What is the most boring AAA game you've ever played to completion?

I personally don't have the same hate for AAA games that people on the net do. They usually state how the industry is failing cause of this and that, indie is the way to go for something "good" but I think both have their merits. AAA can be really polished even if people say all these glitches exist (sorry im the few that didn't get glitches in most games including unity Assassins creed to cyberpunk but I get why they're bad so don't worry).

TLDR: I think Some games besides glitches and stuff are things people are just bored of. AAA wise do you know any. Personally, most AAA games are fun if you don't overthink it. That said I've played most through gamepass.

In hindsight, it’s Mass Effect Andromeda. It’s one of those “map games with excessive punctuation with very minimal rewards” games with a surprisingly slow progression. On top of that, they clearly set up all their narrative beats to pay off in future games (which wasn’t surprising considering it’s a Mass Effect game), and then all DLC and sequels got canceled. So it ended up being dozens of hours in a not particularly fun game that will never pay off in a future, better game.

Oh, and the seemingly endless “transport ship full of dudes dropping into this empty open world” moments even further slogged it up. At least the galaxy map was neat?

Most recently it would probably be Halo Infinite. The story is a mess and the back end of the game really drags. For a AAA production and as a poster child franchise representing the Xbox they surprisingly made little effort in diversifying both gameplay and level design.

Final Fantasy XIII or Final Fantasy XV

oof. well this is likely to be a spicy thread.

is nier: automata considered AAA?

to be clear- i have no ill will towards nier or its fans. i was just done with the environments, bullet hell and angst after 2 playthroughs but followed through to the "true" ending, despite it not 'doing it' for me.

more my fault than the game's though (probably).

Hmmm. At first I wanna say Andromeda, but I didn't beat that because I thought it was boring, I beat it because I thought it was horrible and had to see everything in it, in case I found something redeeming (After getting the Platinum trophy for it I discovered: there is nothing).

The proper answer, for me, is probably Fallout 4. I liked Fallout 3 well enough for being new and unique, but I disliked New Vegas and I think 4 is the same to me. While I am one of the biggest Elder Scrolls nerds, absolutely loving Bethesda's style of first person RPGs, turns out when you put those RPG trappings on one of my least favorite settings (post-apocalypse), make all the characters one flavor or another of "I'm a street punk!" and design the world to be 50 shades of brown, I get very, very bored. I beat it when it came out and I can not tell you a single thing about the story or main characters in that game.

I was gonna say LA Noire at first. That's a game I finished and did some extra achievement hunting in despite hating it by the end.

More recently: Outriders is dumb as hell, kind of fun from one moment to the next, but can get boring if you decide to grind...and I ground out all 43 achievements in that game. Just because they were perfectly doable. That wasn't a great use of my time.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

This was a time when my brain couldn't handle not finishing games I've started to play. I was bored of this game in the second mission. And damn, that was a long game, too. Thank god I've overcome my ridiculous tendencies, and can just leave games that are boring/bad unfinished and move on.

Final Fantasy 15, on the top of my head. Im sure there are many candidates though.

@mellotronrules: Why do you hate Nier Automata and all Nier Automata fans …what did we do to you

Metal Gear Solid V Phantom Pain.

In general, I always feel that things branded as "A Hideo Kojima Game" have the guts to waste my time, but they usually have an al'right coda. Phantom Pain has the balls to have an end telling you it's all bullshit. I don't think a longer rope from Konami can fix that with how Death Stranding turns out.

The Last Of Us.

If a friend hadn't urged me to play it all the way through, I would have given up from boredom after a couple of hours. I played through the entire thing in one sitting, knowing that if I stopped, I would never get back to it.

It may actually have been one of the most boring experiences I have ever had.

God of War 2018. Compared to the previous ones, it felt like a slog. The combat felt so clunky, the PS3 had more impressive set pieces, and it just dragged so much, man.

There's something to be said for pacing in AAA games, and some of Sony's recent games are really losing that focus. Uncharted 4, Last of Us 2, this. Not everything needs to be 20-30 hours, especially when narrative is a main focus. An hour between major story beats is too long when you're trying to tell a compelling story.

Probably stretching the AAA-ness here, but i remember being bored by Kingdoms of Amalur pretty much the moment i came out of the cave and into the outside world. It's probably a fairly interesting game from there on out, but i just wasn't up to put that amount of time into a game that bored me with it's story from the get go.

Red Faction Guerrilla also didn't do it for me. Being able to smash towers down with your hammer & explosives is great fun, but once you've had your fill of that and decide to go through the campaign missions... Boy.. there's not much to be found there.

Dragon Age Origins & Dragon Age Inquisition also bored me fairly quickly. I even fell asleep watching my sister go through the opening hours of Inquisition. Fairly pretty game, but there's just not much happening there.

And this is probably not 'one of the most boring AAA-games' i've played, given i spent over hundred hours in it on multiple platforms, but it still needs to be mentioned that Fallout New Vegas is an incredibly boring game from a gameplay perspective. That world just lacks a certain.. je ne sais quoi. Pizzaz! It feels so flat. It's all so brown. There are no big world-altering Megaton-like decisions that give you a shot of adrenaline to the system. The city of New Vegas itself doesn't impress at all. All that's left is that the dialogue is well done. I straight up had a better time with Fallout 3 because at that point the wasteland in 3d was still a novel look and it was still interesting to figure out which parts of fallout 2 were present in 3. New Vegas might be a better game overall if you put the games side to side, but i just didn't need that 2nd dose it turns out. It doesn't help that i had to play it on PS3 first, but even all decked out with the latest mods, i couldn't turn my frown upside down.

If I actually finished games, I'd say either Forza Horizon 4 or 5. But out of the big-budget games that I actually finished, Far Cry 5 is technically the most boring game I've finished in recent years.

Red Dead Redemption is a slog to play through. I beat it last year only playing the story missions and you just spend a majority of time going to start a mission. Ride your horse to where the mission is. It ends only for you to have to travel all the way back across the map to get another mission. The shooting is fun, but its a slow boring game.

You really should stop reading those reddit threads, Topcyclist.

That being said, Final Fantasy X is the most boring AAA game I played to completion. It was the last jrpg I ever played.

I don't complete games that I find boring.

Borderlands 2. The limitations of it combined with how long some of the sequences in it were made the last half of it feel like a gigantic slog. Some of the areas were too big for not having on-demand fast travel. When I first got it in 2012 I didn't finish it and it took me until a couple years ago to finally get around to playing through it before Borderlands 3 came out.

Borderlands 3 fixed pretty much of the issues I had with 2 and I had a significantly better time with 3 as a result.

I think I finished BFA which was my final foray into World of Warcraft. That's about all I got for this.

I'll finish good games, and I'll finish a fair nunber of "bad" games but I'll just stop playing something if it's boring.

@humanity: you'll need to ask me at least 4 more times for the true answer.

thinking about it more- FF13 was defo more boring than nier, so FF13 is my final answer.

I generally don't force myself to play games I don't enjoy (fell off RDR2 really quickly) but I would say Horizon: Zero Dawn. The gameplay loop bored me to tears and the main story thread was extremely uninteresting and boring. But I liked the flashes of backstory that are sprinkled throughout and they kept me going until the end. They need to make some serious changes to the fighting, controls, quests, upgrade system and... all of it if they want me to buy the sequel. Especially since the mystery of the reasons of the apocalypse and the state of the world has been solved already.

Oh and it took me literally YEARS to finish Bloodborne. Not really because of boredom but frustration. Mixing intentional obtusiveness, high difficulty, and massive loading times made for a pretty shitty time until I got into the rhythm and started dying less. After that happened I beat the last 80% of the game in a couple of weeks. The hardest part of that game is mentally managing those loading times.

Even boring games at a base level are somewhat rewarding to complete, there's parts that are good, you get the satisfaction of leveling up, finding new weapons or beating the boss at the end etc... So it's hard for me to say whether any of these are worse than the others, i beat them feel a bit meh and then forget about them and move on, so i'll just list a few that spring to mind.
Editors note i just realised the answer is Destiny 2, but it's so boring even this answer is boring, so...

Every Halo after the first, the first gets a pass by being the first, it was new, had an interesting world, incorporated vehicles into combat seamlessly, Cortana, Guilty Spark, the Halo, i even enjoyed fighting the flood unlike most, but every release after was so absent of story and ideas they just felt like map packs that often played worse than the original.
I went into every sequel expecting something better thanks to rave reviews but bordom sets in when you realise half way through nothing interesting is happening or will happen.

Uncharted 2 and 3, i didn't play the first, Nathan Drake's shenanigans are fun but combined with the genocide he's performing it's a little at odds with itself, you climb and shoot in these games but the climbing is so light it might as well be absent and at least on PS3 the shooting was affected by massive amounts of input lag. I love set piece moments and Uncharted is known for them, but they're let down by the fact you then have to take control and play the game, then of course they famously throw supernatural enemies in leading up to the end, which was like adding tedium to the tedium soup.

Control, don't hurt me, i enjoyed flying around and fighting enemies once i modded the game to improve the weapon switching and health mechanics, and the story is fine, but it kinda felt like all the incredible amazing parts of that game's world were just cribbed from SCP, hey i know nobody owns that idea you can make secret supernatural objects as much as you want, but they did it with as little effort as possible if you wanted to find out more about the objects or the world of The Oldest House its not there, so if you're familiar with the incredible detail in SCP Control's radical setting ends up feeling quite shallow, which i know is a me problem, everyone else was blown away. Add to that running back through areas and having to do large battles repeatedly for 20 hours and i'm glad it wasn't longer.

Dragon Age Inquisition. I literally fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon while running around the Hinterlands. In retrospect I have no idea why I bothered finishing it, since I'm generally very good at abandoning games I don't care for.

@cikame: Not here to argue your "I got bored" point, 'cause everything's subjective, but I love SCP and still think Control knocked it out of the park. If every weird happening in The Oldest House had an exhaustive taxonomical breakdown or there were reams of lore lying around every corner a la SCP, I think it would be a weaker game for it. The beauty of SCP is that it's such a massive tangled web of contradiction and overwhelming detail, which also makes it completely impractical to exist in a big picture fashion as anything other than a decentralized wiki authorship project. I think taking that general premise but stripping it down to its essential concepts and leaving a lot more unexplained and left to the imagination served Control super well, since as a video game it's much more reliant on its visuals and environments to give you the sense of strange unreality that SCP conveys through its text.

(For what it's worth, I think the ideal SCP game would be some sort of a bureaucracy sim along the lines of Papers Please, where you're a pencil pusher reducing the abject fucking horrors of SCP's world into clinical reports and documents.)

I basically never complete games I'm not enjoying. I give a game maybe two hours or so to capture my interest, and if it doesn't, I drop it. The only exception in recent memory I can think of was Skyward Sword. That game has good aspects but it's not great. I only finished it because, well, it's Zelda, and I have to finish every (mainline) Zelda.

Red Dead Redemption 2. I wanted to see Arthur's story to completion but man I hated doing anything in that game.

I utilized the hell out of that auto travel camera thing. In hindsight, I should have just watched a YouTube cut of the cutscenes because I think I hated playing the game so much that there was no payoff to the ending(s).

Horizon Zero Dawn is close but I got about halfway through it before I watched a playthrough online. That was just one where I think the menu/rpg elements ended up hurting the game and I just didn't enjoy the gameplay enough to suffer through that.

Borderlands 1 for me.

That game coasted a lot on being the first loot shooter that wasn’t Hellgate London. So like, props for setting the stage so that Destiny 1 and 2 could exist, but I don’t think Borderlands 1 is very good, even at the time.

Borderlands 1 had the loot shooting and a cool comic-booky shader thing going for it, but everything else in that game is pretty bland, and frankly I regret my time with it (get rekt, 2009-2010 era Jeff Gerstmann). Boring quests/story/writing, pretty bog standard post-apoc/Fallout enemies and bosses (raiders, giant alien bugs, militaristic faction with armour, etc.), mostly forgettable desert wasteland environments. After a while I noticed it was just a soulless level grind where I didn’t particularly care to keep going because everything but the shooting kinda sucked.

I could land on either...

(1) That 2013 Tomb Raider. I've never played an Uncharted game and I'm starting to think that's a real blessing. Oh no, the environment is exploding and collapsing for the 50th time! Guess I'll jam that left stick forward and hit jump a few times.

(2) Assassin's Creed 2, the last one I finished (and second-to-last one I started). I loved the focus and intimacy of that first AC. AC2 favored sprawl for sprawl's sake, and I trudged through its shop-buying, florin-collecting nonsense under extreme protest. Also, I came to it a bit late, so it included that siege DLC that it kind of just drops right in the middle to derail whatever little momentum the game had going.

RDR2 - this game is tantalizing. The best parts are the action packed sequences. But doing chores in a video game or traveling 15+ minutes to get somewhere virtually... just no. Let people choose how they want to fast travel, if they want transition animations, and whether they should be slowed down at points. To me, being forced to interact with a game in a very specific way is the opposite of immersive.

Many games I just completely stopped playing - Neir: Automata, HZD, Fallout 4, Mirror's Edge, etc.

Edit: As the person above mentioned, 2013 Tomb Raider for me too. I completed it and that was the first game where I said... that's it? What?

Breath of the Wild. Not even close. I kept thinking it had to be fun because everyone else said so!

I'd rather have spent that time spackling the walls in Hyrule Castle with my tongue.

Also this! A thousand times this. When hunting robot T-rexes becomes a chore, something has gone very wrong.

@el_blarfo: I think the main problem is that the combat doesn't feel good, and the rewards are completely uninteresting. As a comparison, I played Monster Hunter World for 40 hours and enjoyed every minute if it, even though it's one of the most repetetive games imaginable. That's because the combat feels -GOOD- and impactful, and you can use the spoils to create weapons and armor made from your enemies. The equipment is not made from generic loot, but are designed to unmistakeably look they're made from the unique materials you've gathered which feels great! I do wish the drop rates were better, but it's still more engrossing than creating 'purple'/'rare' variants of existing equipment.

I just realized I forgot about a game that was guilty of all the wrongs of Horizon, and likely was a direct source of inspiration for the Horizon devs - the Witcher 3! That's another game that literally took me years to finish because I always grew bored by the glacial, meandering plot, pointless open world, dime-a-dozen sidequests (SO much time is spent following tracks with Witcher vision), and the terrible, terrible combat and the worst crafting system of all time. The game finally picks up and becomes pretty interesting when you find Ciri, but then the game is almost over. I don't regret finishing it though. As a fan of the books, the games are pretty well-made fanfiction. I appreciate that they actually put to use an enemy that Sapkowski just sort of forgot about (the Wild Hunt) and I really enjoyed the bitter-sweet ending. Enough so to actually beat the DLC stories, that thankfully have better pacing than the main game.

Sometimes I think y'all just wanna be spicy.

Fallout: New Vegas is up there. If I was specifically interested in good writing, I would have read a book or several. Because outside of that, New Vegas is just one of the blandest games in existence. People complained about endless brown shooters in the 360 days and those complaints are valid, but Fallout New Vegas was the brownest of boring brown video games. There are things in the game that should be exciting, but it's just such a drag to actually play or participate in that none of it really is. Instead of making the same mistake with Planescape: Torment, I just quit playing that a few hours in. I'm sorry, guys, I have to have a decent game to go with my brilliant writing. Giving players dialog options and making those options affect other events in the game is cool and commendable and one of the strengths of video games... but if that's all you've got, I'm not interested.

On the flip side, I quit playing Icewind Dale because I got distracted by something else that was coming out and that's a game I really do want to get back to.

@theonewhoplays: If I could have been bothered to finish The Witcher 3 it would have definitely made the list, but I was so burnt out after Skellige that I gave it a cheap funeral and moved on.

Watch Dogs: Legion is the most recent. I really don't know why I kept playing even knowing that the core gameplay loop wasn't interesting me.

@theonewhoplays: See, I absolutely LOVED Witcher 3. I felt the combat was a lot more engaging than Horizon, certainly. For me it was that the world felt a lot more unique and lived-in, so I was able to overlook the fact that everyone has their feet nailed to the floor and so can't go gather their own monster parts, or whatever. In Horizon, by comparison, everyone felt like a generic quest-giver-bot.

Anyway, I've never played any of the Monster Hunter series, so I can't speak to that comparison, but I totally agree that the combat in Horizon felt weightless. Hell, you eventually get a magic wand that just blows robot parts off in one whack. (Phrasing!)

Another reminder that if a game gives you a tool to just skip its core mechanic, that mechanic isn't very fun in the first place.

Dragon Quest VIII. That's mainly because the storyline was very slow in its execution, often dragging in spots. But I stuck with it until the end and liked it overall. Took a lot of patience on my part.

I platinumed the original Watch Dogs. Halfway through I was really regretting it, but I had already done a bunch of stuff towards the platinum and I got caught up in the sunk cost fallacy. Boy, do I hate that game.

I'll defend the person who said NieR:Automata. First, I hate having to play the same game three to four times to know what the fuck is going on in the story. Second, the plot twist that got everyone on the internet into a tizzy was done before in the first game, and I would argue done better.

What you end up with is a monotonous slog that repeats plot beats from the previous game and the Drakengard series like it is a "Best Hits" album.

Y'know what, anything which is just mindlessly killing stuff as a poorly-written alpha wide-boy. I used to love the Gears Of War games but I can't play them anymore, they're just mind-numbing.

I took a quick look at my shelf and realized there are a bunch of big hitters that could fill this criteria. So here's a top 5 that can change positions, depending on what day you ask me:

1. Dead Island and every sequel

2. Assassin's Creed Revelations

3. The Division 2

4. Metal Gear Solid X (though I guess 1, since fuck finishing the others)

5. Both Zone of the Enders

Now, if we open the flood gates to games that were too boring to finish, then we'd see some real shit.

The thing that springs to mind for me is Medal of Honor (2010).

Halo Infinite is probably the most recent one. I changed the difficulty down to easy at some point and even then the final hours of that game were a slog.

Pokémon Sword/Shield - a truly unremarkable story in my opinion. Loved discovering the new Pokémon and trading with my friend, but the story felt like a slog. It didn't even have full voice acting which resulted in some pretty embarrassing scenes such as Piers "singing" on the mic but you're not able to actually hear any singing. For a property that is so incredibly successful, the dumb plot and lack of voice acting felt especially annoying.

@el_blarfo: The 'blow parts off' weapon was the only enjoyable part of the fighting system in Horizon. That and one-shoting Watchers. I actually likes the Watchers and if they added one as a companion, like Diamond Dog in MGSV, I would consider buying the sequel.

Boring is a bit tough, being quite different from bad. Can't name drop something like Heavy Rain here, or even The Bouncer, which I not only think (,er, think I remember) is Good Actually™ but regardless can't ever be accused of being "boring" anyway, though it does take a Nier: Automata-like level of devotion to seeing all that game has to offer.

But it'd also clearly be boring to name Mass Effect: Andromeda because so many other people are doing it, but boy does that game stick out like a sore thumb amidst all the stuff I've played, especially "to completion". That being said, I did still have fun playing it moment to moment - the combat's alright!

Scrolling through my trophies from PS3-5, I honestly can't say I've even booted many games I'd consider boring, especially not that I stuck through with to the end. So then I thought, surely I could just do a Google such as "mediocre PS2 games" and find something interesting but...no, everyone wants to skip right ahead to "worst" or "underrated". That doesn't work for me!

So then I had to wonder, does my memory really matter? Shouldn't I be able to assume if I played James Bond Jr. for the SNES or Mission Impossible for the N64 in 2021 I'd find those games pretty boring? Possibly, but I definitely played them over and over again as a kid - should I betray my childhood? And just as I remembered something I could nominate, I'd become fascinated enough with the concept of boredom I did the massively boring activity of scrolling through every PS2 game with a Metacritic entry for both nostalgia and research's sake. I found two games:

First up is Syphon Filter 3 for the original Playstation, which wasn't functionally all that different from the first two games and that was kind of the point. The N64 had published cooler future-spy thrillers like Perfect Dark by this point, while the PS2 had existed for nearly a full year and was hosting games like Madden NFL 2002, SSX Tricky, Devil May Cry, Metal Gear Solid 2, Final Fantasy X and...oh, yeah, Grand Theft Auto 3. The original Playstation was stupid and Syphon Filter 3 was for babies.

Second, often spending upwards of 30 minutes trying to pick a game to rent at Blockbuster sure burned a lot of otherwise esoteric video games' cover art into my brain forever!

Then I thought - I should just kill a darling and say it was Zone of the Enders. This is a franchise I will always fight for (can you imagine a sequel on PS5?!) and I've actually replayed the original more than the sequel because I'm an absolute sadist. I can admit the story is completely pointless and the voice acting often anathema to the concept of acting itself, while the mech combat is mostly a lot of button mashing and finger crossing...and I've beaten this game like six times over? That must've felt dull at some point.

But I want to say Assassin's Creed, so I'm gonna. Never have I felt like I saw everything I needed to see from what would go on to be one of the biggest franchises in the world with my very first experience. I played this on a friend's XBox 360 on his parents' brand new big screen HDTV in two seven hour sessions interspersed with bong rips and couch naps and the only thing that was ever interesting about the game was climbing up real high and jumping down real low.

Black ops 3, Bioshock Infinite, Gears 3... all slogs that I got through.

I haven't beaten a single AAA open world game since skyrim on the 360... because they end up boring me before they end(also the fact they are incredibly long).

I beat crackdown 3 though. I dont know if that counts as AAA. Haha.

This. I'm only like halfway through and I want to finish, mostly because I have finished the other 7 games. Man, oh man is it bad though. It's sooooooo bad and boring once you reach the open world. I had more fun in the linear start of the game. Not exactly looking forward to "the back end really drags." Man, I didn't think it would get worse, just figured it would stay about the same.

It gets worse huh? Dang it. Maybe I just call it then.

@ginormous76: I dunno if you like the interior stuff more then maybe it will be better for you. How much did you like the library?