Have you ever had to quit playing a game because it was TOO good?

I will preface this post by explaining my current gaming situation. I have two kids (12 years and 17 months), a part time work at home job, and a full-time "job" of travel hockey for my daughter, plus caring for my toddler son (no day care). While I do get some Switch time in at hotels and before bed, my available console/PC time is limited to generally 5-10 hours a week.

Now, my problem. I like Apex Legends A LOT. I'm not normally one for multiplayer shooters, but occasionally I latch on to one. I liked Halo Reach. I was pretty good at Destiny 1 Crucible. And I'm pretty good at Apex. Not outstanding by any means, but I've gotten a dozen or so wins and consistently make the top 10. I use multiple characters and like how most play. The problem is, if I want to stay competitive at all, I need to play regularly. And I want to play the game often, so that isn't the problem. The issue is that I also have a large backlog of games I would still like to play (Control, God of War, Spiderman, Outer Wilds, Outer Worlds, a bunch of Yakuza games, etc.), and as much as I like Apex, I also feel bad not getting to these other games. If I had more time in my gaming schedule, I could probably bounce between Apex and another game. However, given the current situation, I've decided to drop Apex altogether. I still want to play, but it seems to be all or nothing for me right now.

So, has anyone else had to stop playing a game because it was TOO good? I expect some MMO stories here, but am curious how often this happens.

Usually it happens to me with very long games. Whenever I realize I'll need 80, 100, 120+ hours to beat that 1 game, I'll get cold feet like 10 hours into it and decide to save it for another time. I know it's silly cuz it's all the same gaming time I think a good game can really take over my life and a really long one becomes a black hole. I did that with Zelda BotW and haven't gotten back to it yet. At this point I'll have to restart from the beginning. Really enjoyed my time with it tho.

I've said it elsewhere many times, but Resident Evil 2. That was a very, very, very good video game, and then Mr. X showed up doing what he was designed to do, and he did what he's supposed to do so well that I turned off and uninstalled the game less than five minutes after he came on the scene. He wasn't annoying me, he was simply too much and I knew it from the moment they revealed he was a major part of the game unlike the original where he was safely quarantined to the B scenario and far less effective.

Happy to have fresh, high def memories of the police station to replace all my childhood memories of the original, and also happy to always have the moldy, low def memories of the underground facility from the original I can safely hold onto for all of time.

HITMAN (2016). Steam has me clocked in at about 143 hours, and I would've likely done two or three times that if I hadn't forced myself to uninstall it. I love that game so much; it was all I played for a while. Just checking things off the list for each level. Hell of a game, but there's a lot of other stuff I want to do, and I won't be able to do it if I'm just playing Hitman forever.

Any Dark Souls game, as well. I was so enraptured by that first game that I would beat it and then just immediately start another character and go again. After I had beaten it several times, I decided I had to burn myself out on it to move on; getting all of the achievements was a good way to do that. I had to do that with the second game as well, and while I haven't done it with the third, I'm fairly certain I'm be reinstalling it sometime in the next few months and be playing it again ad nauseam until I've perfected it as well.

If I didn't have severe backlog guilt, I would currently be replaying Fallout New Vegas for the second time in 9 months. Hell, if it wasn't for my crippling FOMO, I would happily take a year or two off paying attention to game news or buying new games and just replaying Bethesda's catalog with different gimmick character builds.

Civilization V. I remember starting that game while I was in college and playing hours upon hours upon hours. Just one more turn, you know? I had to uninstall it so I could focus on more important things in life. I still haven't installed it since... out of fear.

There have been a few games I uninstalled over the years because I couldn't stop playing them. Starcraft, Halo, Spelunky, Nuclear Throne, Dead Cells, and more. It got to the point where I'd play these and ignore a lot of other stuff (I'm good at balancing games and life, but they were keeping me from trying new stuff).

To this day, if a game is too addicting I'll just move on. Single player games at least end (although No Man's Sky got uninstalled when I realized I'd spend way too much time on it without much payoff). But multiplayer games are endless and I know that isn't the best route for me in gaming, since I generally play one or two games max at a time.

I have certainly uninstalled multiplayer shooters because I wanted to finish a story game. I would sit down thinking 'just a match or two' and two hours later I still had not put it down in favor of what I was supposed to play. That being said, I think the best example of this for me is Far Cry 2. Not that the game itself is too good but at the time I thought it looked too good. I remember not even being able to play the game properly because I was too focused on looking at all that graphics. Eventually I gave up on the game because I just wasn't progressing, I was just looking at that rocket fly and things blowing up nicely.

Now that I think about it and being honest with myself, I think I put down Dead Space because it was too good at what it was doing. I loved everything that game did, but I was constantly tense to the point that it just wasn't comfortable. Which is ironic given how little horror movies affect me. But at the time, after about a third of the game I just couldn't go on, I just accepted that it was getting to me. Likewise, I put down Star Craft 2 because I would end every match with a pulse that wasn't comfortable either, despite loving every moment of it.

No.

I’ll pace myself and play as I can. This might be an hour every couple of nights, one night a week, whatever. But games are a hobby, so I enjoy them when I 1) can and 2) want to.

I do have an issue with playing too many games at once. If I stop playing a long game like Judgment, it might be hard to get back into. So I tend to stick with a game, for the most part, until I’m done.

Just last week I hit 1000 hours in pubg so erm.... I guess not?

I absolutely get what you mean though. I've a bit of a backlog from Christmas sales but lately every time I sit down to play something I find myself just booting up Total War: Three Kingdoms again.

I DO want to play a lot of the games in my backlog. Just a combination of the effort required to learn a new game and the time available (an hour is decent progress in a Three Kingdoms campaign, but will probably only get me through the tutorial/intro on a new game) has me constantly returning to what is comfy and easy instead.

@redwing42: You aren't considering dropping Apex Legends because it is too good. You're considering dropping it because it requires too much time and you want to do other things. If the game was actually "too good" you wouldn't care about trying other games, because you would be so enamored by it that no other games would matter.

If I am truly enjoying a game, I play it until I'm done with it. Then I'll worry about what's next.

I have a confession to make: I have never finished X-Com: Enemy Unknown. I have started new campaigns like 4 times and it was my favorite game of 2012, but something about the pressure of loosing my squadmates gives me panic attacks, and I can't move past the halfway point...

Eventually I had to uninstall Borderlands 2 for the sake of other games I wanted to play. That game’s loop had me pretty hooked.

Yeah, but not really in a "its too addictive" way. More of a "I'm in awe of what just happened/how good this is" kinda way.

This happened most recently while playing Nier Automata. I got overwhelmed with how cool some moments were and had to pace around the room for a bit. Fire Emblem: Three Houses almost did it with the reveal shortly before the time skip. Maybe it would have if I chose a different house.

First time this happened was probably Super Metroid. I was a big fan of the original, and Super Metroid was the first game I played that really subverted my expectations. Fighting little Kraid then going into the room with big Kraid was a big moment for 6 year old me.

I've quit playing Dota 2. Not because i resented the game or the community ( my behavior score was maxed out, i played support and i was closing in on 5k MMR which means that everyone generally was serious enough trying to win games). It was just that i spent thousand of hours on this one game, which made the days fly past while i didn't have any time for other stuff. And it wasn't like i was closing in on being a serious contender with a shot of making money out of it. So i just quit playing at a point where i was satisfied with my progress as a player. I still think the game is quite awesome and love watching it. I just don't feel like playing it for a thouzand more hours for no real reason. So yeah, pretty much the same reasons why you felt you needed to stop playing Apex.

I have also quit games because i enjoyed them so much that i didn't really want them to end. I just wanted to enjoy them in small bits. This is often the case with storydriven linear games. It's just such a good feeling to look forwards to diving in this game and it's world, that it would be a shame if i could only look forwards to that feeling once or twice :P

@banefirelord: I wish I could create different character builds in RPGs. I don't typically re-play alot of games, but when I do, I end up playing them using the same strategies and builds as before; even when I spec completely different.

I'm so lame and boring.

That makes two of us. I *looove* XCOM:EU and XCOM 2, but I haven't finished either.

For me, though, it's more that I'm really bad at managing multiple squads, so I always have a single crack team of soldiers and a bunch of rookies. Once my good squad starts eating it, I'm inevitably fucked. So it's really my own shortcomings in games like that moreso than the stress of the missions. But it's still funny to consider that I might never see the endings of two of my favorite games, haha.

@nodima: Mr. X only appears a few times throughout the game at scripted locations and once you do the thing you need to do to get rid of him, he's gone and you don't even have to think about him until the next scripted event, of which there are only a handful. That and he's generally pretty easy to get around. Mr X is no reason to avoid RE2.

I played the game and vehemently disagree. Sorry. He scary.

I still haven't gone to the Witcher 3 in any real capacity because of this. Like I know I am in for something special...but I am not ready lol.

Final Fantasy XIV is probably the best answer for me. I've put quite a few hours into it, and it's no coincidence that I took a break when my 30 day trial ended. But truthfully the idea of jumping back in is both super exciting and incredibly daunting. I just have too many things going on to commit fully to an MMO. Maybe someday... who knows. I've loved what I've played and everyone says what I've played is the most boring part of the game. Can't even imagine where it goes from there and I might never actually see it.

An alternate answer could be Journey. I've never even started the game specifically because the praise was so overwhelmingly emotional that it totally colored my perception of it. I think it was the stories of people having some kind of emotional nirvana when certain things happen with another player that pushed me away. Not because I'm against those experiences, but because at some point it feels like any playthrough I do couldn't possibly match everything I've seen and heard about the game.

@nateandrews: I keep hearing about ff14 being so good but I am intimidated by its vastness.

@nikana: I'm not even sure how I got as far into it as I did. I don't play MMOs. Something about it just grabbed me. Right place and right time, maybe.

I'm more attracted to games that are flawed/niche these days. I feel like I can have more meaningful conversations about a game of which I had low expectations for, but found some very redeeming qualities of which make me feel more enthusiastic about it,

Games that are "critically claimed" and held in high regard by fans mainly trigger my contrarian inclination where I'm more inclined to nitpick and harp on the things that I don't like about the game. And even if it meets those high expectations where the game is technically "perfect" because it fulfills one arbitrary checklist or another, I feel like I'd have nothing new to add to the conversation since I'd just be joining the circle-jerk of how good the game is, which is boring because everyone would basically be saying the same things over and over again. So I kinda just put those big budget/tripple-A/summer blockbuster games to the side while I look for things that are imperfect but have a charm to them.

I put about 1200 hours into Overwatch over the course of a year and a half and had to stop because I was really starting to get mad when I was on losing streaks. I don't know if it counts exactly but no game had ever made me care so much or get so invested in competitive multiplayer.

I have not quit a game, but I definitely will love a game so much up front that I get afraid it will let me down and I hit this weird speed bump - usually for a few months - where I just sort of enjoy the feeling the game gave me and I don't move on. Yakuza 0 all the way back in 2017 was this way, as was Horizon Zero Dawn (I live where HZD takes place and I'm also an absolute sucker for "humanity does itself in" stories).

I am that way with some TV shows I love as well, where I am afraid to keep watching subsequent seasons because I like what I have already watched so much that I worry they'll drop the ball and I'll feel let down by the whole thing.

Breath of the Wild. I played a dozen or so hours, loved it, and then realized I absolutely did not have the bandwidth to give it the attention it deserved, because it was so damn good and I didn't want to half-ass the experience. But, I resolved to revisit it once I had the time.

That was 2 years ago.

Not exactly had to stop playing but I sometimes refrain from playing GREAT games in place of GOOD games, mainly because I hate the thought of running out of great games to play so I stall and play the GOOD games instead to avoid spoiling myself too much. It's as if playing a better game will diminish my appreciation of a good game especially if it's the same genre.

Generally speaking no. All good things must come to an end. I'll focus on one game and only stop when I finish the plot or when I lose my interest in the gameplay loop.

However, there's two exceptions:

1) Warframe: Once I realized it had its hooks in me, I reduced my playtime to avoid burnout. I play it almost every day for maybe an hour. If there's no new content or time-limited events, then I can do the dailies and be out again in 20 minutes.

2) Papers Please: I sat down one day, played it for a couple hours until i had a lengthy run, and never touched it again. It was my 2013 game of the year.

Binding of Isaac is the only game I've deleted because I kept playing it instead of other things. One last expansion coming though, so at least I have an excuse now. My PC died while I was taking a WoW break post Lich King and I never got another one and that was probably for the best.

I will also bump this year old thread and say, yes I do this a lot. If I play a game I like a lot and can sense that I'm about to reach its end, I will stop playing it for weeks, sometimes months to play other games before I go back to it and finish it. A recent example is Miles Morales. After the one encounter with Finn, I'm sure many of you who played the game can guess what I'm talking about, I stopped playing it until the 2020 New Year weekend where I finished it.

And like others have said, I'll also stop playing live action games if they consume too much of my time from other games. Right now, Warframe is this for me. I will still put a little time in it every now and again, but not nearly as much as I used to.

I remember being around the final battle of FFXIII and while that game is not all that good, i decided to keep that last little bit as somewhat of a dessert for another day. Safe to say, that day never came.

I also stopped playing Dota2 pretty cold turkey, despite still having a lot of love for that game. It was just that i got into that reflex of putting all of the gametime towards it to the point where other games were just not getting played anymore. So with the idea that variety is the spice of life & i had achieved a decent level of play in dota, but would never be like a full professional player, i decided to stop playing it and just enjoy it as a spectator game from here on out.