Popular Rpgs that you tried but never was able to finish?

[Varn]

Drakensang the River of Time: Started out fairly charming but the combat became extremely repetitive and I totally lost interest in the story. The character development was also poor with level-ups being more or less pointless, so there was little sense of progression. Felt too much like an MMO as well.

Wizardry 8: Tried it 3 times given the rave reviews about it. Combat was boring, lengthy, difficult and insanely frequent. Always gave up at the swamp. The story was boring too.

Bloodmoon: Always get burned out on Morrowind either half-way through the thousands of side quests or just after finishing Tribunal. Never even got my character to the shores of Solstheim due to burn-out.

Divinity 2 FOV: Got way too tired of the dragon combat in ED and only barely finished the main quest. Sequel seemed more of the same boring combat and annoying english voice-overs ("more's the pity") so uninstalled.

Jagged Alliance 2: Seemed vaguely interesting with the different mercs and Fallout-esque feel but ultimately was the trademark Sir-Tech Endless Lengthy Combat type deal in the spirit of Wizardry 8. Got to Grumm after liberating half the map and uninstalled after my mercs got pinned down in an unwinnable battle. The story didn't really hook me either and the lack of real RPG elements made the endless combat very boring.

Darklands: Who said this game was good? Pretty much everything about it sucked.

Ultima VII 1 & 2: Thought this would bring me back the UO feel. It did for a short while but soon got bored of the ultra-crap combat and never-ending dialogue trees with no real C & C or character development involved. Kind of like a half-arsed adventure game, not an RPG.

Two Worlds 1/2: Everything about them was boring and tacky. Felt like I was playing a beta.

Sacred 1/2 & Torchlight: No game can reproduce the Diablo formula successfully. I learnt this the hard way with these ultra-banal and boring games.

NWN2 & MOTB: The camera was atrocious and detracted from the gameplay. The combat was really boring. Got about 1/3 through each and uninstalled in frustration.

Borderlands: Seemed fun to begin with but the very quick, endless respawning of enemies got very tiring rapidly. The items were all very samey and the locations an endless sea of brown mountains. Boring.



There's heaps more but that's the most recent ones. The good news is I think I'm going to finish some games soon. I'm doing a dual run of both Thief and VTMB. Both games seem excellent and have something that has hooked me. I've put Thief on hold for a while as I'm really into VTMB, having just reached Chinatown. I find the story and atmosphere very interesting and think I'm going to finish it.

The only game I've finished in the last year or so is Fallout: NV, and that was because I rushed my character through the ending after getting burnt out due to my character being overpowered. I used to finish games when I was younger however. Must be due to having played too many games or something.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Uhhhh dark souls I guess. I finished demon's and it was okay. Dark was just a ton more of the same, and I got bored halfway through.

I got through a lot of Dragon Age 2 but couldn't force myself through the end.

idk I'm pretty good about finishing RPGs and identifying ones I'm sure I won't be able to complete (so I can't answer with stuff like Oblivion and Fallout 3 because I've never played them.)

 

[SuicideBunny]

dao, because it quite literally hurt to play thanks to the god-awful writing and constant flip-flopping between immature and tasteless shit and trying to deal with mature themes in a tasteful manner that made no sense.

oblivion. doesn't need explaining.

fo3. same reason.

skyrim. third time's a charm.

 

[DalekFlay]

I got toward the end of Risen, where you enter the mountain, and was then distracted by some other game. Haven't gone back to it yet because I assume I will just start a new character and do a different path. That kind of thing happens to me quite often, "oh I'll just do a new character down the road."

I got bored of Fable somewhere toward the end, after the gladiator arena part. I recently played Fable 3 for a while and quit shortly after making it to the big city. Those were just "meh" games overall, no real desire to keep going.

 

[tindrli]

I think the question is about games started and never finished, not games you never even really began to play.

Shit, you got the point there bo.. here it goes again:



-Wasteland: too lazy to finish
-Bard's Tale II, III: gave this game a lot of time on amiga but i was too young to understand.
-Devil's Whiskey didnt have time to dedicate
-ToEE: it was so buggy when i installed it. i remember that i liked the damn thing but it crashed as hell backthen.
-Wizardy series: I only play 8-th and still playing it from time to time.
-NWN2: got bored later
-Witcher: bored
-Oblivion: i stop playing when i realized that the only things that im doing is installing damn mods
-Fallout 3 and NV: got bored
-Divinity 2 : Still have it installed
-DeusX HR: got bored
-Sacred 2: got bored

 

[Malpercio]

Let's see

Baldur's Gate 1: Boring. I love BG2 and i replayed it countless times, but no matter how much i try, i can't get into this. May i'll try it again one day with Trilogy or such.

Icewind Dale: My pc broke in the middle of a playtrough, probably will finish it... someday.

Oblivion: I don't need to explain this.

Fallout 1 & 2: Tried to get into them, but i hate the interface and the battle system.

 

[tindrli]

Fallout 1 & 2: Tried to get into them, but i hate the interface and the battle system.

hmmmm maybe you should try suicide

 

[Malpercio]

Fallout 1 & 2: Tried to get into them, but i hate the interface and the battle system.

hmmmm maybe you should try suicide

Oh come on now, there are people worse than me in this thread.

 

[circ]

Tons. I dunno, I never finished IWD 2 because it was plot twist after plot twist and turned into some kind of bad puzzle simulator when you got to some ice palace.

Never finished BG 2 either because right off the boat they want you to do a few hundred shitty quests to get cash. OH FUN. I just spent days in fucking BG doing quests to get to see the king or whatever. In a similar town. YAWN. Plus Dave Warner as a psycho elf? No thanks. And it's not enough fantasy too much steampunk.

Ultima 6. It's hard man, or was back before the internets. I remember somehow getting to the demon land but I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Did I ride a hotair balloon? I read up on the plot years later and it was pretty awesome.

 

[TripJack]

bioware games are popular right? besides bg the only one i managed to finish was kotor

if we are talking about codex popular games then masquerade, it was unsurprising that troika went under after that 'gem'

 

[CorpseZeb]

Oh come on now, there are people worse than me in this thread.

Come to think about it, what will be the worst possible "... was never able to finish" choice of game? My bet - Ultima's. Or Dungeon Master.

 

[Khor1255]

I really like a lot of things about Myth 2 but the liear storyline makes it an arcade style game for me. I play it until I run out of enough 'quarters' of interest.

The majority of computer games I ever played failed to keep me interested enough to carry on until the story's end. And that includes games I really like.

I mean, I really like story driven games but if they are too linear or my actions don't really have any impact on the story I lose interest after a while and they become a fun thing to do for an hour or so.

 

[Nattvardsvin]

Morrowind: Because shit game
Oblivion: Because shit game
Skyrim: Because shit game
Fallout 3: Because shit game
Neverwinter Nights: Because shit game
Arcanum: Because buggy shit
Mass Effect: Because boring shit
Dragon Age: Because shit

 

[Clockwork Knight]

While it's sort of relevant to the topic, is there a Codex Arcanum mods thread anywhere? A cursory search turned up nothing much.

The thread on SA mentions one that isnt on Terra Arcanum.

Krupp's All in One Hack rebalances the technological side of the game: http://www.mediafire.com/?1hqyt1a9vxw076s

From the readme:

YES IT'S STILL A BETA: Haven't had any bug reports though, knock on mother in laws head.

GOAL: My main goal was fix what I consider balance problems with firearms and gunsmithy in general. Quite a few of the schematics yield items whose performance doesn't match the monetary and CP spent to make them. Also I wanted to make firearms more usful in turnbased combat. I can't slow the monsters down but I can give you a chance to start shooting from farther away Last by reworking the rifles to make them actually behave more like a rifle should has the added bonus of making it possible to play a non-tech gunfighter and still have something better than the stock Clarington.

But like Stinger said, Drog's patch should be enough unless you really want these changes above.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

Morrowind, because Daggerfall had filled me with hope.

 

[Skittles]

@Clockwork Knight and Cloaked Figure:

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I am replaying with Drog's latest and last (?) unofficial patch installed. Gunplay was poor enough that I decided to go with a melee techie this time with exceptionally low beauty/charisma--I'll craft my own companions, damn it. I think I'll look into installing that guns rebalance CK linked for my next playthrough, assuming I get there.

 

[DraQ]

If the game is a loose collection of linear quests, it's still linear.
There is still no room to do stuff differently and the best thing you could count on in BG was usually a biowarean moral non-choice.

This is the most ridiculous thing you've said. If you can pick which quests/encounters you want to do and when you want to do them, even if those quests/encounters are narratively linear, how is that necessarily more linear than being able to pick and choose which order to do things in within a quest?

It doesn't matter that much, if the things you've done already affect things you have yet to do it's nonlinear.

Why are you thinking in terms of quests anyway? Why not just think in terms of over all content?

Because if we count simple detours, then pretty much all RPGs and most shooters are going to be strongly nonlinear.

The only nonlinearity that matters is if there is some significant mutual exclusivity of content (this or that choice) or if order matters.

In Baldur's Gate you can choose which encounters and side quests to even bother with

Why bother with less than them all if there are no limitations of any kinds? It's like 'choosing' which weapons to bother with in doom - utmost larpfaggotry.

To make your game nonlinear you need to introduce branching, introduce substantial freedom regarding the way player's goals are achieved, or way for events to affect each other.

Yes. And in Baldur's Gate it's all about combat. Do you want to sneak your thief up to an enemy spell-caster and back-stab them, or do you want to lead them into a couple of skull traps? That's freedom right there. How about buffing up a lone fighter with enough protection potions as to make them invulnerable to the mage? Consequences? Well that's a bunch of rare potions used up! Resource management is the ultimate C&C.

By that logic Diablo is a fucking nonlinear RPG.

Aand, to make things worse, BG doesn't even have proper exploration, because exploring needs no involvement on part of the player, you just wipe the blackness off, monotonously waving your cursor so it passes over every pixel of the map, to not miss any cleverly hidden item.

What is your obsession with the black shroud? You mentioned it in a previous thread. Scared of the dark?

No, but I live in northern poland and cleaning frost off my house's/car's windows in the winter satisfies my craving for "wiping stuff off so you can see" mechanics and I have no need for it in games.

And if being able to cut out a huge chunk of content using "meta-knowledge" is such a bad thing

It isn't, but it certainly doesn't count as normal gameplay and is therefore irrelevant to this discussion, just like being able to buff yourself to high heavans through alchemy, and finish the MQ in 14' doesn't mean that the length of Morrowind's MQ is anywhere around that.

Content like a quest chain? Made up of quests? Made up of quest steps? Made up of items, characters, spells and/or environmental interactions? What does it even mean for content to be non-linear when you can break content up into smaller chunks of content?

Fine:
If your content can be fully expressed as an unordered set of disjunct totally ordered (by possible succession) sets of its elements, then it's linear.

Formal enough?

Yeah. That was nice. Except that was the biggest "back-and-forth" quest in the entire fucking game.

I mean it had delayed consequence.

 

[mondblut]

Because if we count simple detours, then pretty much all RPGs and most shooters are going to be strongly nonlinear.

After computers became able to contain more than one dungeon per game and before white heterosexual male RPG designers saw final fantasy 7 and became white, heterosexual and male no longer, that was pretty much the case, yes.

Linearity is when you have no option where to go. When you can go anyfucking where, the game is totally unlinear. When you can only go to whatever location is designated as "next level" by some cunt, the game is totally linear. Most fall somewhere in between, with the ratio of rails vs free exploration defining where exactly. It's that simple. Linearity per se has no corellation to that superficial tackled on bullshit called "plot", a game can have exactly zero of it and still remain totally railroaded (the opposite isn't true, since no "plot" can survive when a player actually has a free reign on what to do, so any game with a pretense of telling some fairytale gets to employ an occasional handholding or two hundreds).

The only nonlinearity that matters is if there is some significant mutual exclusivity of content (this or that choice)

Storyfaggotry at its purest.

 

[MMXI]

Storyfaggotry at its purest.

A storyfaggot he may be, but he's also plain wrong.

If non-linearity is about having mutual exclusivity then RPGs are full of mutually exclusive choices. If you complete a quest one way, you can't complete it again another way without reloading. You might win a quest related battle using web and ranged weapons, but after you've finished it's too late to do it again using summons. Of course, you can always reload the game and try another way, but you can do exactly the same thing with mutually exclusive quests in their entirety. And consequences? Sure. A memorised summon spell versus a memorised web spell.

So it's quite obvious what DraQ wants. He wants "choices and consequences" at the highest level possible. If mutually exclusive choices within a quest cannot result in non-linearity, then mutually exclusive quests cannot result in non-linearity either. Why? Because mutually exclusive quest chains is non-linearity! No! Mutually exclusive factions is non-linearity! No! Only mutually exclusive MAIN FUCKING QUESTS is non-linearity! The only true non-linearity in gaming is choosing which game to buy from a shop.

 

[Suchy]

Skyrim - bored me do death
DA:O - bored me do death
Drakensang - bored me do death
Gothic 3 - bored me do death
Morrowind - bored me do death
M&M 6+ - bored me do death
TOEE - bored me do death
NWN 1, 2 - bored me do death
Icewind Dale 1, 2 - bored me do death

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

Undead posters.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The only true non-linearity in gaming is choosing which game to buy from a shop.

...but what if the store doesn't sell the game you wanted? You're being railroaded into buying the game they want you to buy.

 

[Daemongar]

Well, I'll just post this secret shame down here, where I can get it off my chest and no one will notice.

Ultima V: Yep, finsihed every Ultima, most of them 2+ times, but U5 fell through the cracks at a time where I was broke. I just never got around to it. I've been pretty deep into it, but I am kind of saving this game for a time when I'm really depressed. Also, I read in the Complete Ultima Book about LB and Warren Spector (?) having a speed contest to finish U5 the fastest. Ever since I read in that book that there was a magic axe near Iolo's hut.... (reading that last paragraph... my God, I've wasted my life...)

Wizardry 7: I love this game, but never finished it. Just get to about level 14 and... then I start screwing around with classes and doom my party. Yes, I suck.

Buck Rodgers: Countdown to Doomsday: My system crashed every time I started flying the spaceship. I really liked that game as well.

 

[Serious_Business]

I actually didn't finish U7 Sepent Isle. I don't even know how I got through U7. I was on an Ultima romp at some point, played 4-5-6-7, then I burned out.

When I think about it, these games were pretty shit. Collecting nonsense and putting the cube in the cube in the cube in the cube, like Spoony said. I liked the setting and such but I really wouldn't play that shit again, way too tedious. Pixel hunting at its worst. I much prefer playing Skyrim instead

WHAT UP RPG CODEX
Fuck man I'm kinda proud of this one

 

[betamin]

Ultima 7
Divine Divinity (the fucking ending...)
Wizardry 8 (I like combat but jesus that's a grind if I ever saw one)
ADOM (Got tired of alt tabbing for spoilers)
I barely finished Arcanum and NWN (the latter was really hard, too much boring)