What a waste of time that was! I suppose there's no point to trying to push myself any further though that travesty of a title.

Here we make our yearly chronicle of the games we've laid to rest incomplete, and detail why; either to air frustrations or in warning to others.

.....sooooo.....write a review?

This isn't about that sort of thing. This could be games we've give up plugging away at, decided to inter, or perhaps have to air some grievances about that might make useful reference for a review later.

Apex Legends. Again. For good this time. Probably.
A classic case of mismanagement absolutely wrecking the gameplay. The biggest issue is sound, where it reached a state that can't help but have you feel Respawn's sound guy is that dude from Fallout New Vegas working at Helios One.
"They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard."
That's pretty much the skill level of whoever's handling sound in the game. Hell, that's probably the skill level of their entire replaced developer team. Which poor sod intern is doing the work of an entire tech team, I don't know, but it's a hell i'm happy to be ignorant of.

The second issue is casino style matchmaking where skill doesn't matter, having people keep spending money does. There is absolutely zero chance of having a match pairing players based on their skill. Pure Las Vegas illusions at work. And they're lying about it because it technically falls into the gambling category and this has restrictions they'd rather not deal with. As long as someone doesn't raise some flags about it, they're keeping mum.

Third issue is their lootbox gacha system. It's overpriced, diluted with a swarm of stuff nobody wants or even sees in-game. Elementary Paint grade lazy reskins, the occasional overpowered "exclusive" skins that are "bugged" but they're in no rush to fix and so-called "events" with the sole goal of selling more gacha lootboxes. It's a mobile level scam affair.

Fourth issue is their report system in that it's non-existent. The only thing that works, barely, is an automated censorship bot that is triggered when a report is made for banned names. And their censorship list is likely very, very short.

And what impresses me is not that so many players are still addicted enough to keep playing despite the absolute wreck that the game has become, but that Respawn or EA or whichever have the gall to ask players to vote for them in gaming awards. It's a contender in Steam's crappy awards, probably based on the number of players or reviews, because if they had bothered to actually read the reviews, they will had noped the hell out of adding it in the first place.

Finally, i could freely rant somewhere that won't remove my whining. Such a disappointment has this game become...

My gripe about many games would be to ask "What is the point?". There are a lot of popular games that are more like this statement "....living to to work... over, working to live....".

The Mount & Blade series is this way. The entire series is vapid and hollow from start to finish. While a game does not require a story, it most certainly should be about something.

The Last Starship= offers 2 goals. One is to run away from a spacial anomaly that consumes the universe. The other is to be the start of an entrepid mission to explore unknown space, but not explicitly be the people to do that.

RimWorld= Get stranded and make your way off the planet you were stuck on. What happens after? Who knows! That is not the point.

Heck as dumb as it is, even Mario wants to save his princess.....no wait....that dude punches bricks with his head....nah bro, he jus a horny mofo! Seems legit! ;)

Even if you were ignorant of the art of the manual which shows his hand raised, the peculiarities of the matter were well known enough to be parodied by Luigi's appearance in Super Mario Bros All Stars + World.

He was after Luigi the entire time!? 0_0

....no wonder he could break brick with his hands.....he had a kung fu grip ;)

I know what you're attempting to brazenly insinuate, but this isn't 2005 anymore, jokes like that just aren't funny anymore for a myriad of reasons.

The Lamplighter's League. Had a lot of fun with it when it would run. But it would reliably crash at least once a mission. Then it started deleting save files. Every mission was taking 2-3 times longer than it should be of this and there was a constant fear of losing all progress. Not worth it in the end.

As you have not bothered to write an example of your own experience this year - is this thread simply one for you to munch popcorn on?

FFS!

Make an effort!

It's a boulder roll. I push the boulder, and then fate determines if it becomes mossy. I quit a lot of games because I hosed my games partition. :P

Yeah, I normally start these kind of threads only if I have something on my mind on the subject, and there is no similar thread already.

I actually recall there already was a thread about games people have abandoned and not finished, in addition to the threads "what am I playing now", "games finished in 202x" and "take a screenshot of a game you are playing now". I can't find that thread right now though, at least in my bookmarks...

I am careful with these kind of threads though because then I would have had to have make up my mind that I am never going to try to finish the said game. I think I've mentioned abandoning TES: Daggerfall because of its aimlessness, awful twisty dungeons and awful user interface, but still I have this thought in my head that one day I will pick the existing save game and finish the main quest of the game, if there is one. To get the game to some kind of completion and tell myself "There, now I never have to think about this game anymore.". Maybe even learning to enjoy the game in the process, like I started enjoying Diablo 2 only after playing it for a longer time?

Other games where I am unsure if I will continue and finish them at some point:

- Heroes of Might and Magic 1
- Homeworld: Emergence

These games were mainly put on hold because the Windows 7 laptop where I played them died (I have the save games available though), but there was something in both games that annoyed me so I haven't been that eager to get back to them...

I think in Emergence I was annoyed by the complicated controls (that were easy to forget if you were a couple of weeks away from the game) and that I think I faced an bug in some mission where some important event wouldn't trigger so I was stuck in the mission, and had to start it from the beginning hoping it would trigger properly that time.

As for HOMM, I just couldn't quite understand the logic of the game... I mean, there were apparently some very complicated rules of what kind of units you should and should not put together in the same group of fighters. It just annoyed me as there didn't seem to be any logic in that, like "if you put a troll and a fairy into the same group of fighters, both will get a -30% penalty to the fighting ability", or "if the party leader is a knight and you have giants in your team, the giants will get -60% morality penalty" and weird shit like that.

It just felt like being complicated for the same of being complicated. Like having to keep a rule book in front of me in order to understand whether or not I should add a certain kind of unit to my existing army. Fjuck that shit. Then again, maybe by playing it more I would suddenly get it and be like "Oooh! Oooh! Now I get it! This makes perfect sense! Of course you can't put trolls and fairies together as then you will get lots of small ugly fairytroll-babies!".

There are lots of other "on hold" games as well, like Portal 2 and GTA 4. I don't even know why I am not continuing those two, I didn't find anything super-annoying in them or anything... I loved the first Portal game, but having played the second for awhile, for some reason I was just bored. Then again I recall also with the first game, you had to play for some time before it became interesting (at least story-wise).

GTA4 though, I am pretty sure I would enjoy it just if I picked it up again and continued playing it. I don't recall being bored, but I got a bit annoyed when I tried to reach areas that I was apparently not supposed to reach yet that early in the game, and it felt a bit gimmicky how the game tried to keep me away from those areas (basically, cops having closed the main road to that area, and shooting me to death if I tried to drive past them). I became too attached trying to outplay the game mechanism, trying to get to the areas which I was apparently not supposed to reach yet because the game made it seem like I should be able to somehow get there, by somehow getting past the cops.

A kind of fake feeling of freedom, you should be able to go anywhere, except that you can't. I don't remember why this didn't annoy me in earlier GTA games or GTA-like games...

So is it any members of different factions cause similar morale penalty, or do I have to have some spreadsheet with all the different factions and units to make up my mind whether it makes sense to add certain units so that they don't affect the morale as much?

It isn't that clear to me anyway how (much) that morale affects the real outcome of fights. Or does it mean my units may start even fighting each other during combat? Does it even make sense to think about it, ie. is it always better to add an available unit to the team, than leave it out?

As said, to me that just seems complicating things for the sake of making them complicated. I would rather have a more straightforward strategy game where the units just have different purposes, strengths and weaknesses, and I wouldn't have to worry that e.g. my tanks and foot soldiers in Command&Conquer would start fighting each other because they don't like each other for some unknown reason, for being from different military factions or whatever.

Yeah I know, many DnD RPGs have similar "issues", ie. if you put evil characters and paladins in the same party, there might be problems. That at least makes perfect sense and is a better fit into RPGs than strategy games, in my mind...

Yes. No. Units with high morale have a chance to say "yay I'm fighting with my bros this rocks dude" and get an extra turn, units with low morale might say "this sucks I'm going on strike" and skip a turn. Yes, that's why the mechanic exists, just like any other mechanic. Do you mix & match factions and deal with the morale penalty, or go full xenophobe and get a morale bonus, and do you go with the hero morale skill. All the HOMM games have this mechanic as far as I remember (having played up through V).