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How do you resume an old play through

Shackleton

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
Can't deny, this is a problem I can identify with. Whatever you do though, the reasons why you got distracted or bored with the game are still there. I don't think I can remember a game, much less an RPG that I've given up midway and then picked up again afterwards to play to completion. There's been a couple I've shelved due to bugs and got back to, but ones I've got bored of- never.

I can almost guarantee if you start again, you'll get distracted a bit before you reach the part you stopped playing at before.
 
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RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In
I really don't have a problem with this. If I do leave the game and come back it later, and I feel happy with my character builds and all that, I'll just pick up where I left off.
 

Anthedon

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Man up and finish what you started. It's rare that I play multiple games simultaneously. Usually I stick with one title until I complete it (or abandon it for all time).
 

visions

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I started my playthrough of Dragon Age in 2010 or 2011. One day I'm gonna reload the last save and complete it because no way am I going through that shit again. The reason it has taken this long is that I spent a few years without a desktop pc, then got a desktop pc but spent/spend a lot of time away from it. I still have the saves though.
 

Apostle Hand

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If I stop current playthrough, i stopped it for a good reason. Going back and playing again would be like I stopped drinking coffee and came back after a year to drink it. It would sure taste bad.
 

Raghar

Arcane
Vatnik
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Jul 16, 2009
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I can only play single player games in bursts and usually end up abandoning a game temporarily despite enjoying it greatly to play multiplayer games. This leads to situations, where for example I haven't played arcanum in a few months because I wasn't in the mood and while I want to finish it, i find it hard to find motivation to sort of get back into it.

How do you deal with that? Its a huge problem for me, causing many abandoned games.
Well. You don't. I started my P3 FES playtrough 3x before I managed to find time to finish it in about two weeks. With RPGs you forget a lot of story in half year of not playing it...
 
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Serpent in the Staglands Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
I can only play single player games in bursts and usually end up abandoning a game temporarily despite enjoying it greatly to play multiplayer games. This leads to situations, where for example I haven't played arcanum in a few months because I wasn't in the mood and while I want to finish it, i find it hard to find motivation to sort of get back into it.

How do you deal with that? Its a huge problem for me, causing many abandoned games.

No real easy solution. The only way to do it is to do it.

Sort of like lifting, meditation, and anything that isn't masturbation (both figuratively and literally).

More long term, give up multiplayer games and probably web browsing/social media as well. As long as you leave these sort of skinner box entertainment options open to yourself, there is no hope you will maintain a hobby that demands any significant amount of attention with any degree of consistency.
 

ProphetSword

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Monkey Island
A fun game is one you will want to continue. If you didn't want to pursue it during the time you were playing it, you will likely smash into the same brick wall when you try to restart it. In the end, it will be a waste of time.

My suggestion: Move on to another game instead.
 

Alkarl

Learned
Joined
Oct 9, 2016
Messages
472
Depends; if I drop a game, it's usually for a good reason. Something didn't sit right with me, and kept creeping back into my concious mind. Even if I find some element of a game particularly insulting or annoying, I'll usually push through to see if it gets better or at least gets ammended.

On the other hand, if it's a game I know very well and have completed multiple times, I may take long breaks and pick it up just fine. For instance, I recently reloaded a 5 month old save on BG1 with my evil party, currently in Baldur's Gate city, and was able to easily pick right back up from where I was and what I was doing.
 
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Serpent in the Staglands Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Problem with those approaches is:

(a) you can quit a game because it is bad and then pick it up later and after an afternoon of relearning the curve, have a blast with it

(b) related but somewhat different: games are like people where familiarity over time = love. My best friend (practically a brother) is an abrasive guy I didn't like much at first and couldn't believe I had to hang out with for "social reasons," but whom I grow to appreciate over time. My relationship with Arcanum is patterned similarly.

As with human relationships, a lot of the fun in games is found in the patience and effort you put into them.

Problem is people don't want to put patience and effort into their real life, let alone into a game. It's why people prefer superficial entertainments like Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor or Disney's Marvel movies.
 

huskarls

Scholar
Joined
Aug 7, 2016
Messages
108
Resuming is the best: no tutorials, no fighting rats, no worrying about min-maxing. That's how I played deus ex, just dropping it for a month when I was worried about my gay augs, inventory tetris, and lockpicks. Even pillars would probably be good if I just played from the save of a 13 year old boy with a shit build at the middle of the game, not understanding the plot adds mystique
 

Fowyr

Arcane
Vatnik
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Mar 29, 2009
Messages
7,671
Just load old save, duh. I returned to some games after sometimes more than ten years, and never had many problems with it.
 

Invictus

Arcane
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Nov 3, 2013
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Divinity: Original Sin 2
I mostly blame this droping a game, coming back to it and then thinking about restarting on the whole issue of having to many options; growing up I mostly had one or maybe 2 new games to play at a time so I stuck to them until I beat the first one to go for the second one
On the case of RPGs I would play the game until beat and the longer the better so no restarts there
Growing up I had more disposable income and I could buy more games which inevitably lead me to try the new games out...
But I have to agree with some of the others users who say that if the game didn’t “grab you” enough to play it until ended it wasn’t such a great game after all
Sometimes I rather restart than pickup a game and feel kind of lost in what I was supposed to be doing, so it is hard to pick an old save, although sometimes external circumstances like a new project at work or a trip can also make me leave a game unfinished
To be honest that is why I love my phone games like The Quest or Final Fantasy 4... since they are fairly basic they can be played in short supurts and coming back to those is fairly easy
Lastly, I may be getting old but I rather replay and old favorite than to play a new game, I mean I am looking at the shrink wrapped copies of Uncharted Collection, God of War 3 and Batman Arkham Knight for my PS4 that I bought almost 2 years ago, yet I have replayed Gothic, Dungeon Rats, Age of Decandence, Dark Souls and Stalker at least once during that time
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
Patron
Joined
Oct 26, 2012
Messages
5,104
I tend not to and that's the reason why I pretty much play only one game at any point in time. Although, looking back on how I took a two month break playing through Witcher 3 I guess I could generalize and say modern games have decent catch-up systems to bring you up to speed narratively and mechanically.
 

RoSoDude

Arcane
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
727
I used to be in the exact some boat as you. I still have this problem occasionally, since I get periodically more busy with real life/passion work and I experience a sort of activation energy associated with booting a game up (relatedly, I feel a bit guilty when I'm actively doing something unproductive and leisurely, which ironically leads to me passively waste a lot of time on the internet. Go figure).

However, in the last two years, the time has always come around where, even after a month or more, I can bring myself to get back into an old playthrough. Want to know what the key has been for me? Quitting multiplayer games. Yeah. See, I realized that most of them weren't worth the huge blocks of time I was spending on them, especially since the only good multiplayer games I was playing (e.g. Tribes, Quake) are as dead as this forum's hope for a renaissance of incline. Also, if you're playing a MOBA or an MMO, get yourself out of that hole ASAP. You'll look back and wonder what in god's name was worth that amount of investment, and hopefully not of the financial sort.

Since I did that, I've had a lot more reason to actually finish what I start, provided I was enjoying it. Sometimes there are lulls in engagement (looking at you, New Vegas strip), and it's tempting to drop a playthrough for a while, but when all you have to look forward to are other singleplayer games with a beginning, middle, and end which will require a similar sort of commitment, it's less tempting to continually drop games and start new ones. Not only is it easier to dig yourself out of a rut when you're only playing singleplayer games, but every moment spent gaming is experiencing something new, or revisiting something intentionally -- you're never just "clocking in" and doing the same thing you were near-mindlessly doing for the last 10 weeks. I still play a bit of MP FPS here and there, but it's pretty sparing and just for a few minutes at a time. If I'm feeling unmotivated to continue a long RPG playthrough, I'll download a nice, short oldschool FPS like Doom or Quake and blast through it in a couple of days for a change in pace, then get my head back in gear to continue. If I keep stalling and can't find the energy to get back into it, I probably wasn't enjoying it that much anyway, and I can actually know that for a fact because I don't have any other gaming commitments eating up my attention.

I'm sure some people could balance the singleplayer/multiplayer thing better than I did, and maybe you're getting much more enjoyment out of the latter than I was (and playing better/less dead games). I just know that quitting them almost entirely was like waking up and discovering this whole world of classic games I had never allowed myself the time to play. I've been like a kid in a candy store ever since.
 
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