Do you often give games a second chance after a bad first experience? So many games, so little time. You chanced an hour or two, do you want to chance more? After all, it takes a while to get the swing of a game or learn the rules.
That is an odd experience for games. Rules mastery is usually a requirement for having a meaningful opinion. There are few movies anyone would say you should try watching a few times to see if it grows on you. There are TV shows people will recommend watching until they grow the beard. Even then, it can be hard to suggest someone sit through about 10 hours of weak Buffy the Vampire Slayer until “School Hard.”
There are plenty of games I am not offering a second chance, like the DC deckbuilding game. Deus has kind of meh, but maybe it will grow on me.
Video games often run 40 hours. If the first two hours are weak, do you even press on to four?
Kill Ten Rats started as an MMO blog. Those run 1000+ hours. Can you really say you even tried World of Warcraft after two hours? But I remember mostly liking the first two hours I played way back when. And my wife tried it, saw it as similar to Guild Wars (which she did not care for), and for her purposes I cannot say she was wrong.
What game did you give a second chance? Did it work out well?
: Zubon
ESO. I tried a few months ago to get into it, for the 3rd time (1st try was on Beta, 2nd was when it went B2P). I always roll a new class (maybe this will fix it this time!) but I can’t be arsed to get involved after level 10 or so. I don’t know why, but it’s just not grabbing me.
For me ESO is just the example for the other side. Just like you i tried it in the beta, a second time in a trial week, and both time rejected it. There were too many issues, the biggest one being that their instancing system meant utter frustration when trying to play together with your girl. It was playable solo, but was a mess with partner, which was a complete dealbreaker for me.
Now the third time turned out quite different. They used the time to fix a lot of things and the game turned into an enjoyable experience when playing together. So now (thanks to Funcom shattering TSW) it became our new home.
MMOs also grow and change, which makes them more likely worth the second chance. Early City of Heroes was terrible for near-mandatory grouping and grind; I gave up on it after a couple months. When City of Villains came out it I had another go and it was a very different experience.
Most games don’t change in significant ways after their release; if they do, it’s often just expansion material. Darkest Dungeon is one I can name I gave another look after it reduced the amount of time I had to spend spinning my wheels on maintenance. The Last Remnant would never get that.
I have “Won’t Play” and “Probably Won’t Play” categories in my steam library. More games end up in the latter than the former, but few make it back out.
I think “trying” an MMO means playing it most days for a few hours for at least a couple of weeks, probably a month. That’s how long I usually go before making a decision – or, more accurately, coming to a decision by inertia or enthusiasm. Occasionally (Tera for example) I loathe an MMO on first contact but that’s very, very rare.
FFXIV. I bought the game with a gift card I was given at work. After the 1st month, I was not feeling it, so I didn’t ever set up a sub for it. But a bit later I came back and tried it again and…. it’s been my primary MMO for the past 2 years since then.
Assassin’s Creed didn’t hook me on the first try. (And I lump all the different games I played together now).
For Mass Effect it was more like: started, somehow veered off after a few hours, came back weeks later and loved it. This was the case for all 3 original games. Maybe more like an attention span/RL getting in the way kind of thing, not really “needed a 2nd try”. Same thing for Shadowrun Returns.