Last night I completed Batman: Arkham City. But this post isn’t about the game itself, but the little statistic of how much of the game you have completed. Because mine is nowhere near 100% even though I’ve seen the ending!
BAC is of course one of those many games where completion of the main quest/storyline in no way means you’ve actually completed the game. Indeed, this is one of the most striking examples of that I’ve seen in a long time; I think I’m at about 40% completed now. There is an absolutely enormous wealth of things to do, from collectables to challenges to side missions. And of course I have varying degrees of enthusiasm for these. The side missions and challenges are pretty much great fun and I imagine I’ll do many if not all of them as I continue to play; the collectables (Specifically the Riddler trophies) rather less so. I have always found collectables to be a very boring and tedious way of extending gameplay. I can’t really bring to mind any games where it has been done well, except perhaps Final Fantasy X because the collectables there (movie spheres) show Auron, Jecht, and Braska.
I’ve very rarely 100%’d any games actually. Partly because I’ve got a small core of games I play a lot that aren’t really open to that as a concept; sure you can WC as Haiti on Very Hard but there’s always another campaign to fight in Darkest Hour, you know? And open-world games generally just annoy me with their hidden collectables and so I end up running over innocents or whatever instead!
What about you? Are there games out there you can say you’ve completed 100% of, explored every last nook and cranny, done every sidequest, found every hidden room and item, reached level 99 with every character, whatever it might be? Or are you like me, and more prone to put a game down well before that point?
Beating the game is all that’s really important to me. I don’t care that I missed this thing over here, or that over there, if I killed the big bad evil guy then I win. Anything that could have been collected along the way that didn’t have the potential to impact that last boss encounter isn’t worth me doing it.
If you were to take the achievements in WoW as an example, there are some that I absolutely must have on all of my toons, but beyond that handful of achievements the rest of them can go rot for all I care. Every toon I have is going to have achievements related to certain things in PvP, and they’re all going to have Going Down!, but none of the rest matter. That same concept applies to other games, where some things will matter to me while the majority of the others will not.
I won’t 100% most games but I tend to be competitive instead; with games like Geometry Wars and Dustforce, which track your scores against others, I tend to play until I have a higher score than anyone I know which is pretty similar to the OCD tendency of 100%-ing a game.
I have a stupid amount of issues with this.
Because I’m pretty sure I’m leaning towards the OCD end of the spectrum, I do tend to punish myself with, “you know you never REALLY completed Ocarina of Time don’t you Sophie? You know that original save file you created when you were 11 is still there don’t you? With the missing heart pieces and skulltulas waiting to be collected? You REMEMBER don’t you Sophie???”, etc etc etc.
So yes, I do strive for completion in all my games. Do I reach it? Hell no. I won’t ever remove a game from my hard drive/sell it/burn it with fire unless I have though. Which is why I was actually not that annoyed when my hard drive wiped my Assassin’s Creed I playthrough – I’d (in a very amateur fashion) collected flags etc at random throughout my playthrough, rather than doing the sensible thing and waiting til the end to do a full sweep through. Now when I play through it again I can do it “properly”…
I’m not normal am I???
I think the closest I’ve ever come to finishing a game 100% was OOT (finding all the bottles and heart pieces) and Wind Waker (exploring and mapping the entire great sea, finding and doing all the treasure maps, etc.) Other games…eh. Once I finish the main storyline I don’t see a point of playing the same thing again just to find everything. Probably why I love the Dynasty Warriors series so much. I can just turn my brain off and slash my way through hundreds of yellow turbans and wei/wu/shu soldiers.
I got to 99% in FF X-2 and almost threw my controller at the wall because I could not bring myself to play through the game again to try and get the 100%. Waaaaay too much blatant girl power going on in that game for me.
Sometimes completion percentages are fun, but it has to be done well. I just didn’t care about most achievements in WoW because there are so many stupid ones. “Gratz, you caught a fish!” It just got really silly after a while. I wish they would have just done achievements for the big things, and gotten rid of a lot of the stupid pointless ones.