Top 12 Reasons to Stop Playing A Game (Part 1)

You know what it’s like: You have that brand new game. You pop it into the machine and turn it on, or you click Play on the screen after it’s installed. Play for a while. A short while; a long while; however much you feel the need to play, in order to be satisfied. And then… you stop playing. There may be various reasons for this, and that’s what I’ll be covering today. The topic may seem a little grim, but it feels odd, strange even, to have this piece of work that entertains someone for multiple hours, and then it’s dropped and, sometimes, never played again. A game can have hours upon hours of content, so you might want to see a game’s ending so those hours don’t feel wasted; on the other hand, if for any reason the game doesn’t keep your interest, it’s also easy to put aside.

Today, I’m going over 12 reasons to stop playing a game… and why you might never pick it up again. It’s actually an odd topic to think about for me. I made it no secret that I started this blog, Planned All Along, as a project that would force me to replay through my entire collection of games – including the bad ones. It made me play through games I thought I would never experience again. In part because of the following reasons. Although, it goes to show that even if you stop playing a game, you may (sometimes) find an incentive to pick it up again later.

The list is not in a particular order, though similar reasons are grouped together. I might also reference games that I haven’t played, but learned about thanks to word-of-mouth, or by watching YouTubers discussing these topics, or by reading about them online.

12. 100% completion

Proudly displaying that gamer cred.

The happiest outcome, and the best reason to stop playing: You’ve seen everything the game has to offer. You have surmounted every challenge it could put in front of you. I like to believe that developers wants gamers to experience each single aspect of the game they’re putting out. In reality, a lot of games will never be finished, even more games will be put aside before the famed 100% appears on the screen.

The famed 101% from Donkey Kong Country.

Not every game has a percentage completion system – most games don’t need it. Beating the last level or the final boss is usually enough. At best, this kind of “progression” is tied only to the achievements, when there’s any. However, I’ve also seen such systems be applied to various games, in various ways: I still distinctly remember Donkey Kong Country, on the Super NES console, actually reaching 101%, if you found every secret area in every level. The sequels pushed the concept even further, reaching 103%! On the opposite end of the scale, we have modern games of the past decade, some of which are open worlds bursting with activities. I obviously think back to titles such as Grand Theft Auto V, reviewed last year on this blog. You don’t reach 100% completion by doing every single thing; only by doing most of them. Which is a fair trade, considering it’s almost impossible to do absolutely everything.

From The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth.
That's getting a bit ridiculous.

And, of course, 100% completion isn’t always possible. At other times, it’s better to not look for it…

11. You’ve done all you could do

Achievements-wise, if you're willing to play more of a game, but you
can't get to 100%, would 60% (passing grade) be okay?

World-Star: To prove you're a superstar.

So, let’s say you’ve beaten the main part of the game, so to speak. You’ve met the final boss, you whooped its ass. However, you’re not sated. It’s not enough. You’ve decided to play some more.

And hey, it’s great, this particular title does have quite a bit of postgame content for you to enjoy. Maybe it has a few extra missions. Maybe it has a bonus boss or two; Hell, maybe they're accessible before the end of the game. Maybe a new World just opened. Or, hey – maybe there isn’t much else left to do, but the game comes with achievements and encourages you to revisit the game and self-impose a few challenges on the way.

Don't even hope to beat Culex unless you can beat the
final boss. This bonus boss is THAT tough.

But that boss? Uh, a little too tough. And you’re not feeling too keen on level-grinding. That new World? Maybe just go through it, and forget any additional bonus content. Those achievements? Sure, you can try to get most of them, but there’s a few that make that famed 100% completion a dream only the best may hope to achieve.

For a few games out there, once I had beaten the “main story”, I found myself with many new things to try out – many new goals. But not all of them were attainable for someone with my level of talent at the game. Therefore, I tried to earn as many as I could, before I could finally consider myself satisfied.

Once again, games with too much content can also fall prey to this. There’s always that one side-quest nobody wants to bother with. I personally remember doing this with Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Play until you’re satisfied; sometimes, it’s the best thing to do so a game won’t overstay its welcome.

10. Beating it is enough

Sure, I "could" try the other difficulties...
...nah, not anytime soon.
(Ironically, this screenshot IS from a game I will
gladly replay.)

It may have taken a few hours of your time, but you’ve come to the ending credits. You can proudly say that you’ve been to the end of the game. But that’s where you stop. You don’t feel an incentive to go any further. And as the names scroll on the screen, you figure you’ve had enough of that particular one.

I guess this category goes for any game that doesn’t have any sort of post-game content. Any game that doesn’t contain an additional quest for you to complete. No collectibles, no bonus areas – in that case, beating it is, indeed, the most you can do. (Unless you decide to learn the game inside and out for speedrunning purposes, but that’s not the topic I’m covering today.) Nowadays, games without any kind of bonus content are much rarer, but it does happen.

Screenshot from The First Tree. Review coming to a
blog near you sometime soon, hopefully.

This is most common when the game is good, at least good enough that the average player will be tempted to see everything up to the end… but nah, nothing more. Admittedly, people with large collections of games may be content with stopping there instead of playing some more. After all, there are many more titles that await to be played!

I will never berate someone for not playing past the credits – after all, it’s up to each person to decide when they’ve had enough. And if that means skipping out on any sort of additional content, that’s fine. It all depends on each person’s level of satisfaction with the experience they’ve just had. From this moment onwards, the following points don’t even get to the end…

9. It’s a glitchy mess

From my personal experience, one of the best ways to make me stop playing a game is to encounter multiple examples of poor programming. Bonus points if it comes with loads of glitches.

Champion in all matters of glitches, Sonic '06.

A game can be bad for many reasons: It’s bland, it has a terrible story, it has poor controls, some decisions made in its creation are baffling… but then, we can also stumble upon glitches. Whether it’s laziness or a poor case of quality control, the final product is shipped with glitches. Not all glitches are bad; some are exploited quite efficiently by gamers attempting speedruns. It’s fair game. Others may have no real impact on the game itself (think of MissingNo., the tamest glitch “creature” of the Pokémon Red/Blue era). However, it would be a mistake to call all glitches beneficial. Many of them can make games either a lot harder than expected, or a lot more awful than they could have been. And sometimes, they stem from the simplest of programming errors.

As far as glitches are involved, the game crashing will
usually be the least of your worries.

I have heard of the infamous Aliens: Colonial Marines (some people won’t shut up about how bad it is), and how one fan literally repaired the artificial intelligence of the enemies by correcting one single spelling mistake, a single character in the code.

I'm not saying that every glitch necessarily ruins the game; a lot of great titles have a couple glitches here or there, though they may vary from slight annoyances to massive problems. Crashing the game repeatedly, for instance. Glitches may often affect your opinion of a game, if you do run into them, if the overall game is good, you might pay them no mind. Plus, like I said, they frequently serve as speedrun tactics.

Example of a game-ruining glotch: Intrusive menus
that never go away when they're supposed to, and won't
let you see the damn screen. Again, The Astonishing.

That is also not to say that there isn’t enjoyment to be had with glitchy games; as material for jokes, they can be quite effective. Think of all the rage and snark to be had while playing through, say, Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 (which spawned one of the most famous Let’s Plays of all time). However, unlike some gamers out there, glitches tend to turn me off. It doesn’t help that the glitches I encounter are the type that prevent me from playing the game in any decent capacity. I still remember the game based on the album The Astonishing by Dream Theater, and how its menus would not leave the screen, blocking my view of the chessboard. That’s a good reason to never play a game again!

8. It’s terrible

Admittedly, you shouldn't treat reviews as the gospel...
But it's Anubis II. Screw that pile of crap.

We’re falling squarely into subjective territory here. Was there ever a game that you no longer wanted to play, solely because it wasn’t all that good? Or, worse even, it was plain bad?

I mentioned earlier that it’s actually rare to have games beaten all the way to 100%. If you look at any Steam title that tracks in-game progress with achievements, and also tracks the percentage of players who got each achievement available, you might notice that a somewhat small percentage of players actually go through the effort of beating the game from start to credits. You’d expect that number in percent to be higher. Points 1 to 7, on this very list, are other justifications for that decision to stop before a game is beaten, but putting down a game because it’s bad is a lot more common than you’d imagine.

Part of this point may be the clash between expectations and reality. All of the promotional material put out by a game development studio to promote a game is meant to hype us for upcoming releases, usually by showing the strong points of that to-be-released product. Chances are that, once you purchase a game – may it be brand new or used for physical copies, or on a virtual store – you can assume the game’s quality based on brand recognition or past experiences with other games of that franchise or genre. Then you actually play it. And, oh! Can assumptions can be far from the truth!

I’ll be perfectly honest, even with my hobby as a reviewer, I don’t aim to radically change someone’s point of view on any video game. Sure, I have my opinions, I share them, but in the end that’s only my perspective. If you liked New Super Mario Bros. 2 more than I did, more power to you. There are games that I think are terrible, others that are merely okay to me, and others that I adore. It’s all up to you to make up your mind on each game you play. If a game is bad, you’re probably going to stop playing it quickly. (Since I try to beat each game before I review it, I don’t get that luxury…) And it’s perfectly fine! Heck, if you stop playing a game because it’s merely alright when compared to other, better examples of that genre or from the same franchise, that’s alright too. Difference being, an okay game is still somewhat tolerable and you might come back to it someday, while an actual bad game will rot in the deep corner of a drawer or be sent back to the nearest used game store. Or refunded, if you’re willing to go through a virtual gaming platform’s maze of a system in order to get your money back.

The one advantage is that you can usually tell pretty early on when a game’s quality isn’t up to par with what you were expecting, so you can let go of it more quickly.

7. You can’t win (And it’s the devs’ mistake)

Save and quit at the wrong time?
That cannon will not work right. Oversight!
(From The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.)

I don’t think that every single gamer out there realizes the sheer amount of work that goes into programming and playtesting. At any moment in a game, anything can go wrong, and sometimes it’s caused by variables that don’t even seem to have anything to do with each other. The game being programmed juggles characters, events, items and countless other elements that developers need to think about. To top it all off, gameplay mechanics can also interfere in the relationships between these many elements. The best example I can think of is the concept of key items in role-playing games. If such a game comes with the ability to discard or sell back any item (as is the case with the Pokémon games, as an example), and you need to keep one precise item in your inventory, it’s entirely possible that a player will sell it and get stuck forever, especially is there isn’t a way to get that item back. Hence why these are made into Key Items, which cannot be discarded or sold. (It IS possible to forget them behind, if there aren’t inescapable cutscenes where you’re given the items.) Then, of course, good old glitches can also be the cause of an accidental trap from which a player can’t escape. Sometimes, a poorly-placed save point can also spell trouble. Generally, it implies that the player ran into an inescapable scenario accidentally.

You should always be able to buy some water for the guards around
Saffron City. However, the devs didn't plan for the possibility of a
player wasting all their money...
(I'll get back on this type of error in Part 2 of this list.)

Oh, but there are many other ways one can get stuck in a game without any option but to start over. However, it feels all the more enraging when it’s accidental – a little design oversight from the developers, a glitch that was unaccounted for, a combination of factors that they couldn’t think of before the game’s release. (Good thing this sort of thing can get patched nowadays.) That’s why I will always, always praise video games that take care of even the smallest details in order to make sure that everything works right – and, in some cases, even prepare for things that not even 1% of gamers will attempt to do. That’s foresight.

If I were to be stuck far into a game, multiple hours into it, only to find that I could no longer progress due to an oversight… I’d give up on it. In fact, that game would probably go out the fucking window.

On this note, see you soon for Part 2 of the list!