Games Abandoned thread

[Fardaza]

Seems like good advice.

I've been staring at the No Man's Sky link in Steam. I only played it for about 6 hours when it first came out. I really want to play it now, but I just don't have the patience to learn the weird control scheme again.

Maybe it will just sit there some more as "something I have access to".

[Blackhawk]

FWIW, the game bears no resemblance to the mess that first came out. It's become the poster child for fixing a bad release.

[Isgrimnur]

Going back through my installed games, as space is becoming a premium.

System Protocol One is a sysadmin-themed tower defense game. As I have no love for the genre, it's an easy pitch into the abyss.

[Isgrimnur]

Wasteland Angel going on the pile. I'd played it some before. Steam has some achievements I gathered back in 2012. But frenetic twin-stick shooter just isn't a desktop game for me. Perhaps back in the quarter-slurper days, but those days are long gone.

[Smoove_B]

Saddens me to add Battlefield 4 to the pile. Why? No FoV adjustment - it's set to 50 by default. What's fun is that it lets you adjust it to 105 (which would be quite helpful), except that only applies to multiplayer games, for reasons.

Tried playing a few hours this evening, but nausea wins - every time. Now gimme those cards.

[Isgrimnur]

Colt Canyon

Roguelike shooter with twitch shooting and low resources. Better than 12 is better than 6, but not enough to keep my attention.

[Isgrimnur]

Baba is You

[Jaymann]

Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous. Game stopping bug, and I was so far along that I didn't care any more.

[Blackhawk]

Wasteland 2: Director's Cut.

This was my second attempt, and both time I made to right about the middle of the game before burning out. Last time it was right after I made it to California, this time it is right before. I don't know why, but this game just doesn't have what it takes to make me keep wanting to play for as long as it is.

[Carpet_pissr]

Wasteland 2: Director's Cut.

This was my second attempt, and both time I made to right about the middle of the game before burning out. Last time it was right after I made it to California, this time it is right before. I don't know why, but this game just doesn't have what it takes to make me keep wanting to play for as long as it is.

Same for me, and I don’t think I got as far as you did.

Weird thing is…I actually REALLY like the game, borderline love. I suspect it’s just that these longer games are incongruous with my age and responsibilities.

I came very close to finishing Black Mesa recently (1 hour left at most I think), which clocks in well below 30 hours, and it took me forever, and a ton of way too late night gaming sessions which I (now) hate doing. Feels like I spent 70+ hours in that game. (and not because it’s bad or I didn’t like it).

I think Grifman nailed it for me, upthread: I just don’t have the time these days to play through epics like I did when games like Baldur’s Gate came out.

[infinitelurker]

Wasteland 2: Director's Cut.

This was my second attempt [snip]

Same for me, and I don’t think I got as far as you did. [snip...]

Thirded, I was at least halfway through Wasteland 2 before I shelved it. Then the Director's Cut came out and I read that the saves didn't transfer over. I haven't been able to get myself to start over.

However, I did purchase Wasteland 3 on it's release and enthusiastically finished it. The game and story felt a tighter, and the soundtrack is phenomenal. Give it a try if you haven't!

[Carpet_pissr]

Wasteland 2: Director's Cut.

This was my second attempt [snip]

Same for me, and I don’t think I got as far as you did. [snip...]

Thirded, I was at least halfway through Wasteland 2 before I shelved it. Then the Director's Cut came out and I read that the saves didn't transfer over. I haven't been able to get myself to start over.

However, I did purchase Wasteland 3 on it's release and enthusiastically finished it. The game and story felt a tighter, and the soundtrack is phenomenal. Give it a try if you haven't!

Nay, I MUST finish 2 first! Before I started 2 the last time, I actually went back and tried to play the first one. Oof! Now I loved those games back in the day (and the original Bard's Tale was definitely one of my "gateway" titles into the complete gaming monster that I would later become, but....oof. I actually did put quite a few hours into the remade version of Bard's Tale, and was running 95% on nostalgia fumes, and nothing else, let me tell ya. Mangar the Dark lives another day...

[infinitelurker]

Much like you, the original Bard’s Tale was my gateway, not only into gaming but I also give it some credit for a push towards my career as a software developer. I played that game so much, that I eventually got into playing with a hex editor on my characters disk. I had no idea what any of it meant, but the free time and patience of a young teen in the 80s allowed for trial and error to the point of getting fully maxed out characters with the best gear. That gave me enough of a peak behind the curtains that I knew I wanted to learn more.

[Blackhawk]

I give up. Dead Island is officially abandoned.

The game is fun, but the port is so utterly terrible that I am having a terrible time actually playing it. It's a game where you're encouraged to make headshots (I mean, zombies), but you aren't allowed to aim at the head. There is a non-optional auto-aim that locks on to the torso. The best you can do is wait for the lock-on, then move your mouse up before you throw, but once the game is locked on, you lose your crosshair. That means you're aiming blind.

And I'm playing Logan, the thrower. He specializes in throwing knives and knife-like accessories. When you throw a weapon, it auto-equips the next weapon for you. The problem is that the game doesn't give them to you in equipped order (If you throw slot 1, it doesn't switch to slot 2 next.) Instead, it uses some screwy-ass logic that, if your quick bar isn't full, switches to your strongest weapon. And since you're throwing your weapons, your bar is almost never full. That means that if (as is the case with me), your second or third strongest weapon is your melee weapon you keep in reserve for when you run out of knives, you will throw one knife, then switch to your melee weapon. Every time. That means that you have to fire once, then manually open the wheel to switch weapons, then fire once, then switch, then fire once, etc. If you're faced with a bunch of zombies, you invariably end up throwing your backup melee weapon at them, leaving you helpless.

And when you're done, you have to scour the entire battlefield to find your weapons, one by one, before you can continue.

For such a fun game, these godawful design choices have absolutely ruined the fun for me.

[Blackhawk]

*sigh*

Me again.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners for VR.

Man, I really wanted to play this game, and I kept hearing stellar reviews. I'm a Walking Dead fan (comics and shows, sorry, Hep. ), so I was looking forward to finally playing it. There are a few caveats there, though, and a couple of them absolutely make the game unplayable for me.

It's incredibly atmospheric, scary, dark, and they did a great job with the theme. I didn't love that weapons break after every five or six uses, but I can understand the gameplay reasons - it made avoiding the walkers vs fighting them a meaningful decision, and turned what would have played like a zombie kill-fest into a tense semi-stealth game. I liked the scavenging, the crafting. There were a few problems that were annoying, but not terrible.

VR is a fast-evolving tech, and Saints & Sinners is out of date enough that it doesn't know how to handle more modern hardware - specifically, Quest 2 controllers. It insists that you use Vive controllers to even access the menu, which is a problem given that the Quest 2 isn't a Vive. Just accessing the game requires a headache-inducing amount of troubleshooting that involves going into Steam and downloading a custom controller profile from a third party. The developer never bothered to fix this, despite the fact that the Quest 2 came out just nine months after it. But that was fixable. Still, the controls were sluggish and poor.

But what really kills it for me are two terrible, intentional design choices:

1. As I mentioned, it's a semi-stealth game. What I didn't know until halfway through the first mission is that it has a built-in time limit to every mission. When you pass that time limit, bells ring and the streets fill with walkers. If you haven't gotten back to your boat before then, you're dead. That's such a weird thing to throw in there in a game that's supposed to be about sneaking and exploration, and just absolutely takes the joy out of the gameplay.

2. There is no way to save, not even after mission objectives, until you've finished an entire zone and left the area to go back and 'rest' and your camp.

So we have a scavenging/stealth game with a short time limit and no way to save. Spend too long, you're dead. Rush, you're dead. Take the time to scavenge and you can get stronger - but you're probably dead from taking too long. I hate having to replay content in a narrative-based game. It's like reading the same chapter in a book, or watching the same episode of a show over and over - it completely kills the flow. And again, I'm an adult. I have things I have to do. I can't always just sit and play for extended periods of time without being able to stop to take care of other things. No save = unplayable for me and a lot of the rest of the adult population with real-life responsibilities.

[hepcat]

. I'm a Walking Dead fan (comics and shows, sorry, Hep.

I mean, if I were the only one complaining the show jumped the shark a while back, I might understand why you singled me out there.

[Blackhawk]

. I'm a Walking Dead fan (comics and shows, sorry, Hep.

I mean, if I were the only one complaining the show jumped the shark a while back, I might understand why you singled me out there.

No, I singled you out because we have been butting heads over shows for years. It's a singling-out of endearment.

[hepcat]

Ah, okay

[Isgrimnur]

I decided to see what the Ninja Gaiden series was all about and downloaded Σ from GamePass.

Yeah, the consolitis is strong with this one, limited save points, having to repeat fights, etc. And my days of wanting frenetic fighting action are long past.

[disarm]

Ninja Gaiden is definitely a tough game, but I would recommend not giving up too quickly. The first level and first boss are a total pain in the ass because you don't have much chance to learn, but once the gameplay clicks, it's really awesome. The creativity and visuals in later levels are totally over the top in a great way...one of my favorite games of that generation.

[DarkOverLord]

Half Life 2 is for me. Really cool but abandoned game

[YellowKing]

I quit Persona 5 for probably the 3rd time.

I know it gets rave reviews, and I did get further this time than I ever have before (beat the first castle), but I find the in-between stuff where you're having to go to school and build friend relationships mind-numbingly boring. I just couldn't take it anymore.

I started Tales of Arise a couple of days ago, and I'm semi-enjoying it. I just haven't wrapped my head around the combat yet. If it doesn't click with me soon, it may be another one to add to this thread.

[Blackhawk]

Aven Colony

This one wasn't horrible. I actually had some fun with it. It's a light sci-fi themed city builder. I only played the campaign, and got probably half of the way through before I burned out, though.

A colony ship has arrived over it's destination planet, and you're given governorship over the colony below. As time passes (IE - you finish missions), you are given new assignments to make colonies elsewhere on the planet thrive. There's a story, and there are characters. Most remain on the ship in orbit. They pop up from time to time in communications, and it's a fun way to add some context, although it doesn't try to be too heavy or deep.

It's the usual city builder curve. You place buildings and tunnels (roads - there's no oxygen here), address pollution and crime, increase population, provide for food and water, provide housing, provide jobs, provide power, keep the air clean, address health and morale, setting policies from benign (free medicine) to malign (martial law - but sadly no nerve stapling) keeping them all in balance. Too many jobs without enough people and everything runs slow. Too many people and not enough jobs and people get unhappy. Expand too fast and you will run out of power because your population will be spread to thin to keep the plants running. Expand too slow and your population will fill up without having placed the infrastructure to support them. Spread too far and the people get unhappy with the commute, plus tunnels use power. But stay too closely packed and you will run out of resources. There's a good balancing act here.

The aesthetic is great - it's ta clean sci-fi look (think Star Trek/Mass Effect rather than the grimy/rusty sci-fi that's more popular.) It's the sci-fi look that I love, with lots of smooth lines, white and gray panels, and glass.

The campaign mixes up the missions by providing different challenges. First, build a colony and place a specified advance building. Next time, build a colony in an inhospitable location with nowhere to grow food nearby (you'll have to use trade until you can expand far enough for farms.) Next time, build a colony so that you can expand to a certain point across the map to have a drone pick up an item.

There was also an 'overworld' map. It allowed you to send out expeditions to explore, perform tasks (rescue, scan, etc.), and you could set up external settlements that could, in turn, support the main colony (providing power, mining minerals, etc.)

There are some threats - toxic spores that attack your colony from time to time. There are 'shard storms' that are basically hardcore hailstorms. There are plague clouds that will go straight for your air filtration systems. There are supposedly rebel factions later, but I didn't see them. There are also giant worms, but they don't seem to do much - they look dramatic, but they pop up once or twice in non-buildable areas and just wiggle there for a few seconds before disappearing.

I really enjoyed it, but I eventually burned out due to a few flaws:

~The interface is functional, but not great. You can't, for instance, see a list of your buildings with the kind of statistics you need, like what each is assigned to and current status, and you can't easily jump to a certain building (I eventually figured out a way, but it wasn't obvious or intuitive.) The 'fade out' overlay when placing buildings obscures things a little too much - you can't always see what's a tunnel (IE - road) and what's not. And there isn't a convenient management pane that lets you control things without clicking each building individually. It's not a hugely deep city builder, so the interface gets the job done, but it makes it more of a hassle than it needs to be.

~The threats, as far as I saw them, weren't really threats. A turret here and there and they never got far enough to hit anything. I never once felt threatened by any of them. Dealing with the threats of this alien planet was far easier than dealing with, say, minor pollution.

~The overworld map/expeditions felt horribly unfinished. There were 'commendations' you earned by performing tasks, but no real way to use them. If you got any rewards for the tasks (resources, etc), I never saw them. There were upgrades for the expedition ship, but except for the sensor range and thrusters, they didn't really seem to do anything.

~The challenges of the individual missions weren't great. Most of them were so simple that you really didn't get to engage with the core gameplay at all. At the halfway point in the campaign, I shouldn't have a mission that is, essentially, "build a long road." I always finished the missions long before the city building got to the interesting parts. I wanted to plan my layouts, plan for pollution and commutes, but... it just wasn't needed. I would start setting up the layout, and I'd be done long before I filled in half of the space.

~The biggest problem, though, was that balancing the colony wasn't a lot of fun. It was minor tweak after minor tweak. Complaining about pollution: Add a filter. Complaining about crime: Add a police drone tower. There weren't really a lot of meaningful decisions, and it quickly became plate-spinning, just cycling through a bunch of minor adjustments over and over.

Again, I had fun, but I just got burned out by the minor issues.

[baelthazar]

I quit Persona 5 for probably the 3rd time.

I know it gets rave reviews, and I did get further this time than I ever have before (beat the first castle), but I find the in-between stuff where you're having to go to school and build friend relationships mind-numbingly boring. I just couldn't take it anymore.

I started Tales of Arise a couple of days ago, and I'm semi-enjoying it. I just haven't wrapped my head around the combat yet. If it doesn't click with me soon, it may be another one to add to this thread.

If you change "first castle" to "third castle" this entire post is also me.

[Isgrimnur]

Worms Crazy Golf is going on the cart. I put 5.5 hours into it, and I just can't muster up the desire to 1) play the hole for score, and then 2) play for all the score and coin collectibles.

[Isgrimnur]

Defcon has been thrown on the pile.

Perhaps with a group of people on voice chat, it might be entertaining, but that's not likely to be in the cards with a 16yo game.

[TheMix]

Does a game count as "abandoned" if you intentionally quit and uninstall within the first hour because you hate it? I think of abandoned as those games that I was playing and then kind of forgot about.

I tried Tomb Raider (2013). First TR game ever. Hated it. Besides not actually getting to play much due to all the cut scenes/QTEs, having to repeat them over and over in order to memorize the correct buttons to hit and making sure to hit them at the right time.... grrrrrr....

I'm trying the more recent one. So far it's definitely better/less annoying.

[Archinerd]

Defcon has been thrown on the pile.

Perhaps with a group of people on voice chat, it might be entertaining, but that's not likely to be in the cards with a 16yo game.

I like that game but you really do need 4 friends to play.

[Isgrimnur]

Yeah, the gameplay isn’t deep enough for bot solo.

[Isgrimnur]

Geneshift: Battle Royale Turbo

Not enough there to make me want to devote time to it. I put 90 minutes into it.

[Isgrimnur]

1953 - KGB Unleashed

Puzzle game. I put a couple hours into it, and it was going to be obvious that I wasn't going to get through it without a walkthrough, as it involves plenty of backtracking. Story isn't engaging enough for me to want to continue.

[Isgrimnur]

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010)

Hitpoint bars, unskippable cutscenes, and damage-penalty time trials aren't exactly making this fun. Plus the constant attempts of Autolog attempting to log in.

[Isgrimnur]

10 Second Ninja X is going on the pile. I have no interest in time-restricted jumping puzzles.

[Kasey Chang]

I replayed NFS: The Run again. It's different, but at least it proves EA was actually TRYING something instead of putting out re-treads back around 2011. Had to firewall the app else it'd softlock trying to access the shut-down Autolog servers. Which means a lot of the extra car unlocks are no longer possible. The main story can be finished in 4-6 hours. They try to extend it with 10 different "challenge series" (5 races) at each of the 10 "stages" across the US, but again, a lot of the cars had to be unlocked, which are no longer possible, which is kinda lame. And the time limits are impossible, at least for me. You can be rated platinum, gold, silver, or bronze. Best I can do is silver and bronze, and that was the first 5 challenge races (1st series). Without crashing, and I was already using the fastest cars. MAYBE there's some shortcuts, maybe I need a different class of car... whatever. Enough of this game.

[kirantes]

Colt Canyon

Roguelike shooter with twitch shooting and low resources. Better than 12 is better than 6, but not enough to keep my attention.

Spent all day on this game, it's kinda good.