The mentality of nerds

[Christian Lerche]

Games dosn't seem to be as easy if you don't invest enough time in side-plots and optional quests. And that sucks for the younger audience and the eager.

Alright, so a month ago I remembered playing Batman: Arkham asylum along with my little brother. We each played it a for a couple of weeks and we were both on the same difficulty. Being the older, wiser, sexier, and more expirienced nerd, I put a lot of time into the riddles and unlockables than my kid brother did.
All he wanted was to punch the joker in the face and downright ignored the possible puzzles (unintentional rhyme) and just went for the main missions.

I thought the game was way too easy and I regret I didn't select a higher level, when I talked to my brother he complained that everything was way too hard. That's of course because of his "imma gonna kick jokers butt!"-attitude and he totally forgot to select the right set of upgrades and everytime he encountered a boss he called for help or asked me to finish it for him.

Now that sucks for him and every other "eager" player who doesn't have the right mindset to complete it "probably". I know there is a lot of people here who are completetionist, I am myself and have spend more time with some games than is required, but what about the "others" or newcomers to the games? there is a lot of games that say you can play however you want, but it still requires you to do a lot of stuff, so it's not true to some point.

What do you guys think of this? Even though you love doing side quests, are they still neseccary to have a finish the game?

 

[Skorpyo]

Mass Effect 2 does this mercilessly, I've noticed.

Didn't even bother with upgrading the ship or team very much, and when I got to the end mission they were all slaughtered in front of my face for it.

So yeh, second play-through is going to take WAY more than 32 hours. :S

 

[KEM10]

I think you also found it too hard because you were over leveled when you faced the Joker. Every riddle gives experience and if you do blaze through the game you won't be at max level for the final boss fight.

 

[shadyh8er]

I do all the side-quests/collecting, but only because I get an empty feeling if I don't do them. I despise that feeling. But of course, there has to an incentive for me to do it. Like a trophy, new power, etc. But if I don't get anything for it (ex: beating God of War 3 on Chaos difficulty) I'll pass on it.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Hmm, really depends on the type of player you are, and this surely changes from game to game.

A game that interests me I want to inhale every single piece of entertainment the developers put in it and I will poke into every nook and cranny to find it, mostly this goes for RPG's with good story.
But with Arkham Asylum I wasnt that fussed, mostly because extra things you found gave you no new features or skills, but the audio logs were quite fun so I can't complain on that, just weren't my kind of collectibles.

I would say age also has the attention span factor, younger gamers mainly want something new happening every second, while older gamers prefer to dive into the world.

 

[SimuLord]

Side quests are less about being "nerdy" and more about being thorough---with the exception of the infamous JRPG optional boss, most game developers put sidequests in as a means to reward the diligent, thorough player. Some games (sandboxes, mostly) go a step further and limit the means of creating maxed-out characters solely to those willing to put in the time to go find everything.

Consider Fallout 3---even without Broken Steel (and thus with a level cap of 20), there are enough skill books in the world that as long as a skill is raised at base to about 45 or so (easy enough to do with even an Intelligence of 4) it can be leveled all the way to 100 with the Comprehension perk. But you have to be willing to explore the world. (your reward for this? The ability to put more points into other SPECIAL attributes like STR and END.)

 

[Christian Lerche]

Thanks for the replies so far, and yes, bioware is king of this kind of thing
When I beat ME2 the first time, I was so bitter that someone had died just because that a certain someone didn't appreciate me (looking at you, legion and jack).

The bosses were a nightmare for my brother, everytime he called for my help he knew the game beat him, just because he didn't wanted to do the riddles, it was even worse when he finally got to the last stage and he didn't see it through by himself.

Of course there should be a reward, but shouldn't it be completely optional? I mean, I banged afrodite just as much for the XP as I did it for the kinky QTE.

 

[Valkyrie101]

To be honest, I don't think the upgrades helped much in Arkham Asylum. Aside from the health boosts, there were only maybe half a dozen really useful ones, and you would recieve enough experience just through playing the story to grab those.

 

[L4hlborg]

I only do sidequests that feel essential and interesting in some way. If it involves no interaction with characters and has no effect on nothing, I usually don't do them. The Witcher works as a fine example, with sidequests with there nice own small stories and contracts that were kill x number of monster y and bring remains to person z. I only did contracts by accident, but completed most side quests. This did kinda cause me trouble in the final Chapter, though people 5 levels ahead of me were complaining about the ridiculous difficulty on forums, so I guess it wasn't just my own fault.

I have lately been observing my brother's progress in Mass Effect and he hasn't completed any side missions at all. I found this really weird, as ME1 still has quite many side quests involving good dialogue and there own interesting stories (unlike ME2, which was only go to planet x, shoot enemies y). Maybe the younger generation isn't very thorough.

 

[HotPinkCrayola]

I prefer being able to play through the story line, have the happy glee of finishing it, and THEN going back for the extra side quests. I always worry that the side quests will just confuse the plot for me (I tend to play JRPGs and am a big story geek, which probably explains why I can't play COD and co!). I know on one level that generally they actually won't detract enough for me to 'forget' whats going on, but I'd prefer to get the big ending and then use the side quests as a way to still have a reason to stick the disc in that isn't just 'you can shoot the same thing a million times while 12 years olds kick your arse'.

 

[TheMetalGuy]

I always complete all the sidemissions i encounter, but i don't want to discover them myself.
Just doing what people asked of me.