sunk cost fallacy and gaming

[madhair60]

i'm a big fan of Borderlands - right, make fun of me if you want, it's fair fucks - i enjoy the shooty looty business and the sense of developing your character build. I also enjoy the characters and story, for my sins. so I started Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel again, aiming to get it done before I allow myself to get stuck into Borderlands 3. but unfortunately having just spent 150 hours on BL2, the Pre-Sequel is just not doing it for me. yet I feel I must beat it.

i'm curious if there are games or series that you sort of forced yourself through for whatever reason. not to shit on anyone's taste, just a general interest in the attrition side of gaming.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

stayed with the final fantasy series far longer than i really should have, can't remember which one i was joylessly playing through and just went "why am i even doing this, I don't even care what the ending is??" possibly 12

is this a good answer please don't say anything mean

[madhair60]

it was an excellent answer. if i am or was ever mean to you, dontpaintyourteeth, i apologise. it was a jest. you are very dear to me.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

Now I'm just thinking about how many hours I must have spent playing Final Fantasy X and X-2... they weren't very good games and the characters annoyed the piss out of me. I could have been going outside and talking to girls instead. 28 I was, etc.

[Thursday]

Well I play Destiny so...

I'm not completely insane like a lot of the community though, I do actually generally enjoy the game, and I'm aware of the existence of other games and play them.

But I will still do things like grind out the seasonal pinnacle weapon, which you'll get by maxing out your rank for strikes/crucible/gambit, even though I'm not even really arsed about the weapon itself particularly at this point, it's just the routine and sense of completing a task I crave.

[Pink Gregory]

Enjoyed Assassin's Creed 1 & 2 when I wasn't expecting to; then, being unemployed, I mainlined Brotherhood and Revelations.  Big mistake, though despite being overloaded with a load of useless bollocks including a rubbish tower defence minigame you have to do once and an inexplicable first person puzzle platforming section, Revelations felt quite refreshing.  Still felt like I was chewing a mouthful of white bread by the end though, and then AC3 was utter, utter bilge, so that was that.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

i 100% completed Xenoblade Chronicles X despite that requiring sessions so long it made me nauseus playing it

the music and the interface are horrifically bad and ruin any chance of the late game side missions being fun, or there being any point to the open world after a certain point. its the most doldrum collect-em-up in the world. even in comparison to the first game, you have to collect hundreds and hundreds of items for the most basic upgrades. you basically never get anything fun for doing so

why? i think because the game is absolute crap for a solid 5 hours (worse than most JRPGs) and suffering through the boredom and grind of the early game made me want to see it through. the middle part is very good and the world is worth all the praise - there's an incredible 35 hour adverture in there, but its spread so thin its not even funny. having to wade through hours of crap to get to the fun part really made me want to see it through to the bitter end. i also couldnt believe it wouldnt get good again. but it never did.

also Batman Arkham Knight 99% really made me feel like i was wasting my life. hours and hours of the most pointless content ever, and i liked the tank game.

Enjoyed Assassin's Creed 1 & 2 when I wasn't expecting to; then, being unemployed, I mainlined Brotherhood and Revelations.  Big mistake, though despite being overloaded with a load of useless bollocks including a rubbish tower defence minigame you have to do once and an inexplicable first person puzzle platforming section, Revelations felt quite refreshing.  Still felt like I was chewing a mouthful of white bread by the end though, and then AC3 was utter, utter bilge, so that was that.

AC4 i think is when i mostly jumped off big open worlds like that, and the desire to play every one that came out (not that i did, i just felt like i wanted to)

AC4 has a muddle of really strong, fun ideas and a cute story with fun sailing. then dozens and dozens of hours of the most tedious, empty and poorly designed filler content. every mission you do, you know you'll play a partially broken and unfun version of that mission five more times. and every mission is either so easy it might as well be a cut scene or frustratingly hard with gameovers you can't predict or prevent.

AC2 is one of my favourite games. i wish ubisoft ceased to exist after it. i slogged through brotherhood and half of revelations, only got 10 mins in AC3.

[Pink Gregory]

here's another one, I ploughed nearly 100 hours into MGS Peace Walker HD, grinding out the horrible giant robot boss battles to get all of the somewhat randomly dropped Paz tapes, so that I could be all up to date for Ground Zeroes.

Yeah so you can just listen to them all in the menu of Ground Zeroes.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

in the PC port of Final Fantasy 7 i decided to grind to beat the snake boss you're supposed to lose against

i forget if i did actually beat it

[Milo]

stayed with the final fantasy series far longer than i really should have, can't remember which one i was joylessly playing through and just went "why am i even doing this, I don't even care what the ending is??" possibly 12

is this a good answer please don't say anything mean

That was exactly what I thought after reading the OP. I think if 9 hadn't been pretty good I'd have been out there but that pulled me back in to the series.

[bgmnts]

Over the past few years, I'd say that has been about 80% of my gaming experiences.

It's hard to spend money on a game and just not complete it, even if it's dogshit.

[oggyraiding]

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 looked interesting, but it made it necessary to play the previous two games. XC1 is good but there is a huge difficulty spike near the end. XC2 is shit in many respects, the big twist was cool, but the gameplay was dreadful. Nearly a hundred hours of its terrible combat, and that shit game design where to progress in the final dungeon you need to teleport out to give the robot maid donuts to boost her strong arm characteristic to open a door. XC3 itself had some good ideas, but also may have one of the worst JRPG stories ever. It had its moments, and I think the ending was impactful, but the villain organization and its leader were so fucking stupid and poorly written.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

XC1 is good but there is a huge difficulty spike near the end.

i've tried to finish Xenoblade Chronicles so many times but the way these games mete out their content and gameplay is downright baffling to me. people are slagging Final Fantasy off in this thread - fine i get it, but Final Fantasy tends to have a good curve of introducing things the more you play (with the exception of 13 i think, and the sudden ending of 15) so you're going from small fights in short dungeons to bigger battles and more complex stat concerns.

XC plays like an incredibly fast paced, fun taken on JRPGs that still felt fresh a decade after it came out... for 15-20 hours, then it turns into a single player MMO. there are loads of crafting and village building mechanics that you don't even touch until 50/60 hours into the plot, and then they can take upwards of an hour to get just the simplist upgrades. and by the time you've got to that point, you've likely progressed the game to the point where its lost most of its MMO trappings and you're doing the extremely hard boss and miniboss battles at the end, which are punishingly difficulty even if you've been grinding. there's one of the best games ever in Xenoblade Chronicles and its completely lost under layers and layers of padding. it can never decide whether it wants to be streamlined, exploratory and open or being a finicky min maxing collect-em-up for nerds.

WHAT A BUNCH OF JOKERS

[The F Bomb]

Whether because of my adhd and autism (I am actually autistic, just couldn't be fucked engaging with the panel of know-zero experts in that thread), I will just instantly fuck off any game that doesn't push my buttons and hold them down. I almost killed gaming by getting into Cave bullet hell shoot em ups because they basically smash my buttons with a nuclear mallet a billion times a second and make my heart pump through my chest while I grind my jaw in furious ecstasy. The constant escalating tension and difficulty, not just playing for survival but trying to maximise scoring with these infinitely high skill ceilings and exponential difficulty curves, it's so so fucking good. I often feel emotionally exhausted after a good session because I feel completely addicted and saturated by the intensity and the dopamine.

It means that when I play, I dunno, Spider-Man or some shit ticking stuff off on a map, I get an hour or two into this seventy quid game and just start reaching for knitting needles to insert them directly into my brain because I'm so bored. I don't have any backlog at all, I buy stuff due to a flickering interest and optimistic expectations and then I just return or sell it almost immediately. Most games are time wasting filler crap. I need intensity or a high degree of artistic imagination or execution to keep me interested. Indie games can almost all fuck off these days. Derivative box ticking shit.

[oggyraiding]

Leading up to the Halo Infinite release, I played through the series. I had played the first three a bit back in the day, but never really properly got into them. I found the original and the numbered sequels mediocre (except 4 which was pure shit), I only got enjoyment out of Reach and ODST. Then Infinite comes out and it's shit too and I played through all these not very good games for nothing.

[Noodle Lizard]

Less so now my free time is more scarce and hard-won, but I definitely have the tendency. It's really quite liberating to be able to say "this isn't enjoyable, I don't have to spend the next 80 hours with it", as I did with the more recent AssCreed entries and plenty of other AAA titles where, even if they're quite good like the Spider-Man games, at some point I just say "yup, I get the point" and leave it alone forever. Helps to buy physical copies so you can at least sell or give them away, which makes the "sunk cost" part sting less.

[Schlippy]

Much better at this these days, used to make myself miserable until I saw a sleb on twitter (who I have a sneaking suspicion had a stunt account on here back in the day) talking about how wretched some types of open world games made them cuz of their neurodivergence (having to tick all the boxes / clean the map) and realised, oh yeah, I do that. Waste of fucking time, eh.

PS plus has been great for me, didn't have a ps4 so when I got the ps5 there was a mahoosive backlog of fantastic first party stuff that I'd not been able to play on PC, and there's been enough of interest released each month since I got it that not only have I not bought anything since taking the subscription out, there's waaaaaay more stuff that I want to play than I've got time to get through so pretty much as soon as anything becomes a slog I fuck it off and move onto something funner.

Blasted through the first Shadowrun game last month, loved it then started Dragonfall. Got to one main mission with a huge difficulty spike, realised to get through the battle at the end I'd have to redo the whole level save-scumming the entire time and just sacked it off instead. Almost sacked off Plague Tale: Requiem earlier in the week because of a similarly stupid difficulty spike, but perservered after I looked up the total number of chapters and realised I was at 15/17 and had really enjoyed the story up til then. Glad I did, it was literally the last fight in the game and the credits rolled less than an hour later.

Life's too short to slog through "more of the same". Got a mate that likes to obsessively platinum games, specifically plays titles that are easy / short to 100%. Seems like absolute hell to me.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I remember looking at my Origin account in 2020 or 2019 when I was playing Fifa constantly and it had me at something like 500 hours played for the year. It was basically a full time job. Pretty much quit FUT after that. Horribly addictive and mostly frustrating with no feeling of ever accomplishing anything or getting better at the online matches because even I wasnt playing as much as most of my rivals.

[Memorex MP3]

Very slowly stumbling my way through the FF7 remake at the moment, driving me insane how padded of our the original story is and I'm not especially enjoying anything but I feel a bit duty bound to push through it on amount of how excited me from 20 years ago would have been about it


I've gotten further into Nier Automata than I really want to on account of my liking a lot of it on paper and trying to convince myself it will eventually click


It Takes Two had so much of A Way Outs best parts that it took me way too long into the game to accept that it had way too many of the older games best parts repeated ad nauseaum  and fuck all new ones of its own

[McQ]

Much better at this these days, used to make myself miserable until I saw a sleb on twitter (who I have a sneaking suspicion had a stunt account on here back in the day) talking about how wretched some types of open world games made them cuz of their neurodivergence (having to tick all the boxes / clean the map) and realised, oh yeah, I do that. Waste of fucking time, eh.

Which specific type of neurodivergence is this, do you know? I definitely have this.

[Poobum]

I'm currently being diagnosed with some type of Nuerodivergance as in the years long process. Obsessively clearing the map can be relaxing but then all consuming. I quit Starfield cause I was going from planet to planet surveying and mineral collecting to a detrimental dreaming about it degree. Inspired by a certain forum cunts shit book ;) I'm playing older games and platformers where I am rubbish and focusing on getting good and completing, where I had picked up a nasty habit of try and abandon.

[Thursday]

It's interesting how some seemingly quite similar forms of neurodivergence can make people.

- Absolutely have to 100% complete open world games that have hundred of hours of filler content and grinding.
- Have no patience at all for anything open world or grindy.


I do also think there's a reason games have replaced job satisfaction... sure you do something with a long boring grind, but you know you might actually be rewarded appropriately and congratulated for putting in the work. You don't generally get that in a real job.

[Ron Maels Moustache]

in the PC port of Final Fantasy 7 i decided to grind to beat the snake boss you're supposed to lose against

i forget if i did actually beat it

There was a non-grindy way to do that but it was incredibly convoluted, and not at all worth doing. IIRC you get nothing notable for it, even the XP is the same as for a normal enemy at that point in the game.

I rarely have the patience to stick with games I'm not enjoying, one exception was hate-playing my way through Silent Hill Homecoming on PC, which made me so angry I just wanted to finish it so I never had to endure the wretched thing again. Beat the bullshit final boss and fucked it off my hard drive within about 30 seconds.

I did have a bit of a "What the fuck am I doing" moment recently, when I realised I'd spent a couple of weeks joylessly chugging through Adventures Of Alundra on my Retro Game Pocket just to kill time on the bus, even though I must've completed it two or three times back in the PS1 era, and there are thousands of games I've wanted to play for years but haven't so much as started.