puzzles but really enjoyed the story). But I try my hardest not to put a game down unless I literally become broken, pissed, or uninterested. As a huge Zelda fan I never thought I would get so frustrated with any of their games but Skyward Sword just did everything wrong and now just sits on my shelf staring at me and I stare back knowing I probably will never beat it.

So I'm curious how the community approaches game completion and is it important to you to actually finish the game.

I usually try to beat games when I get them. I still don't beat most games like Starhawk and Just Cause 2. They don't have to be great for me to beat them. They just have to be short and easy to play.

I'm the opposite. If I don't like it I have better things to do with my time

@Phatmac said:

I usually try to beat games when I get them. I still don't beat most games like Starhawk and Just Cause 2. They don't have to be great for me to beat them. They just have to be short and easy to play.

Two very good bonuses for me too. If you enjoy a game do you ever go back and play on harder difficulties and such?

I don't finish every game I come up against but regardless of quality I will try.. alot of the time a game just stops being fun or engaging and I have no qualms about putting it down and moving on.. It also depends on how my work/ free time is when I pick up the game, If I have the time to finish it early on I probably will..

for example Prototype 2 and the new Spider-man just got boring, MW3 lost me when the Player Character died again and I couldn't care less what happened after that, and a long game I've just put down for a bit and never picked back up

If I paid money for a game the only things that are going to stop me from finishing are game breaking bugs and some sort of impossibly difficult difficulty that prevents me from finishing it even if I want to.

By which I mean every time I tried to play Dead Rising I got frustrated with the controls/bad boss fights and gave up when I died on the second day. That's the only game I can think of that I own and gave up on beating.

But generally speaking, I don't buy too many games that I end up not liking. Even in the case of Dead Rising, I think the game is pretty fun when you're just fighting zombies, and the number of on screen enemies in that game was MIND BLOWING back when it was released. Those boss fights are just awful.

I used to be that way. As a teen, I would finish any game I bought/rented, no matter what. Nowadays, video games don't interest me enough to do that kinda thing.

if i dont like something i usually don't bother finishing it. Recently really tried to like darksiders 2, but after 4 hours it does nothing for me, so i'll sell it. I dont have enough free time to bother playing something i dont find fun.

There's probably 100 games in my Steam library that i've played for about 5 minutes and then set down. But usually if I have a disk i am more inclined to finish it for some reason. and I still need to beat FF10... So I guess it depends?

If I get bored of a game while playing it I'll stop and probably won't go back to it. A game's job is to engage me, if it doesn't then it has failed and I get some of my life back for other things.

I make an attempt to but I don't often finish everything I buy. If it's boring me to tears or I'm getting more frustrated than I would if I were actually, say, doing my homework, then I'll definitely put it down. Red Dead Redemption is one such game - you spend most of it running around to get a mission, doing that mission, then running somewhere else to do another. This is fine in, say, Sleeping Dogs, where I'm doing things like knocking down lampposts, stealing cars, running over pedestrians, etc., on the way there, but in RDR there isn't anything to do except shoot the occasional wildlife or pack of bandits holding someone up and neither of those happen often enough.

EDIT: Also, it takes a lot less time to get somewhere in Sleeping Dogs than it does in RDR.

I used to but I don't have enough free time these days to waste it on games that are not entertaining me.

I got 30 hours into Lost Odyssey, got to the last disc, and never finished it because I was bored of its mechanics. I can play long games with no problem - in fact many of my favourite games are longer games - but if I get bored enough there's no completionist inside of me telling me to go on. For me games aren't about beating them in single player, and I'm not so into multiplayer and beating other people. Games are supposed to be fun, and if I've stopped having fun, I'm out.

Also I have a large enough library of games now, spread across 360, PS3 and PC, that there is always another game to move right onto if I get bored of a game, so that helps.

Disclaimer: I was diagnosed with Adult ADHD last year, so maybe it's not so shocking that I don't finish games if they no longer have their hooks in me.

I've gotten worse at it.

I used to scrounge for games like a leper, scrabbling and clutching at it like a starved child.

Now I sit atop a throne of games I've never touched, empty and unfulfilled.

I feel terrible when I can't beat a game I own for whatever reason. The first Mass Effect still irks me in this regard. Generally though I don't run into this kind of problem because I do a lot of research before I purchase a game, and I can count the number of times I didn't like a game I bought enough to finish it on one hand. When I had gamefly though I'd send games I hadn't beaten back with no shame, because if I wasn't liking it it was just keeping me from a more awesome game, I try to avoid this behavior now.

oblivion is my favorite game, must have upwards of 600 hours at least, never finished the main quest once.

sometimes if the final boss is being a pain I just won't bother, I mean what is the point?

finishing a game, completing quests, achievements, loot, even the story, all mean zip, for me the fun of games is in the moment, the atmosphere, and the persona i have taken on in that particular world, as soon as those things aren't engaging, i'm out.

well here's the thing, are we talking about completing the game 100% or are we talking about playing until credits roll? If the former, fuck almost never, if the latter, then I beat every game I buy.

Probably close to 85% of the games that I have started I have also completed. It was higher until I got PS+. They just throw games at you so fast that if something isn't good you don't feel bad about not playing it.

For a brief period I was like that, especially when I was chasing my 350 points per game self-imposed challenge, and then when I changed it to 400 points per game. But ever since then, just tons of games I haven't bothered to finish. A lot of them I turned on for an hour and never went back to.

I keep telling myself I'm going to go back to Enslaved.

I tell you the good thing about modern, easy video games; I will never go back to Deus Ex in a meaningful way because I will never be as good at video games as when I was 16 years old. But ten years from now I'll be able to go back to Enslaved or Gears of War 3 and play them just fine.

Sounds like some OCD thing. I won't play games I dislike, I won't allow myself to be mind numbed, just for the sake of completing a crap game. I have far better things to do than play videogames already.

Nowadays I actually very rarely finish a game, I need to really enjoy playing it.

I have actually made an effort to get through more of the games I buy regardless. I've found that I usually play something a little much when I first get it, then I burn out on it and have to sit and wait a couple of weeks. In that cool-down period, I start another game or two and once I burn out with those I go back and finish the first game. Then I repeat. It actually works quite well since that's how I even read books. NOTE: this technique only works well if you're kind of thing is juggling several stories at once in your head.

I want to finish games, but like a lot of other people, I'll give up if it's frustrating me or has lost my attention.

I try to finish at least all the story parts of a game before moving on, but I've been so busy I've barely found the time to even stay anymore!

I have to finish every game I own. I ... just have to.

OCD.

If I start playing a game I tend to finish it at least once. If it has a New Game+ and I really enjoyed the game I tend to go for that too (also because of the achievement/trophy if it has one).

Now that I have barely any time to play games, I have come to terms with not finishing games.

I'm barely anywhere in Fallout 3 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I love the many hours I've put in to both of those games, and I don't have any realistic expectation of finishing either of those (even though I'll always think of them as games I need to go back to).

I tend to finish about 50-60% of the games I buy, excluding indie bundles. I finish only if the game warrants my attention. If the gameplay irks me or the story is garbage I tend to leave it unfinished.

@Tim_the_Corsair said:

I'm the opposite. If I don't like it I have better things to do with my time

Yep, the time I could be spending doing something more productive is more important to me than finishing a game I'm not enjoying. I never like that buyer's remorse feeling of not getting my money's worth, but so be it.

I won't complete a game I don't like, I just don't understand the thinking behind that. Games are supposed to be entertainment, if you're not enjoying it then do something else.

Games are so weird. It's no wonder games are getting shorter and shorter these days. Why bother when so many players never bother to finish them. Or is it because most developers don't make games worth playing to completion?

Apparently you have to be OCD to finish all the games that you own, but you'd never say the same about someone that finished all of their books.

I guess it's rarely compelling to finish a video game. When I think back to games that I HAD to complete, as opposed to completing just because, there are probably only a handful, and most are short anyway.

If I don't enjoy playing a game, I stop. Bad enough I spent money on it, it doesn't need to consume my time as well

I finish over 90% of the games I play. If it's garbage or a genre I'm not too familiar with, I don't bother at all; I don't have time. Occasionally, there will be games that seem average but I might like, like Crackdown 2 or the recent Wolfenstein, but I'll stop because I would be bored and backed up with better games to play. I think Far Cry 2 was the only "good" game that I stopped playing after a few hours because too many things about it annoyed me.

When I was younger I would finish just about every game I had, but now that I have disposable income and more important things to do with my time, I only play games that I'm actively enjoying playing.

I guilted myself to complete more games by creating this spreadsheet back in 2009.

2012 has been my best year yet for completing games! However I haven't bothered updating the games that need completing list as it still grows larger than my completed list.

But I also have this stupid thing where for example, I started playing Persona 3 in 2010 and then stopped for a year and felt I should start again, but I had got a cheap PSP by then and decided I need to finish the first Persona on that and then move through them which means I probably play will never play Persona 3 or 4. Which I am pretty certain is how Brad goes through his library (or doesn't get through his library, even).

If I don't finish a game before moving on to another, I will never get back to it.

Nope, I have hordes of games I played once then gave up on after the first try, but most of them are games I bought cheap.

Even weirder I occasionally give up on games really close to the end. I think I was just before the last boss in FFXIII when I just stopped playing, even though I was enjoying the game. The same happened with Dark Sector.

I completed Sleeping Dogs a few weeks ago, which must be the first game I've completed in several months. I'm losing patience as I grow older, and there's nothing I can really do about it. I bought Demon's Souls and Dark Souls with the aim to complete them, but I never got beyond an hour in terms of progression. It had nothing to do with the difficulty, really. Love the idea of both games, but I just stopped caring.

A game has to be worthy of me finishing it. Most games are not.

I play till I feel I've had my fill. For most story driven games, that means I play till I've finished the story, but not always.

Although, I don't really play games that are "bad" per se. I play some I don't like. I'm with Jeff on Resident Evil 4, for example. I gave it a couple chances, but didn't like the shooting or the less horrory more actiony direction it had taken, so I bailed a few hours in.

I don't do that at all. Most of the times I only buy games that I know I will like, and therefore will likely finish, but I don't have any qualms about dropping a game (or any piece of entertainment). Powering through a bad game is stupid if it's not your job to do so, like it is Patrick's.

Nope. My steam and GOG libraries both are testaments to that. I've gotten a lot better at finishing stuff as I've gotten older and (in the case of old games) I've started writing about the games I've been playing. I don't think I would have dragged myself through the last 10 hours of Icewind Dale II was I not committed to writing about it. Really, unless it's an important game or one I clearly like but got distracted from, I don't mind if I haven't finished it.

If there's stuff I actually almost feel guilty about, there are plenty of games from my childhood that I never totally finished because I was like 6. I played a lot of Donkey Kong 64, for example, but I never have actually beaten K Rool, and now I feel like it's probably too late because now I'm old and realize that there's an absurd amount of stupid minigame barrels and collectathon nonsense happening in that game. Same goes for Majora's Mask, but there's a more obvious reason why I never finished it, that reason being that I totally don't like that game at all.

When I was a teenager, money was my most valuable commodity so playing a game through to completion seemed necessary to get value out of the game.

As an adult "with many important things to do" my most valuable commodity is time - so if a game doesn't grab me, it's likely getting traded-in eventually.

One of the things I appreciate about the Walking Dead games is that serialized small-dose games are perfect for my lifestyle - can afford to lose 3-4 hours on something at a time, but a 50-hour game is too much of a commitment.

I'm actually surprised that with gamers aging, more companies don't develop games that appeal to busy adult lifestyles.

I don't have that kind of time to do that anymore so I have to say no to shit games.

Why waste time with bad games? Life's short.

I've taken the opposite route lately, while I would've put the effort into completing a game in order to give it a meh or really not like it I just don't bother anymore. I suspect a large part of that is I'm getting a bit impatient for the new consoles to hit.

Suppose it would depend how bad the game was, as well as how crucial the story was to the game. It's hard for me to have loose threads kicking about. Too many half finished stories is something I find personally distracting, so unless it's offensively bad or broken mechanically; I finish the ones I start.

I finish as good as every game I buy and I almost always enjoy it. Seems like a lot of people here are buying games "just because" but I've never had that problem.

EDIT: My only exception to this is Bulletstorm, picked it up for $5 during Steam summer sale and among the worst games I've played this generation. That game deserved no second chance.

I used to do that, but now I try to make goddamn sure I will like a game before I get my hands on it. If I do end up with a game I don't like I won't be finishing it.