100% Completion Freak

I am that person. Though I will hasten to add that I don't always get there.

I want to argue that there are two ways to go about playing a game, the 'complete the narrative' approach and that the '100% completion' aim.

Just when is a game completed?

I am just offering my thoughts on the subject. I can imagine there is lots of academic writing on this subject already, and if you can think of any beauts then please let me know and I will happily devour them :)

Some preparatory reading!

First of all I would like to invite you to read a blog post by my friend.  http://gamasutra.com/blogs/SimonBrislin/20130529/193201/Balancing_Narrative_And_Gameplay.php

He writes about narrative in games and it is a very enjoyable read. After reading this I wanted to reply to some of the points he makes; particularly about sidequests and how they can detract from the narrative, because completing them can seem quite contrary to the point of the game.

To understand this fully we need to understand what audiences view as 'the point of the game'.
Is it to complete the storyline? Is is to collect all items etc. (100% completion). Or might it be that you can enjoy a game thoroughly without completing anything?

I can think of plenty games that I have played/watched that I haven't completed and I have still enjoyed. The failure (if you want to call it that) to complete could have been down to skill level (ahem), especially in the Mega Drive era of not being able to save. But is is also often due to a lack of time; and sometimes when you leave a narrative based game for a while and come back to it, the twists and turns of the plot are such that they can become overwhelming, and frankly, lost on me.

The game gets left, but enjoyment is not necessarily tarnished. Now this might be a *me* thing, I have also done this with Cloud Atlas (a book), I just didn't bother reading the last scenario as I felt satisfied enough with the others.

So Deus Ex: Human Revolution remains unfinished, but I am happy. On the other hand, when I finished Silent Hill 2, I wished I hadn't, as the final boss was much easier to fight than some of the other characters (e.g. Pyramid Head *shiver*) and it was a massive anti climax. I was disappointed, as I felt I should have had a better reward (a more difficult boss fight).

Satisfaction

So completion could be linked to satisfaction, and obviously this is going to be different for each player. The narrative itself doesn't always offer satisfaction. Sometimes a player might enjoy a game so much, that they wouldn't want it to be over, and this is where sidequests come in.

I want to talk about two games in particular that I think are kings of the sidequest. Any Final Fantasy game, and Fallout 3.

In the Final Fantasy games there are always loads of other quests to complete besides the main narrative. It wouldn't feel like you were playing a Final Fantasy game unless you fully interacted with these other adventures. You know you are taking on a 100+ hour beast when you first turn one of these games on. Who can forget Chocobo racing, Chocobo digging (my personal favourite!), Blitzball, the card game in Final Fantasy IX and everyone's favourite- maxing the health to 9,999 (until they pushed it to 99,999- that is a challenge too far, even for me :( ) Some of the quests did directly help with the main narrative; you might get a more powerful weapon for example, but the game is still very much complete-able without grinding every single map and looking in every single nook and cranny. So there is more to it than just feeding into the main narrative. I guess there is a lot of pleasure to be had here if you are a 'collector', or dare I say it, an obsessive type.

In Fallout 3, it was the thrill of finding somewhere new and 'off the beaten track' that pushed me towards the 100% completion aim. Obviously you weren't going to find anything that the developer didn't put in there, but I still felt that what they did put in was there to challenge you, and I'd love to think that they were placing cabins, underground bunkers and deserted towns in the outer reaches of the game world, hoping that no one would ever find them. Am I the first to wander into this abandoned factory??? Has anyone else picked up all the radio signals??? Make sure you talk to EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER as well, as you do not know what juicy tidbit you might miss out on. I felt a great sense of wonder and discovery when stumbling across something new because of my relentless self-imposed quest to reveal everything. So again, here I gained a lot of pleasure. (Writing this made me think of Baldur's Gate, and how I insisted on revealing every single pixel of the maps between towns, and if there were trees or rocks that prevented this, it really annoyed me- that's the 100% completion aim!)

So it satisfied me to search these places and it gave me great pleasure to find something new, or to collect all of a set of something. If I had just played the narrative and wanted to stay immersed in the game world (more specifically the unity of time- 'we have to fight the monster immediately' etc) then I would not have been able to get this kind of pleasure and satisfaction.

Sidequests for all?

I am not totally disagreeing with the points made in the article. I do think that there is a time and a place for sidequests. The games I discuss above are both ideal for this kind of gameplay, whereas others aren't. So developers need to consider sidequests carefully. Are you making a sidequest kind of game? Or not? Make sure they add value and don't detract/distract.


For me, killing the big boss means the game is over. No more game. On to the next game. And I feel like when a title has so much more to give then that is a shame.

Or am I just a little bit obsessive?