176: To Do: Finish Any Game

[calelogan]

I agree. I used to be of the "play the hell out of a game until the disc is too worn to load" mentality, but nowadays I'm more impressed with a tight 4-6 hours experience with no downtime or redundancy. In a way, this is sort of a Portal vs. BioShock debate, and I think even the latter's most ardent fans will admit that you could trim a few hours from that experience.

I have to agree with this comment. A few hours could be trimmed in order to avoid unnecessary repetition.

From what I understand, repetition is inherent to the game in order to justify the price tag and claim "At least 10 hours of gameplay" as an advantage.

It seems times are changing though, and what we need is more quality than quantity, after all gamers (the older generation at least) don't have the same free time available they once had.

Some games have opted for shorter "single player campaigns" and though the act alone is not enough, it seems like a step forward. Take Portal, Call of Duty 4, Fable 2, and Mass Effect, for example. All of these games offer content that caters to hardcore fans with hours at leisure, but their main story campaigns are considerably shorter in comparison to other games.

In my opinion, Portal, COD4, and Mass Effect offer short and linear, yet greatly executed, narrative arcs. Each with its own attributes (and Mass Effect scoring higher on the "hours played" count for being an RPG) and strengths justified the price tag even if not as long as the usual game from their respective genres.

 

[MorkFromOrk]

I never finished Dead Space because I got tired of redoing a room over and over and over again trying to kill all the monsters so I could progress. I never finished Mirror's Edge because I got tired of having to repeat levels, or sections of levels, over and over again and over again just to learn the proper route and how to time my jumps properly for each. Essentially I do not have the time and energy to spend redoing sections of a game when I feel I should be progressing. I have a life to live, I have a full time job, I don't have time to waste with frustrating video games that force you to redo sections of the game.

On the flip side I have invested over 95 hours into FFXII and I replayed Bioshock and Max Payne 2 three times. Why? Because I loved the stories, characters, gameplay and environments. To note, a good story will keep me playing a video game more than amazing graphics or gameplay.

 

[proj235]

I'm an adult gamer, and from my perspective, I finish games at least 90% of the time. Even if I stop playing it for a month while I play something else, I make a point to go back and finish up where I left off. For me it's a question of economy, if I drop $60 for game you'd better believe that I want to get my money's worth. That's also why I'm so picky about the games that I play, I always read a couple reviews before I buy, and if it looks like something I won't finish, or it's a short (6hour) game I'll just rent it. The true test of a game is the replay value. There's a lot of games that I enjoyed, but if the gameplay is boring or not conducive to "pick-up-and-play" then I'll likely just play it once and let it collect dust.

You can't fairly compare games to movies though. Sure, they occupy the same couch space, but a movie is spoon-fed media with very little investment in time and money on the part of the audience. A (good) game is immersive entertainment, something you want to be sucked into and spend time with. It's the job of game studios to create worlds that people want to delve into, by creating compelling stories, interesting gameplay, and intuitive control schemes. It's the players responsibility to suspend their belief long enough to enjoy the experience. If you get bored playing a game once you've figured out how it works then maybe video games aren't for you. That'd be like quitting Super Mario once you figured out that all you needed to do to win was jump and shoot fireballs. :-\

 

[Tiut]

I would like the idea of having a game that was similar to a movie. Perhaps a game that could only be 2 hours long and could sustain a story much like movies. Then again, you'd need a good game, so that you could enjoy playing/beating a game over and over again.

My saying is: "To know the value of a 1P game, you have to beat it at least twice."

 

[Deschamps]

I would like to see more games like Portal and Braid. They're short but challenging, for less than the price of a full game (Braid is about $15, I think Portal is $10 if bought on its own) But they give me my money's worth because they were so well done. Neither game has any filler. They don't try to stretch ideas more than they should. Instead they give you the best they have to offer and they end before they start running out of steam.

These are the kinds of games I talk about because they're the video game equivalent to a short story or short film, both of which I like. Short stories/films don't require a big time commitment and they're often just as good as the ones that take you hours to finish.

Speaking of which, does anybody know of any other really good video game "short stories"?

 

[ToenailCar]

For me, the problem seems to be in their prioritization of content over execution. There's all these epic saga's with gigantic backstories and a very fleshed out world story, but in the end all it's all just information because there's no real effort made to suck you into the moment. And that's why, at least for me, games like Portal (and the old Abe games) and such were so fun. They didn't need to bombard you with backstory and motivations and the history of that rock over there. They simply made you feel like you were actually a part of whatever was going on.

When you take out the immersion in a games world or it's various situations, all you've got left is the core gameplay mechanics to play around with. Most single player games aren't too strong in the core gameplay department, and even if they are, there's only so much fun you can have playing with bots.
If I want to play an FPS that means nothing more to me than shooting people, an area in which multiplayer games excel, why wouldn't I just play a multiplayer game?

 

[savandicus]

I would like to see more games like Portal and Braid. They're short but challenging, for less than the price of a full game (Braid is about $15, I think Portal is $10 if bought on its own) But they give me my money's worth because they were so well done. Neither game has any filler. They don't try to stretch ideas more than they should. Instead they give you the best they have to offer and they end before they start running out of steam.

These are the kinds of games I talk about because they're the video game equivalent to a short story or short film, both of which I like. Short stories/films don't require a big time commitment and they're often just as good as the ones that take you hours to finish.

Speaking of which, does anybody know of any other really good video game "short stories"?

I would say indigo Prophecy, i found that it told quite a compelling story even if it does go completely loopy towards the end. It was short enough that it never dragged out, it was long enough that its well worth the price and i thought it was really enjoyable and easily in my top 5 games.

On topic though i've completed a fair few games and the ones i dont complete are for a very simple reason. They are or have become boring, simple as, if i dont enjoy it i'll stop playing, if that happens before the end of a game then o wells, if it doesnt happen and the end comes first then its a good game assuming it was long enough to be worth the price tag.

 

[JamminOz07]

For the author. I bought my g/f the CSI Hard Evidence game for Xbox 360. Not only did she complete the whole game in a couple of days, but got me 1000 xbox gamer points on the way!

My personal reason that I have so many unfinished games, is usually getting bored part way through, or buying a newer, more interesting game before completing the first. Some I will go back to, but many more just gather dust on the shelf.

 

[MorkFromOrk]

I'm all for episodic content. Give me 4-6 hours of a engaging story and fun gameplay for a reduced price. Drop a new episode every 4-6 months. He'll I'll subscribe to that.

 

[stompy]

I find myself more and more leaving games to rot, and not finishing them. However, it's not because I don't have time, it's that they don't interest me. I find the games I finish are the ones where the action is non-stopping, because it results in a continually interesting experience that keeps me hooked.

Oh, and goo article Endo.

 

[Hiroshi Mishima]

I'd like to comment on something that this article brought to mind: The notion that story-driven games are a chore to play while games that do nothing but challenge our skills with little reward save for gloating about "beating Megaman 9 without taking a single hit" are all the rage.

I am of the mind that the opposite SHOULD be true... but have to sadly admit that I have seen far more people concerned with challenges of the increasingly difficult nature, rather than sitting down and enjoying a good story, or a simple to learn and fun to replay series of gameplay mechanics, or even the rarely seen 'go through the same game X number of times in an attempt to see all the possible variations'.

I LIKE being able to pick up my copy of an old 2-D Final Fantasy game and just dive into the story with only simple grinding that doesn't involve tracking or paying attention to 100 different stats or skills. I like being able to replay a game like Super Metroid over and over again, not because it overs an ever increasing challenge, but because it is something familiar that is practically built into me by now from all the many years I've spent replaying it. Super Mario World, and to some extent Super Mario 64, fit that notion quite well.

Far too often these days do I see people chanting "it's too easy" or "it's the same old thing over and over again". I am personally quite sick of seeing people say this, because I for one don't give to spits about 'challenge' or 'formulaic' gameplay. I don't care for difficulty in games anymore, because that just means it takes me longer to get through them. Increasingly used is the concept of genre-switching mini games of various degrees of difficulty (and all of them hard).


But far more than EVERY other aspect of the situation... the thing I'm seeing is that there are far too many new games coming out every year. You can go on about nostalgia and so forth in regard to the older years of gaming, but the fact was that not nearly as many games came out per year as we have today, and more often than not the games that did come out were better quality and had longer lasting appeal.

We didn't constantly "trade in the game that just came out!" bargins or deals, people weren't concerned with beating a game as fast as possible or being challenged to their limits. At least, I sure wasn't.

I have to admit that in today's increasingly boring (or insanely hard) video game selections, I'm finding myself far inclined to simply slap on Infinite Lives or Invincibility just to make it through some of these newer games where they put so much focus on "challenge" but not on actual gameplay or all around FUN. It's all about making it as hard as possible, or having you search an increasingly confusing huge city for a couple of tiny objects which you will never find without a map...

I can't take it anymore. I don't have the time for most new games today. I find myself returning far more often to the older ones, because they had less gimicks, more direct gameplay, and moved the story along with less necessary grind.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

Kick Ass article Mr. Endo, well adresses some of the problems of Narrative in Games.

 

[ReverseEngineered]

Excellent article Endo; very well articulated.

I can count the number of games I have finished on one hand. I think this is due to a few factors: repetition, purpose, and time constraints.

When I was a bachelor and college student, I had an inordinate amount of time that I could spend playing games. These days, I'm lucky to get a few hours a night. "Pick-up and play" games like Tetris are fine, but it's difficult to make progress in most 80-hour games an hour or two at a time. A large part of this is context: epic games typically require keeping track of the storyline, your abilities, your next objective, and a slew of other facts. It takes a considerable amount of time -- say 10 to 20 minutes -- to get back up to speed on these things and they are lost between gaming sessions. If for some reason you can't get back to the game for a day or two, you may well forget a large portion of this context. With so much spin-up time, it isn't worth picking back up unless you can devote a few hours in a single span.

For the longer games, I find repetition the most important factor in whether or not I will complete a game. I enjoy the challenge and discovery inherent in learning a new game, which drives me to try every new game I can get my hands on. Once this initial bliss is over, most games leave the player with little to entertain them. The game mechanic doesn't change or offer any new challenges, the "rich, immersive world" often only gives glimpses of innovation every once in a while, and the whole thing ends up becoming a repetitive grind to the end. Completion is great, especially if there's an interesting story behind it, but I won't grind through repetitive gameplay just to see how the story plays out -- that's like peddling an exercise bike to keep the power going to your TV just so you can see how the show ends. As much as games can include interesting narratives, they are still games and still need to offer interesting challenges to the player.

Lastly is the purpose for playing these games. Sometimes I want to delve into a deep story and I have a few hours to devote to it. Other times I just want something to keep me busy for an hour. Sometimes I want a feverish, fast-paced challenge; other times I want to sit back and contemplate my options. All of these purposes are served by different paces and lengths of games.


Of all the games I have played, few have lasted me any significant amount of time. Games with simple but constantly challenging mechanics (due to their multiplayer nature), like CounterStrike and Team Fortress 2, have given me the most lifetime. Even if I haven't played them for months, I can pick them up for an hour and have a good time, and because of this I have played them for months on end. Shorter immersive games such as Portal, Braid, and On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness have held me captive to their conclusion mainly because I was able to finish them in only a couple of extended sittings.

Even the better epic games, such as Fallout 3 (which I have loved every minute of), have failed to hold my interest to the end. It's not that I don't enjoy them, just that I can't devote enough time to them to finish them. I usually start off with a couple extended sessions, which get me solidly past the initial-interest period, but then something prevents me from picking up the game again for a few days. When I return, I struggle to pick up the story and remember where I was and what I was doing. After a few cycles of this, I realize I won't have time to really enjoy the game and I leave it until I can.

When I get a new game, I'll often devote a lot of time to it initially, but this isn't something that I can commit to in the long term. If a developer wants me to finish their game, they either have to make it possible within my initial burst of excitement (3-4 fours for 2-3 days) or they have to lower the cost of picking it back up such that I can enjoyably progress through it an hour at a time.

For most games, developers have to start by filling the time from 4-40 hours with something other than repetition of the first 4 hours. For single player games that rely on their game mechanic for this, keeping things new and challenging for 40 hours may be an unreasonable feat, at which point developers should consider gearing their games to be "completed" sooner, rather than trying to drag out a monotonous existence as long as possible.

 

[ranger19]

I have to completely disagree with your viewpoint on video games. I usually choose games specifically because of an extended narrative and view them in the same vein you describe for movies and books. It's an expected point of pride to complete the game (and here I'm using "complete" as you have: finishing the story arc) and it's only the truly poor games that I choose not to finish.

It simply sounds to me like you're trying to play too many games (a problem I must confess to as well). We don't have enough time to read every great book or watch every great movie, what makes us think we'd have enough time to play every great game?

I agree with this, and yeah disagree with the idea of "front-loading" stories in games. I rarely run into games in which the gameplay is *so* bad that even though the story interests me, I stop playing (and if that's the case, it's a failure on the game's part, not on my part if it simply doesn't interest me). Games that have an interesting story and good gameplay I will indeed complete; in fact, the story is a very important factor for me in my games.

Glancing at my collection of games, I've played through the vast majority of them (~80%), with the ones I did not complete games where the gameplay was indeed simply too unappealing for me to continue. But those games were the ones I regretted buying. Most of the games I've bought (and have been happy with) I've played through several times. Like another user said, I want to get my money's worth.

It sounds like you're trying to play too many games, and so trying to rush through the campaign while not enjoying it. When you're trying to rush through, then certainly you'll get more fed up with the gameplay - but this is just how you can get sick of the language in a book if you're trying to rush through it.

I certainly hope games don't become 'top heavy' with their story, sacrificing narrative and pacing just to allow casual players to get as much as they can. You're already playing the game, so why cater to you as opposed to the fans who will be disappointed if the story takes a hit? And more episodic content means higher prices down the line, something I am NOT looking forward to.

 

[shiajun]

I don't get it. I honestly don't. I keep reading these comments of people talking about the importance they give to story in games, yet the one genre whose main objective is to tell a story (i.e. adventure games like Last Express, Longest Journey, Gabriel Knight, all faves of mine) is one of the least prominent ones. It's become such a niche market that the only games that have come out in years, aside from the Sam & Max seasons and the likes, have been independent low budget games. There aren't any big games because people just don't buy them, therefore the investors don't sink money into them, therefore less money is available next time, etc, etc. It has become very stale because there's little new blood coming in or support to very innovative things.

There hasn't been one adventure game I haven't finished, but games of other genres I have abandoned half way through because the actions start to feel irrelevant. If we were doing an analogy between a game and a book, a book's "gameplay" would be hand-eye coordination in the sense of reading words and flipping pages when the words reach the page limit. To string you through this VERY repetitive gameplay is the story. Most games today feel like a 500 page book with roughly 5 or 6 words per page, so of course the repetitiveness becomes all the more obvious.

I too agree that Portal's length hit a sweet spot and is certainly one the reasons it's been so successful. However, I do believe that games can be longer (and yet not really above 15 hours) and still maintain interest. I remember playing the original Tomb Raider for days and days. You can "figure out" that game's mechanics by the 5th level, but the design and atmosphere just kept you going. The industry seems to be popping out very advertised shells, but all of them break rather quickly, usually by being knocked over by the next over-publicized shell.

 

[Unholykrumpet]

Well, finishing the game has become less important over the years mainly because of the emphasis on multiplayer over single player. I would say that the trend in gameplaying is not so much for the single player storyline anymore (though obviously there are exceptions to the rule like Fallout, Oblivion, Fable, etc.) as for the multiplayer. Even the term "single player" sounds restrictive and insocial in a medium where social interaction between fellow players is strongly encouraged. Granted, I'm in college in the U.S., so I'm not 100% sure how it pans out for the most part outside of the U.S., but I've seen a huge shift among friends, dorm mates, and people online towards multiplayer games, and reserving single player games for rents or just passing them over altogether. I myself passed over Fallout 3, as awesome as it looked, because it was a single player game. I passed it over for Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead so that me and my roommate would be able to play together. For me, the social aspect is the most attractive factor in games anymore, especially now that my high school friends rely more on online games to stay in touch.

I roughly estimated that I had beaten over 70% of the games I owned at the beginning of fall semester.

 

[Frederf]

I think that most people here are talking about console games, Xbox / Playstation which probably explains most opinions stated, but I'll give it a go anyway.

Movie-games are usually abhorrent to me. Let's be honest here, the types of games leaning toward movies are not films of Oscar caliber, they are summer popcorn movies without much substance. It seems that most console games are becoming interactive movies more than exercises of the intellect. The love affair with the "cinematic moment" has robbed so much from the art form. Do you run down the corridor now before the bad guys show up? Do you wait for the bad guys to show up and ambush them? It doesn't matter since the game is scripted so heavily that they always show up as you trip an invisible trigger.

Scripting, pacing, tightening--forever tightening. We aren't gamers, we are mice running in the developer's maze scientifically designed to leap out and scare us here or narrowly miss us there. When you see the strings the puppet show gets a whole lot less entertaining. The entire experience is so over-engineered; oh this should happen now, that med pack needs to be there, this lightening flash needs to show the side alley, that there's no room left for gamers to be gamers.

Game designers rarely have the concept of subtlety, of believing in the player to pick up or piece together the story, atmosphere, puzzle on their own. Everything is over the top, cliche, exaggerated, highlighted, and so on. The interactions with the GlaDOS computer in Portal are a counter example where subtlety is used to great effect.

---

My favorite games are always those that teach me something. This is how you start a jet liner. This is how you defend a castle with a medieval army. If I'm not learning, I'm not caring.

Also the concept of the detailed single player and the bare bones multiplayer modes is so tiresome. Why can't we have the full, slow multiplayer experience? Does everything online need to be go, go, go, fast, fast, fast streamlined? What happened to coop, the most social and immersive of all the game modes?

 

[SimuLord]

Back in 1989 my New Year's resolution was to finish no less than 20 NES games (I was eleven when I made that "resolution"; cut me some slack.) I then spent the rest of the year on a quest, renting any game with an ending that wasn't too Nintendo Hard and easily accomplished the goal.

Twenty years later there's no way I could repeat a feat like that with modern games, because (a) you can't rent PC games and I'd be out the better part of a grand for purchases, (b) unlike in 1989 there's a much bigger gulf between quality and crap; games these days are either rock-solid or Dangerously Wallowing in Suck, and (c) the rise of the sandbox genre means that the really good games out there are designed to be the sort of "if you only play one game this year, make it this one" sandboxes that more or less demand the player achieve Hundred Percent Completion.

The good old "a winner is you" days are gone and it's a sign of gaming's evolution.

 

[MorkFromOrk]

Yeah I played Mass Effect twice because I loved the story and wanted to play it out slightly differently. If the story is engaging and the gameplay is decent (read not overly frustrating) enough I will play to the end.

I do agree that there are too many titles being released each year and often at the same time of year too.

 

[ToenailCar]

I'd like to comment on something that this article brought to mind: The notion that story-driven games are a chore to play while games that do nothing but challenge our skills with little reward save for gloating about "beating Megaman 9 without taking a single hit" are all the rage....

When I was younger I used to play games for the story and the whole experience you find in games like final fantasy, the Legend of Zelda etc.
The problem is, I got older, my taste expanded and, I guess, matured. But game stories didn't. They're still stuck in the same formulaic, predictable, generic stories that they were when i first loved them. Except now I know better.
I haven't seen a single video game live up to the quality of a good book or film.
Even extremely simple, grade-school level books (Of Mice and Men etc) go far beyond what games ever have.

I'd love to be able to enjoy a game for it's story, but in lieu of that I'll play the occasional game for the fast paced action element instead. If I have an itch for something with a good narrative there's plenty of books and movies for me to watch, why should I settle with banality simply because it's in a different medium?