For me:
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Breath of the Wild: 400 hours in, have done only 50% of the game. But now that TotK is out, I’m not sure if I’ll ever complete BotW. Perhaps if I’m stuck on a deserted island with my Switch and have nothing better to do, I may pick it up again.
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Skyrim: Countless hours, never really done much of the main storyline, always get lost in modding and optimising the game. Own it on practically all platforms too. But one of these days, I’ll get to the main quest…
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Dangerous Dave: Been playing this DOS game on and off since 1990 but still haven’t managed to beat it. I always die around level 6/7, blasted sun keeps killing me.
Probably Minecraft. I’ve never legit beaten the Enderdragon.
This is a very common tale, but I find it super understandable.
The anecdote: Me and two friends played Minecraft kinda blind after ignoring it since early beta over the span of a month and made a bunch of cool little project, typical stuff. We had fun both together and aside from each other, from making lighthouses, kelp jungles, bamboo minecart courses and reaching sunken ruins using nothing but a corridor of 400 doors (we didn’t know about milk), to torturing villagers in ways that would make Tears of the Kingdom link proud.
When we finally decided to focus and beat the dragon, we took hours, HOURS, to grind ender eyes. We took another hour to find the portal and we had two too little eyes then due to them popping along the way. We took several more hours dragging chicken and digging straight lines near fissures just to make some sort of automated arrow farm and what we felt was ‘enough’ ammo, only for a friend to tell us we wasted it not instead making a mob spawner. All of it just to go fight one of the most absurdly unfun bosses we had the displeasure of facing in any video game and that still took us several respawns as we tried to bullshit the tower step by climbing them with blocks. We then tried it again with slightly more preparedness and knowledge and the boss was a joke, it provided no challenge and was down in two minutes.
it was like we weren’t playing the same game. So much grinding. So little game feel. The only part of Minecraft that didn’t feel like Minecraft, was the actual progression.