Have you ever spent hundreds of hours playing a game you didn't really enjoy?

Yo. I saw someone joke about seeing Steam reviews where the user has played a game for 500 hours but doesn't recommend other people play it. Has anyone done something similar?

This might just be an issue with Steam reviews making people choose Yes or No. Or maybe they enjoy it but leave a negative review to highlight one problem they had. Either way I would have thought by the 300 hour mark you would know if you liked the game or not. Why do people suffer though hundreds of hours if they don't really enjoy it?

I guess the closest I have come to this is playing FFXIV. It's actually seems really well made with lots to see and do, but I hadn't played an MMO before and playing it taught me that I don't really enjoy that style of game But I still played about 120 hours or so because a bunch of friends were playing it regularly. At some point I just found myself running around in circles doing nothing at the Lavender Beds (one of the player housing areas) and I told myself that I was wasting my time. I then unsubscribed.

Do people who play games sometimes have a higher tolerance for being bored before realising that they're not enjoying themselves? Hopefully you have some insight into this or into the Steam reviews phenomenon.

In a way, I guess. Played WoW for around ten years and especially towards it's end I would just log on, do a daily quest or two in a very robotic fashion and then log off, to no real purpose really. Even during it's golden years, the game was sometimes just a very fancy looking chat room for me. Of course I enjoyed the game more in general, but I certainly wasted away plenty of time doing things I didn't really care for or even like, just because it had become a habit (and I also had friends I played with, who didn't become as bored as I did).

No. I think that's always crap.

Like you say, maybe it's the only up and down thing, but I think it gets to be about statements very often on Steam and all that generally annoys me.

I am not someone who spends like the thousand hour mark in any game like I will see some people do but I can get up there and once you are past 100 hours I think the game was good for sure. Great? That can be a question.

For me, I think if you are that kind of fan you can always have complaints. Not that some aren't warranted, but they become very specific and I think the discussion of value and overall quality is lost. I've had years where I don't love parts of 2K and in general the game has failed to improve in some of its big flaws for years now, but overall I spend over 100 hours playing it every year. Can't complain.

It wasn't hundreds, but I definitely spent far too long in Skyrim remaking characters and replaying the early hours of the game before realizing I was never going to get what I wanted out of it.

First and foremost, I think that Steamreviews are often trash. A lot of them don't judge the game based on the contents of the game, but whether or not a development did something nice to them or if there is content that may got added which makes the game worse for some reason. There also is sometimes unintentional shilling involved, in which a game is so promising during early access that people hype it up, only to face inenvenitble disappointment when they realized that the game in question is godsent.

Another problem, one that you have mentioned already are the social media binary choices, such as the YouTube like and dislike bar that leaves no room for nuance and enables "I either can only choose to love or hate this" reasoning. I think it is more reasonable to assume that people who downvote a game don't actually hate the game and are terrible at communicating their reasoning. I think Valve would do good if they would allow users to score the game but keep it simple. 0 - 5 ranking system seems a bit better than a binary one. Obviously such a thing will be abused also, but at least it leaves more room for nuances and people also have more choices. A 3-Score rating is probably completly different justified than a 0 or 5-Score rating, which makes things more interesting. Weighted Averages can be used to generate a total user score. Thats how I would design it.

And thats just one example. Every game more or less has the same problems. Fanboism (See: Many hyped Early Access games), anti- or counter-fanboism (See: Undertale), people being upset about the devs (See: Starbound), something in a game that make people act agressively in the game, so much that they write a review to rage out (See: MOBAs).

And yeah, I've played several games for 4000+ hours and I felt that 500 hours of it was time not well spent but I still enjoyed the overall time I've spend with the game, but I wouldn't argue if the game itself is indeed good or bad, something in between would be a more fair scoring IMHO.

I spend a lot of time playing Runescape in elementary school, definitely enjoyed the social aspect but the game itself was just a grind. I remember wasting countless hours killing rock crabs to raise stats or toiling away in the mines to make a buck. Would be curious to see my total play time.

I have a hard enough time finishing games I really like.

Definitely not hundreds of hours but I've committed to getting a platinum or 100 percenting a few games which always ends up being a drag...Doki Doki Universe? Fuck that game. Saints Row The Third? Not hard to do but real boring. South Park: TSoT? Ok, that's actually I game I didn't care for at all and have no idea why I went for the plat. Probably 'cause it was easy but I still had to play more of a game I didn't like much at all.

I collected everything in open world games for the longest time. All of the AC games, DA: Inquisition, Witcher 3, Far Cry games, Just Cause, Batman Arkham games for a few examples. The number of hours I spent doing this has got to be in the hundreds. Did I enjoy it? Yes and no. I feel I got a reason to stay in the game world, I can further upgrade my character, and it's nice to pull up a podcast while I do it. It just gets incredibly repetitive, boring, and honestly the payoff for that extra time I put in isn't worth it.

I think it's just the idea of leaving something I started doing half finished that irks me. So if there is an upgrade tree in a game and I'm nearing the end game with my upgrades being 80% complete, that bugs me. I have a compulsion to find the rest. A lot of the time, the work to do it is not enjoyable.

I know I would be susceptible to this, it's why I tend to avoid games like Warframe. Games that constant feedback and are basically a loot drop fest.

I've put a hundred hours+ into diablo 3 I think because my friends like it and it's one of those games were the time just melts away into one more run. I didn't care for it.

I have 192 hours in Street Fighter 5 and I would say a lot of that was pure frustration because of the very poor online.

I'm redeeming myself...I haven't played in almost 3 months!

I don't want to sound like a broken record or retread old territory but...the aforementioned game is the most disappointing piece of media in my entire life. I hate how lazy Capcom were and how badly they have treated Street Fighter.

If you haven't checked in on SF5 recently, it's still a mess, basic features and fixes haven't come after one year and Capcom's PR is about as reliable as an original Xbox 360.

Dragon's Age Inquisition. More like 50 hours but it sure felt like over 100.

With the latest Mass Effect video up I just came in to say that. There were parts I liked and it sure looked nice (I guess). But man...that game was a chore. Dragon Age Inquisition actually taught me something about playing games - if the combat/gameplay mechanics aren't perfect, playing on harder difficulties is a complete waste of time. And that combat....man. Man.

Not hundreds, but I've definitely put 20+ hours into games that I didn't enjoy. Usually its because its a developer or genre that I like a lot, and I keep thinking if I just power through I'll eventually get to the good stuff; FFXIII is a good example of this.

There are also games that I had liked, vastly outstay their welcome, but I'm stubborn enough to want to see through to the ending even though I'm not having fun anymore.

Final Fantasy 14.

YOU TAKE THAT BACK! I kid and respect your opinion.

I can't say I have. If I'm putting hundreds of hours into a game I enjoy some aspect of it. I typically stop playing games if they make me mad or I get bored and move on to something else. I have thousands of hours into WoW and close to that on FF14, FF11, and SWTOR.

I really like League of Legends at some point. It was so fucking good season 2-3. Now my role of 5 years (ADC/Marksman) is complete trash and hobbled, and I play with too high elo players for me to want to switch roles and take the time to learn. I play it because I have some friends I only play League with that I don't want to lose just yet

I actually really dislike my time with Terraria on Hard Mode. I really think that mode was probably reserved for going in with a already equipped character, instead of a brand new one.

Don't get me wrong, I loved it on normal, especially with a friend, but solo Hard Mode was just not fun compared to regular. The balance was just off.

I don't think I really hate them, but I do find that some games just ruin half of my time with a game when they end on a unsatisfying node. I remember The Wolf Among us and Dreamfall Chapters. Those two games start so strong and sometimes even get a very good middle, but then the mystery is just never as good as you'd hope. So that's my examples. I don't hate the entire game for, but there are circumstances where it just stains my enjoyment and I think long and hard about whether or not I will thumb that game up or down. I tend to thumb it up, but I will caution of a weak second half.

I remember being disgusted that I had played 60+ hours of vanilla Destiny but the fact that I played it that much meant that I can't have actually hated it that much.

Probably not hundreds but my numerous attempts at grinding through to legend rank in Hearsthone without netdecking definitely amounted to dozens of hours out of which I got close to no enjoyment.

I'd say DotA2 is probably that game for me. I put maybe three thousand hours into it so I won't say I never had fun, but at some point, I did stop enjoying myself yet continued to play anyway. When I look back on it, all I can really see it as is a source of unnecessary stress that I'm glad I was able to pull myself away from. Now that I think about it though, it might just be competitive team-based games in general that I find stressful (as in aggravating) as I had thought I would be playing Overwatch for years to come, but I lasted maybe 2-3 months. Depending on other people isn't fun for me.

Same for me. Good and bad. I enjoy Battlefield 1 but the reason I can't get super into it is that same thing. It goes for your team mates and the opposition. I am pretty good at the game but sometimes snipers are just brutal in this game. And tanks can be if your team doesn't deal with them.

I really started playing it because I really good friend of mine is big into it and he really wanted me to play with him. It's not that I completely hate every aspect of it. Just that I am not really an MMO player so a lot of aspects of that genre is just baffling to me and how "stuck in the past" that genre is. I get grinding and making you work for your character but I really can't stand how in mmo the business end of the game is the main driving force behind the gameplay. At least to me it does. Like I said, I am not big into mmo's so my gamer sensibilities are a bit off.

Football manager is mostly a waste of time. Tactically, you make the most decisions at the start of a season and do all the fun transfers to slowly amass your dream team. The first few games are exciting because you hope that your new purchases perform well. But at a certain moment, you're just endlessly skipping through the days, playing unremarkable football games. Yet it's still somewhat engaging because you eventually want to be able to say that you managed to win the champions league with your hometown club. Or that you managed to buy a superstar. The result is more interesting than the journey. But the journey is extremely time-consuming. So timeconsuming that often once your small league club has done quite well for themselves, the superstars of today are old and not as good as the new superstars that are generated, making the idea of signing a superstar less interesting. It almost makes me wish that you could start with a database that's 10-20 years old, to see how your managercareer affects recent football history.

Football Manager is also an interesting tool to learn which 15-18 yo players have the potential to become a big player, and then seeing some of those players actually achieve that in real life. And it helps you learn how different leagues handle different rulesets. The whole draft system of american sports has always been a weird thing to me, so managing a football team that operates within this ruleset is pretty interesting.

But playing football manager is mostly a enormous timesink with very few engaging moments. I still use it while i listen to podcasts though but it's more because i value the database more than i enjoy playing the game. If only Fifa / PES and Sports Interactive would team up to create this amazing manager mode where you actually play the games yourself, i think both games would be improved massively. Of course, there's still virtue to AI vs AI football where your tactical decisions actually matter, but when it comes to Football Manager, it often doesn't feel like your decisions matter all that much. If you make smart purchases and try to keep everyone happy, you will probably do well.

Oh I get it. I don't know why I keep playing and going back to them but of all the MMO's out right now I enjoy 14 the most.

I think there are plenty of reasons to leave a negative review of a game, and I think that people who are quick to say "if you played x hours of it then clearly you liked it!" are often missing the point. If anything, I trust a negative review with 20+ hours way more than I trust one with 0-5.

There are plenty of games that I would negative review/not recommend (after all, isn't a review just a recommendation?) even after playing a bunch of them, but the only one I can think of that answers the question in your thread title is Skyrim. According to Steam I played over 80 hours of Skyrim, but I think it's a bad game and I wouldn't say I enjoyed any of it.

No. I have, however, spend 6 to even 30 hours playing some games just because everyone around me, critics included, seemed to think they were some of the best games ever made but I just thought they were bad.

I think I have 15 hours or so in Shadow of Mordor. One of the most overrated games of all time. It looks bland, gameplay is superficial, poses no challenge whatsoever and its absolute only draw, the Nemesis system, is entirely build around you dying more than a few times. Which won't happen, so that system might as well not be in there. That is a 2-star game at best. The way it got GOTY around here is just absolute madness. You're all consumed by some horrible trick of peer-pressure, I am convinced of that.

I also spend over 20-30 on Red Dead Redemption. The actual most overrated game of all time. That is a low quality product. Basic gameplay things like the shooting feels like garbage and isn't responsive, your horse doesn't obey and randomly jumps into cliffs when you didn't tell it to go there and stuff like that. But the writing is some of the worst I've ever heard relative to its praise. For instance, the main character won't shut his mouth a single second and keeps talking about shit, yet every single NPC you meet in the first two hours remarks 'huh you don't talk much do you' and your character is basically like 'yeah, I know I like to keep to myself'. Really? Writer A sure forgot to tell writer B that.

Ugh, I'm getting mad again. Somewhere I feel I should've never spent as much time on those games as I did. But at least I know I guess.

Nope. If I hate a game, I'm going to stop playing it. There are some games that I thought were pretty mediocre that I wound up finishing, but I've never dumped anything approaching hundreds of hours into something I actually, legitimately didn't like. Life's too short to waste playing bad games. Outside of the "kid without a disposable income making the best of a gift" scenario, I'll never understand that sort of masochism.

Hundreds? Why would I do that?

Not THAT many hours, but sure. I spent about 40 hours on Borderlands 2 though I don't really like it. I didn't think Tomb Raider was great, but I powered through. I have yet to play a Bioware game with gameplay I thought was fun, but I want to see the story stuff. Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning turns into a bore, but after a while you just want to play something mindless and vaguely pleasant to look at, or just finish what you started. Sometimes I want to justify a purchase, or see what all the fuss is about, or make my friends stop recommending me stuff they like rather than stuff they think I might like. So I play 20 hours of Persona 3 and I can say "Fuck that game" in good confidence, because 20 hours is more than enough time to make a nice impression.

I can recognize the feeling although I have never put that many hours into something I dislike playing.

I hold a particular disdain towards Borderlands, but I have played over 100 hours of 1 and 2 (never played the Pre-Sequel). The reason why I've played that much Borderlands is because they were the games that my friends were playing at the time, so I had the choice of playing with them, or being a lonely fella in the online world for a little while. Come to think of it, I had the same experience with Terraria as well. That's definitely a game I played a lot more of than I would have otherwise. I really don't like that game.

I put 300 or so hours into Fallout 3, and, for the most part, that game is pretty crummy. The problem is that I'm often compelled to do everything in a game, and doing everything took a long time. As it turns out, Fallout 3 is a very quantity > quantity kind of game.

I spent close to 50 hours with Gravity Rush 2 and I would not recommend that game.

@zevvion: I think it helps a lot to realize that people play games for different reasons. You strike me as a very mechanical player. playing games to master them and become good at the mechanics.

A game like Shadow of Mordor is impressive if you are the type of person that wants to feel powerful & cool all the time (Dan Ryckert). If that's your main concern, dying becomes more prevalent as well since you're not even trying to play a game well, you just want to jump into a group of enemies and fuck them up with cool shit, even if it's dumb. That style of play gets rewarded by the Nemesis system. But yeah, having to die to make the system truly shine was also the problem that i encountered. Not often a game makes you so explicitly feel like you're 'too good'.

When it comes to Red Dead Revolver, i think that you need to be a person that values the environment and setting of a game. When i played RDR, i wasn't thinking about the controls, because it was novel enough to play an open world cowboy game which had mechanics &writing somewhat on par with GTA. Playing Fallout 3 was a similar experience for me, the setting was the star of the show while the mechanics were serviceable.

Overwatch. I uninstalled it recently, but my time with it was 10% joy and 90% pure frustration.

i can see getting soured on a game after the initial honeymoon period but still trudging on because you're invested or completionist or whatever, but i don't think anyone's that masochistic enough (or has the time/energy) to keep at a game they hate for that long. and even the ones who pushed on after souring on a game i'm sure would be rational enough to realize the good points in the end.

@onemanarmyy: Yeah, that is where games can really shine for me, but I can also enjoy games that aren't that mechanically heavy. Though that is if there is an interesting story there more often than not. Still, I feel like most people here are pretty good at videogames and wouldn't have died that much in Shadow of Mordor either. I just have this feeling that people might have enjoyed that game more on the idea of what it was, the idea that your death mattered, than what actually happened to be the case.

I do get what you're saying about Red Dead's setting. I don't care for westerns at all, so all that was left was poor gameplay and dialogue. I really liked Fallout 3 as well for the same reason, the atmosphere and exploration. But I also think the gameplay in that game was at least solid (as far as VATS was concerned at least), whereas Rockstar open world games have often suffered from putting world creation above of everything else. GTAV is one of the few Rockstar games where I felt the gameplay was solid enough to enjoy their world design.

Not nearly hundreds, but the more recent Lego games seem to become more and more of a chore. I ended up quitting Lego Batman 3 because it was just garbage and I wasn't having any fun. Lego Jurassic World was a little better and I ended up hundred precenting that, even though I wasn't enjoying it.

If it's a game like CS:GO i can see someone who has played for hundreds of hours being pushed away by some of the more recent micro transaction based design decisions, then deciding to leave a negative review in protest. If Let It Die was on Steam i could see a similar issue, or maybe if that Skyrim remaster breaks someones favorite mod but they play through the game anyway.
I don't tend to get rubbed the wrong way about a game like that, my decision is usually made up after about 2-3 hours, such as with Valkyria Chronicles, i only just got around to that game when they released it on Steam but i'd always wanted to play it since it first came out, i was enjoying it to start with but using strategy started to make way for dumb luck and what felt like abusing or tricking the ai, i could have forced myself to continue but the whole appeal of the game to me just slipped out from under it.
That would be the closest i can think to disliking a game after putting a good chunk of time into it, but not hundreds.
I played the original Deus Ex last year and while it was a massively impressive game at the time and still has its strong points now, i was left overall with a bad taste mostly due to awkward enemy encounters and the endless stream of large military bases.

Hundreds - no. But I did waste about 50 hours on being bored in Fallout 4 and between 30 and 40 on Dragon Age 2.

For me, it's probably Payday 2 going by my Steam list. I put over 50 hours into it, thinking it'd be a fun game my friend and I could get into but the bugginess of it all and just how little the game even lets you get away with just made the game frustrating, not rewarding or enjoyable. I haven't touched it in years but the way they handled patches too was another source of frustration.

One time I was doing a perfect solo run on a hard difficulty, almost completed the level without being seen then a guard just walks through a wall and there was nothing I could do. So yea, fuck that.

Hell no, especially when there's so much good stuff out there these days.

I'll give a game a few sessions, so if it doesn't grab me after 5 hours or so then see ya later.

The Division. Although I doubt I even reached 100 hours. I just played it because my friend likes it. But wow is that game a huge bore or what!

40hrs in fallout 4, 20 or 30 in fallout 3, you would think I'd learn my lesson but i love elder scrolls so much i keep thinking i will like fallout lol.

30 hrs in final fantasy 13

That's all i can think of now.

I played FFIX a few years back with my goal being to finally finish a Final Fantasy game. I did beat it, but I was hating the game pretty hard by the end. I think that game does have real annoying aspects, but also approaching a game "just to beat it" is probably not going to end well no matter what you're playing. I figured one day I'll give it another shot.

Any version of Pokemon past Gold?

People do tend to underestimate trophy/achievement hunters, who will play absolute rubbish for dozens of hours in the name of a platinum or 100 percent completion. I've been there, as the fulfillment from finishing some games otherwise outweighs the mundanity or monotony.

Probably Destiny. I get hooked real easy on games with color-coded loot. Plus the weapons look like candy.

But yeah, there wasn't very much I actually liked about it.

Hundreds? No. Dozens? Yes. I somehow managed to stick through a little less than 50 hours of Fallout 4 despite never really loving that game.

Fallout 3, Fallout 4, about half of The Division.

The early days of 1.1 were awesome, but once everyone hit level 30 it started to drag, and they never made good on their promise of the incursions and end-game content. The Underground and 1.4 were steps in the right direction but it was pretty much dead by then. The initial ramp up to level 30 when everyone was trying to figure stuff out was fun though. Probably my best memory of that was hanging it a group or randoms doing story missions and getting into a giant 45 minute firefight in the street out of nowhere. I still not sure how it happened but enemies just kept spawning over and over again until it just stopped. I know it was a bug and not supposed to happen but damn was it fun. I'm a Division apologist - I think they had something special with the core game, but the developer (Ubi Massive) just didn't have the chops to pull it off. By the time they started to deliver on those promises the game was practically dead except for the diehards. I'm confident in saying that if it were made by a more competent developer it wouldn't have turned out the way it did. Ubi Massive totally dropped the ball on their end.