Abandoned games thread 2023

[Gabe]

I couldn't see a new thread for this and, as a catch-all that did see a bit of traffic last year I figure why not have it again. And also because I have something I've abandoned this evening, which was High on Life on the Series S. I did try - I played the first three bounties - but every aspect of it ground me down.

 

Firstly, I think it's one of the ugliest games I've played in years (and I've been playing a lot of retro stuff!) I hated the art direction, all of it. The guns in particular looked hideous. I also found it terminally unfunny. Now my only exposure to Rick & Morty was about 5 minutes I saw of an episode the other night whilst flicking through the channels (it was about a war against giant sperm?) It seemed okay and I chuckled a couple of times, but the humour in this fell completely flat, and given that was meant to be one of the main draws, it wasn't a good sign.

 

The actual gameplay itself was very basic and with the only reason to explore being the living box things, the thought of hunting around the ugly environments became an easy 'nope' to skip. That only left the story, which lost me within the first couple of minutes. I don't know why - and this is totally on me - but the almost low-res and childish-looking enemies immediately turned me off of it.

 

It was an incredibly dour and regretful experience, but whereas in previous years I may well have forced myself through it in a number of smaller chunks, this was so easy to dislike that calling it a day was a no-brainer.

[BadgerFarmer]

Ghostwire Tokyo

 

I was enjoying it for the first few hours. It's an intriguing scenario and a great setting to poke around in. The combat is decent too. But other than that, there's not much to do except a lot of open-world busywork. The combat doesn't evolve, and missions send you criss-crossing over the same areas with little of consequence occurring along the way. It's boring, basically.

[partious]

I`m reluctant to post here because you never know when you`ll come back to something (I finally dragged myself past the finish line in GTA5 a couple of weeks ago, etc). Also I know this is a popular series/game around here, so forgive me. But anyway, for now.

 

Yakuza: Like A Dragon

 

Like a lot of abandoned playthroughs of highly regarded games, I really have nobody but myself to blame. I don`t have a good track record with JRPGs, but I found the setting etc of this one appealing.

I`m a little over 20 hours into this and I`m starting to think I might be better served by watching the rest of the cutscenes etc on youtube than grinding through the rest of the game. I was enjoying the game at first but if I`m not currently at the "that`s enough of that" stage, I`m getting there, and howlongtobeat.com leads me to believe that at best I have 30 hours left just to finish the main story (and probably more since HLTB estimates are usually on the low side....).

My own fault really for thinking a Yakuza skinned JRPG might not suffer from the same issues as other JRPGs, or more precisely that the Yakuza story and setting would offset them enough that I wouldn`t run out of steam halfway through.
There`s an interesting story told through cutscenes and then a "game" of stat management and busywork scaffolded around those cutscenes.  

 

Mindlessly grinding to level up (I know there's plenty of grinding coming in the second half having watched a couple of reviews last night to hear opinions as my own interest starts waning) might not even feel particularly disagreeable after a day at work, but is that type of experience really what I want from games, from my free time, from a pastime, etc?

Chapter 6 in particular was some of the most tedious gameplay I've experienced in quite a while.

 

I have PSPlus Extra, I have Game Pass. I have Steam, Epic, Prime Gaming, etc etc etc.

There are far too many games I`m actually excited about playing to stay working my way through what is essentially a 50 hour long chore list of tedium with good cutscenes.

 

Dear JRPG developers, put difficulty settings in your games. I`d happily turn down the difficulty to easy and walk through the rest of the story if that option existed, in fact I`d find that greatly preferable to watching it on youtube. I like everything about this game aside from the gameplay. I`m as invested in the story/characters/setting etc as I was at the start, I just can`t stomach the drudgery of repetitive random battles to make a bunch of arbitrary numbers go up so that the characters (not the player) gain skill and can progress the story.

 

Also, if an "autopilot" button for your game`s combat seems like a good idea, and the majority of your game`s gameplay involves combat, you`ve probably messed up somewhere.

 

It was a toss up for me between playing this and Judgment and I went with this, a mistake in hindsight. I think I should give up on this while I still have the stomach to try Judgment and before I burn out on the whole series. I completed Ishin back at the PS4 launch and I really enjoyed it, but I guess this turn based jrpg style isn't for me.

[Jamie John]

@partious

 

I've had my eye on LaD for a while, but your post has convinced me not to bother with it - I just can't be done anymore with putting that much time into a game when the gameplay isn't there to see you through, no matter how good the story or endearing the characters.

 

I'll be interested to hear how you get on with Judgement as that always seemed a little less sprawling than the other Yakuza games. I played an enjoyed Zero, but even that felt like it went on for too long.

[partious]

32 minutes ago, Jamie John said:

@partious

 

I've had my eye on LaD for a while, but your post has convinced me not to bother with it - I just can't be done anymore with putting that much time into a game when the gameplay isn't there to see you through, no matter how good the story or endearing the characters.

 

I'll be interested to hear how you get on with Judgement as that always seemed a little less sprawling than the other Yakuza games. I played an enjoyed Zero, but even that felt like it went on for too long.

 

 

I'm sure there are plenty of people on the forum who would pick apart my post and refute the idea that Like a Dragon is a tedious experience, so it probably largely depends on your level of tolerance for jrpg systems. I fear mine is quite low even when I go into a game with the best of intentions (like I did here).

I beat FF7 Remake recently so that might have given me some false confidence, but that isn't even turn based and also lets you lower the difficulty if you've had your fill .

 

I should have gone with my gut and chosen Judgment based on the howlongtobeat times alone. I find 25 hours to be doable in almost all cases, 30+ to usually end up testing my patience and I'm not sure I've ever beaten a 50+ hour story type game, but I've certainly bounced off plenty. I completed Ishin on ps4 and didn't think it was boring/tedious so I suspect I'll get on with Judgment. I'm going to put a couple of non-yakuza games between now and when I start it though.

[Unofficial Who]

Telling L!es

 

 

I loved Sam Barlow's text adventure game Aisle and was all in on Her Story (until I ended up breaking the back of the game by working out how the indexing system worked which gave me the keys to the kingdom so to speak.) Despite having access to this on two subscription services I'd put off playing this until now before the central premise of the game, viewing one sided pre-recorded conversations looked really annoying. But I had some spare time yesterday and...it was even more annoying to me than I had thought possible. I instantly didn't gel with the game or the characters. In fact the idea of spending several hours staring at these four filled me with so much existential dread I played the solitaire game instead before uninstalling.

 

I'm sure it's a brilliant game, just not for me. Please tell me Immortality isn't all one sided conversations!

[Strafe]

Marvel Snap. Too much appallingly written social sim and the actual battles aren’t good enough to carry it. Takes ages of busy work to get new abilities and Tony Stark is fucking irritating. So much so that I’m glad he’s dead in the films and I quite liked him in those.

[Unofficial Who]

Star Wars Demolition (PS1)

 

I love that Sony are bringing old games to their service but this....what is this? Star Wars crossed with Twisted Metal makes for a very messy game. Some things are best kept in the past.

 

[thesnwmn]

7 minutes ago, Unofficial Who said:

Star Wars Demolition (PS1)

 

I love that Sony are bringing old games to their service but this....what is this? Star Wars crossed with Twisted Metal makes for a very messy game. Some things are best kept in the past.

 

 

I'd argue nothing* is better left in the past. Yes it's probably a sample and move on. See what games were at different times.

 

Sony shouldn't sing and dance about adding these things too loudly (which I suspect they didn't). But the leaving games on old platforms that cannot be accessed, particularly those with an online component that will rot, is a problem for the industry.

 

* Gaming related and that isn't flat our intentionally offensive (racist, anti-something)

[Unofficial Who]

Just now, thesnwmn said:

 

I'd argue nothing* is better left in the past. Yes it's probably a sample and move on. See what games were at different times.

 

Sony shouldn't sing and dance about adding these things too loudly (which I suspect they didn't). But the leaving games on old platforms that cannot be accessed, particularly those with an online component that will rot, is a problem for the industry.

 

* Gaming related and that isn't flat our intentionally offensive (racist, anti-something)

 

I know. I was being tongue in check. And we learn as much from our misses as we do our hits. (I've discovered from playing a lot of really average to bad C64 games over the past two years that the people involved ended up creating or heading up some of the best games out there now.)

 

 

[ChewMagma]

On 19/01/2023 at 08:33, Jamie John said:

@partious

 

I've had my eye on LaD for a while, but your post has convinced me not to bother with it - I just can't be done anymore with putting that much time into a game when the gameplay isn't there to see you through, no matter how good the story or endearing the characters.

 

I'll be interested to hear how you get on with Judgement as that always seemed a little less sprawling than the other Yakuza games. I played an enjoyed Zero, but even that felt like it went on for too long.

 

I've been playing LaD on and off for about 18 months. I am getting towards the end now and I have really enjoyed it for the most part but it does that thing that a lot of JRPGs do in that you can breeze through most of it without really engaging with the systems but then periodically there will be one or two difficulty spike bosses where you really DO need to engage with the systems and you are like "goddamn it, I'm roadblocked."

 

Compounded by the fact that I believe it does that thing Japanese devs seem to love which is not letting you drop the difficulty after you have started the playthrough.

 

I love JRPGs but I think I am just going to start dropping the difficulty from the get go, otherwise I am never going to get through my backlog. I am getting too old lol.

[partious]

It's worse than that. Like A Dragon has no difficulty settings either before you start or during the playthrough (I think there's a hard mode after you complete the game).

[ChewMagma]

Ah that would explain it.

[df0]

Witcher 3 I think. Recently finished my third play trough, twice on PS4 once the PS5 remaster. After having a grand time with the main story I can not muster the enthusiasm to play through both excellent DLC chapters again.

[Unofficial Who]

Thinking about Star Wars Demolition (PS1) again it's a bit unfair judging the look of the game. I was playing it on a screen far larger than anything commercially available on its release and it's lost the advantage of CRT softness.

[Jamie John]

Does Ghost of Tsushima very suddenly and very dramatically get much better? I've pushed through about two hours of it, so obviously I've barely scratched the surface, but it just feels very bland so far. And I don't even think it's that good looking, either. The lighting and colours are nice, admittedly, but close up it's a bit...plain and not very detailed. I supposed it's a 3 year-old game now (although I'm playing the PS5 Director's Cut), but I've been spoiled with Forbidden West and God of War.

[Strafe]

2 minutes ago, Jamie John said:

Does Ghost of Tsushima very suddenly and very dramatically get much better? I've pushed through about two hours of it, so obviously I've barely scratched the surface, but it just feels very bland so far. And I don't even think it's that good looking, either. The lighting and colours are nice, admittedly, but close up it's a bit...plain and not very detailed. I supposed it's a 3 year-old game now (although I'm playing the PS5 Director's Cut), but I've been spoiled with Forbidden West and God of War.

The combat gets a bit deeper as you go but I would say that once you’re out in the open world proper and not having fun you’re not likely to see anything dramatically new to sway you of your current opinion. I clocked it because I mostly enjoyed the combat and, at the time at least, it looked incredible (I mean, I guess it still does but it doesn’t impress as much now as it did then).

 

It really fails by mainly bland quest design, some insta-fail stealth sections (a pet hate) and Ubisoft approach to upgrade and world design. The plot is mostly bobbins too, thanks to the comic book style motivations of the uncle.

[Jamie John]

Just now, Strafe said:

The combat gets a bit deeper as you go but I would say that once you’re out in the open world proper and not having fun you’re not likely to see anything dramatically new to sway you of your current opinion. I clocked it because I mostly enjoyed the combat and, at the time at least, it looked incredible (I mean, I guess it still does but it doesn’t impress as much now as it did then).

 

It really fails by mainly bland quest design, some insta-fail stealth sections (a pet hate) and Ubisoft approach to upgrade and world design. The plot is mostly bobbins too, thanks to the comic book style motivations of the uncle.

 

Yeah - I played those two hours last weekend and haven't touched it since, which is pretty telling, I think. The dedicated thread is full of damnations through faint praise, too.

 

And, more generally, I also think I'm pretty fatigued with the whole Shogun-era Japanese setting at this point. It feels as if, in a relatively short space of time, we've had Sekiro (which was brilliant), this, the Nioh games and their remasters, and then stuff like Monster Hunter Rise, which, while obviously fictional, is very Feudal Japan-flavoured. Then there's that new Yakuza Isshin game coming out, as well as Wo Long (and I'm aware this is set in ancient China, not Japan, but it's aesthetically and tonally very similar, at least from the screenshots). That probably sounds quite reductive, and there are no doubt some Japanese people fed up of fantasy games set in different versions of medieval Europe, but, I dunno, I just feel like I'm done with katanas and cherry blossoms and pagodas for the time being.

 

Yes, I think I'll bin this off. It's on PS Plus if I ever change my mind.

[kiroquai]

Stopped playing Callisto Protocol in December, and not gone back. Myself and the wife picked it as our Christmas game but it just felt incredibly dull. Chances are had I pushed on it’d have gotten better, but the five-or-so hours I experienced felt incredibly one-note. A little bit of environmental variety wouldn’t have gone amiss, and the enemies just weren’t scary at all.

[Majora]

6 minutes ago, kiroquai said:

Stopped playing Callisto Protocol in December, and not gone back. Myself and the wife picked it as our Christmas game but it just felt incredibly dull. Chances are had I pushed on it’d have gotten better, but the five-or-so hours I experienced felt incredibly one-note. A little bit of environmental variety wouldn’t have gone amiss, and the enemies just weren’t scary at all.

 

I haven't played it but apparently it's only 6-8 hours long so I doubt it would have gotten much better as you were pretty near the end!

[Jamie John]

I've given up with XCOM 2 after about 5 hours.

 

This was really disappointing. I loved Enemy Within on the 360 back in the day and thought this would be more of the same, but there's just too much faffing about between missions, far more than what I can remember from the first game; I thought there would be a much bigger focus on the turn-based combat. Of the time that I've played, I've only actually completed four missions, and they felt like they were over very quickly. The rest of that time has been spent in the menus, allocating engineers or setting up network relays or building resistance networks, or all kinds of other stuff that essentially involves clicking on different icons on the screen and waiting for timers to run out to tell you that different icons are now ready to click on.

 

I just want to flank aliens and inexplicably miss them from point-blank range, thanks. Is there a mode that just lets you do that?

[teddymeow]

On 13/01/2023 at 07:41, BadgerFarmer said:

Ghostwire Tokyo

 

I was enjoying it for the first few hours. It's an intriguing scenario and a great setting to poke around in. The combat is decent too. But other than that, there's not much to do except a lot of open-world busywork. The combat doesn't evolve, and missions send you criss-crossing over the same areas with little of consequence occurring along the way. It's boring, basically.

 

I think this sums up my feelings too. The setting and atmosphere are incredible but it is just a big, unimaginative zigzag across the map.

[Unofficial Who]

Eastward.

 

 

This game is stunning to look at. Some say it harkens back to the SNES era but it really doesn't. This feels like the pixel art we got in a brief window in the 32 bit era before everything moved to polygons. Some scenes literally made my jaw drop. But there were issues all the way through. It is incredibly slow, it feels like the writing really needed an editor. There are long stretches where you're moving from one conversation to the next. But that pixel art and the characterisation of Sam and John bought me back. They're an odd couple, Sam the wide eyed innocent, full of energy and John the silent protagonist. Slow and old.

 

I never connected with the combat. And the timed sections. There was an early section where you have to outrun the miasma that almost stopped me stone dead given the absolute small margin for error.

 

I am 24 hours into the game, real time. I'm literally on the last tower. But there are these timed sections that involve solving puzzles and doing certain actions with no margin for error. And if you don't do it within the timeframe maddingly you don't die, it just rewinds the entire scene resetting you to the start of the screen. And I've reached a point, a skill gate that I just can't pass. It's frustrating, it's very old school and there's no options to ease it up so that it's merely hard for my skill level and not impossible. For the good of my health my journey ends here.

[df0]

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.

 

After spending 45 minutes in character creation trying to make sense of it all I gave up during the tutorial battle, it’s just too much for me. Feels like homework.

[Jamie John]

After nearly 30 hours but only 35% completion (apparently), I think I'm done with my replay of Red Dead Redemption 2. I've been playing it off and on for the last month, but I put it down entirely when Metroid Prime Remastered came out, and now I'm struggling to go back to it.

 

It looks beautiful running in 4K with all the bells and whistles, as you would expect, but as immersive and impressive and detailed as the world is, it's not enough to hide the fact that the fundamental gameplay on offer here is, really, just a wee bit dull. Every mission unfolds in the same way: you go to objective markers, press button prompts and then take part in an arbitrary end-of-mission shooting gallery section, sometimes on horseback, sometimes not, but which centres around you just clicking in the right stick to activate deadeye mode and then popping off headshots until the red blips on your radar stop appearing. Occasionally, you'll pause mid-shootout to chew some tobacco and magically refill your deadeye meter so that you can just carry on doing the same old thing, but that's about it. I just don't find it very exciting.

 

And there's just so little incentive to explore the world. Yes, I could complete the debt collections, fishing mini-games, animal hunts, house raids, horse thefts, bounty hunts, train robberies and horse races, but what's the point when I've done each one once already as part of an obligatory mission? What do I get out of it except for money I don't need or clothes I won't wear? Because I'm certainly not getting a rich and rewarding gameplay experience, that's for sure.

 

When I first finished this game back on the PS4 in 2018, I remember thinking at the time that it all felt like such a waste, and it's a feeling that I can't shake playing it again now. It's an incredibly polished, nuanced and interactive world that Rockstar have created, but it's just not much of a game.

[Sane]

Tales of Arise. I'm not far in, maybe 10 hours or so. It's a pretty good game, it looks great, much much nicer than previous entries, the combat is pretty standard Tales stuff but works well, it has all the systems you'd expect, voice acting is fine (I only heard the Japanese). It just doesn't have anything interesting. I can already safely predict how the next 50 hours or so will play out and for me that's the worst feeling with this type of game.

[bradigor]

God of War 2018 

 

I've spoken briefly about this in the Games you completed thread. However I'll go into a little more detail here. 

 

First off, God of War is a fantastic game and it does have some good accessibility options. However when compared to what is on offer in Spider-Man and Miles Morales it is very hard to then get into this. 

 

I play 95% of the time on the Steam Deck, because it is easier on my sight to have a screen up close whilst laying down. It gives me the best opportunity of seeing something well enough. The Accessibility in Spider-Man works so well because of the way they all fit together. Auto completing QTE for example. But it's the contrast options that are best. I set the city to a low contrast grey type effect with Spidey himself being a blue silhouette and enemies/important NPCs yellow and green silhouettes. 

 

It works wonders and means I can play the game as well as I remember when I had vision. There are other bits of accessibility I use that I won't list right now and there are things that can be improved still. 

 

Anyway back to God of War. It lacks the contrast stuff I mentioned above which means I will often get lost, caught out by enemies I can't see, etc. It can take many multiple attempts to get through some of the simplest areas of the game. 

 

Now I was willing to forgive that and persevere, however after a few hours the game decided it didn't want to play nice and would keep crashing. That mixed with some long load times meant I just couldn't put up with it any longer. 

 

I hope that Sony carry across the more recent accessibility options for everything else they port, because as much as I enjoy bashing the big corps. Sony's efforts with accessibility have been exemplary of late and this makes God of War such a shame. 

 

 

[df0]

Lifeline+ on Apple Arcade.

 

Text based game where the protagonist is the sole survivor of a crash on an alien planet. For some reason you are the one and only contact she can reach and it‘s your job to choose the path. Explore crater, take pain killers, sleep near nuclear reactor for warmth etc. Interesting concept that fails to grab me due to the attitude of the protagonist. She’s too quirky. Given the circumstances I expect a more somber approach with some sarcasm and humor here and there to cope with it all.