I have gone through my list of games that I need to beat, and pruned it to no longer include games I have no intention of suffering through until the end. Especially now that Contact and Etrian Odyssey have both snuck onto my DS list, I really need to focus on the games that I enjoy and to hell with the garbage. I even removed some really quality games: couple of Grand Theft Autos and Final Fantasies, to name a few. Why? Because I’m sick of them wasting my time.
For instance, Lost Magic? I have no intention of ever playing that game again, screw it. The only reason I would beat it is for closure, and those are precious hours I can spend playing other games, hanging out with actual human beings, reading, or feeding my non-existant fish.
If the Xbox 360 Gamerscore has taught me anything, it’s that I absolutely hate sitting down and playing games for any other reason than to enjoy it. Suffering for hours upon hours to complete a story, or reach 100% completion is bullshit. Lego Star Wars II - I beat that game in a few hours, and reaching 100% takes about ten times as long. What the fuck? I could spend the 3-4 more hours to get up to that 100%, but I just can’t justify wasting the time. Dead Rising? Sure, I could spend the 10-15 hours to get a few of those achievements (the kill ~50000 zombies and survive 5-7 days ones) but god damn, I could spend that time doing ANYTHING ELSE!
The worst types of games for me though are games that have their gameplay wear out on me before their story does. Final Fantasy 8? I was done with that shit after Disc 1, but no, there were 3 more discs of whiny emo bullshit to suffer through, and at the time I couldn’t NOT beat it- it was Final Fantasy, and I already invested a disc’s worth of time into it! Final Fantasy X-2? Not even going to bother. I just saved myself 50 hours.
It’s gotten to the point now where I’m buying games faster than I’m beating them. Much faster. I can’t take the time to do boring, repetitive tasks in videogames anymore. I remember drawing the line at Final Fantasy X- a wonderful game, but to get one of the secret weapons you had to dodge 100 lightning bolts IN A ROW at a certain zone. You pretty much had to stay at attention with your thumb hovering over the X button for hours to do it (there was one bolt every 5-20 seconds or thereabouts), and if you screwed up, you had to start over. WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THIS WAS A FUN IDEA?!
A much better use of my gaming hours is something like Geometry Wars. I’ve yet to gain some of those achievements. But if I had the skill, I’d get them in 15 minutes. Instead of a stupid, repetitive task, I spend my time increasing my skill on a task that takes a few minutes. This is why I’ll never, ever play another MMORPG. When your main game mechanic is referred to as a “grind” and a “treadmill” I can’t find a whole lot of reasons that I’d want to spend the thousands of hours on it that some people do.
So I guess the point to all this rambling is this. I challenge all game designers out there (myself included) to create games that do the following two things: 1) Give the player nearly all available game content within the first 15 minutes of powering the game on, and 2) Give the player a replayable experience that, if they choose, will still occupy hours and hours of their time. This is the philosophy behind my games to date (a game of Kill Dr. Cote takes around 5-10 minutes, but hours can be spent maximizing your score) and will continue to be. For more inspiration, think the old arcade machines: Space Invaders, Robotron, Defender, pretty much any game that throws a high-score table at you as part of its attract mode. These are the games that people come back to. Show me someone who’s played through Final Fantasy X-2 more than once, and I’ll show you a masochist.
6 Comments
Agreed Justin, for the most part. But I don’t think you can compare arcade games like Geometry Wars and Kill Dr. Coté to story-driven games like they’re both apples. There’s something to be said for the gradual reveal of gameplay mechanics. How about playing Zelda or Metroid? Those games are built on the premise of slowly earning the tools that make up the final abilities of your character. It make take hours, but I certainly don’t count it a waste.
The “grinds” are places where the designers got lazy and tacked on a cheap method of extending the play-through time of the game. I definitely wish I could have my time back that I spent hunting down the triforce shards in Wind Waker. And I abhor the concept of the modern MMORPG.
Well-designed games that avoid the grind, but offer a gradual curve of abilities and content are OK in my book.
Totally.
On Zelda and Metroid- both are great games that don’t reward you on repetition, but on exploration- once you know where everything is you can blow through those games quite fast. My favorite series at the moment is Castlevania- which follow the same formula as the older Metroids, and are tons of fun. It hits a near perfect combination of exploration, fighting, and platforming that keeps me stimulated at all times.
I think what pisses me off is that designers look at that as “not enough gameplay hours”– I’ve seen short single-player experiences get mentioned as negatives very often in printed/online reviews. So designers pad it out with repetitive shit, ensuring that no matter how good you get at the game, you’re going to spend 10-15 hours playing through it. Like digging for Triforce. Ugh.
Agreed. Zelda was a pretty easy game once you knew the sequence. It wasn’t until later games like Diablo that you got into the “ability curve” type of gameplay.
On collection side quests. Are these fun?
I remember when I was a kid, I had no problem trying to burn down every single tree in the entire overworld looking for hidden heart containers (in the first Zelda). This time around, in Twilight Princess, I accepted my task of trying to collect 20 Poe souls for Giovanni, or whoever, thinking that this is OK because I can tackle those Poes easy enough over the course of my normal dungeon crawling. But to reach 20 and then have him tell me, “Oh, it didn’t work, I guess you need to bring me 60!” WTF!? Maybe I had a bigger attention span as a kid or something, but I really don’t want to search every bloody corner of Hyrule looking for 60 invisible ghosts.
Chalk it up to one of those achievements I will probably never accomplish, along with all of those golden Skulltullas. As long as they don’t give me a watered down ending for not completing this one.
But I know there are people who love that kind of thing. Gotta catch em’ all? But what’s the point if these people just go to gamefaqs.com and get a list of every location? Thats just a grind. Secret areas are cool, but don’t make them too mundane.
PS. Your URL rewriting is broken.
I’ve been screwing with my htaccess stuff for the last few days setting up private directories that don’t get eaten up by the rewrite rules in the wordpress permalinks- they should be ironed out now (I hope.)
I’ll make a part two to this post with my thoughts on sidequests. Stay tuned.