What Generally Keeps You Invested In Games?

[Kriven]

It's a lot easier to talk about this in reverse... erm, rather what kicks me out of a game.

If I have to grind for any amount of time longer than ten minutes, I'm going to check out. If I'm not making progress every ten or so minutes, I'm going to check out. If I have to run across a gargantuan map for fifty minutes out of an hour before I move the plot/quest forward, I'm going to check out. I don't even care if that map is pretty and has a lot of characters and environments to interact with, I don't want to trudge back and forth through it to pad out the game. It doesn't matter to me that "look, you can snap logs in half" if that doesn't do anything for progressing through the environment.