Videogames: Don’t waste my time II: Sidequests

My tirade about videogames that waste my time got some great responses and feedback, enough that I’d like to elaborate more on some of the points I made last time.

One part of games that I’d like to focus on in particular is the collection sidequest. These are the most glaring attempt to pad out gameplay hours that I can think of. The vast majority of collection sidequests extend well past the end of the single player experience. For instance, on my initial playthrough of Ocarina of Time I found maybe 30-40 gold skulltulas out of 100. That’s not even half. Collection in the new Castlevania games extends the playtime by at least 200-300%.

So the question was: are these fun? And my completely useless answer to you is: it depends. (God, I hate saying that, but it’s true.) There are two major types of factors that Fun depends on. The first is player motivation. There’s a wonderful article up at Gamasutra about Designing For Player Motivation, and I suggest you check it out, since I’m only summarizing it here. Motivation depends on Player Skill, Needs, Reward, and Challenge. You need to account for all of those factors or you have no motivation to play, and your game collects dust. (By the way, this applies to your game in general, too, not just sidequests and minigames.)

Example: Crackdown. I’ve maxed out all my skills, but there are still like 200 agility orbs and 250 hidden orbs floating around somewhere. There’s no additional reward for getting these extra orbs (aside from Xbox360 achievements) and the challenge is completely out of whack. I have max agility, so I have no physical problems getting to the orbs, but FINDING them is a pain in the ass, and since I have no idea which ones I’ve gotten already, reading a FAQ with the locations is completely worthless.

The second factor is the minigame itself. I hate having my playtime wasted, but yet, I spent 15-20 hours in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin collecting all the different items and building up my characters. Why? Because once the exploration is complete, you still have the combination of platforming and combat, which keep me stimulated and make running around and collecting all these items fun.

Now take for instance, the Fishing Mini Game. Doesn’t matter which game it’s in, because it’s everywhere. Games around the world love to include the Fishing Mini Game. I fucking hate the Fishing Mini Game. My first Fishing Mini Game was in Dark Cloud 2. I fished in the Fishing Mini Game. I caught fish. Wonderful. Diversion over. I have absolutely no desire to play the Fishing Mini Game in the million subsequent fucking games I’ve seen it in. Animal Crossing? Don’t care. Twilight Princess? Don’t care. Contact? Don’t care. If I wanted to fish this bad I’d just get a pole, go outside and fish. If I play Zelda, I want to explore, fight monsters and uncover secrets. I don’t want to sit on my ass and fish.

In Castlevania, the minigames all revolve around the core mechanic of the game: jumping around and killing shit. If it had a minigame that involved me raising a vampire bat by feeding it or something, guess what? I don’t care. If the minigame doesn’t involve me jumping around and killing shit, I’m not interested. Going back to Crackdown, prior to the downloadable content, once you beat the game, the gangs are completely gone from the city. There is nobody left to kill. But yet you still have this huge collection minigame to do. So take out the motivation from step one, and also remove one of the core mechanics of the game (shootin dudes) and you have a completely boring collection sidequest.

When done right, sidequests and minigames extend the life of the game by changing the rules around. It’s like a separate game mode. Now instead of getting to the end of level X, now I have to kill and collect. When done wrong, all they do is piss me off, since now there’s some reward in the game that I’m not going to get unless I suffer through some repetitive bullshit like spraypainting 100 tags for one stupid respawning shotgun.