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Why Don't We Finish More Games?
IGN has an opinion piece discussing why, as video games get shorter, we seem less likely to finish them than in the past. For example, BioWare said only 50% of Mass Effect 2 players finished the campaign. The article goes into several reasons gamers are likely to drop games without beating them, such as lowered expectations, show-stopping bugs, and the ease with which we can find another game if this one doesn't suit us. Quoting:
"... now that gamers have come to expect the annualized franchise, does that limit the impetus to jump on the train knowing another one will pull up to the station soon enough? ... In the past, once you bought a game, it was pretty much yours unless you gave it to somebody else or your family held a garage sale. The systemic rise of the used games market now offers you an escape route if a game just isn't your bag. Is the middle of a game testing your patience? Then why not sell it back to your local game shop, get money back in your pocket, or trade it in for a game that's better – or at least better suited for your tastes? After all, the sooner you ditch it either at a shop or on an online auction site, the more value you stand to get in return."
because we're not 15 years old anymore?
I've been looking at my game shelves and thinking about this myself recently. Like the author(s) of TFA, I find myself completing a far lower proportion of the games I buy than I used to. Looking at the games in question, I'm starting to sense a common factor; repetition.
I think that as I get older, find work taking up more of my life and find my genuinely free time getting more and more constrained, I don't have the tolerance for repetition that I once did. This has had a pretty large impact on how likely I am to finish various types of game.
TFA begins by talking about Mass Effect 2, but to be honest, I had no problem playing through that to completion (and will likely do a second playthrough at some point in preparation for Mass Effect 3). Aside from the planet scanning (which you can ignore past the game's mid-way point quite safely), there's precious little repetition. Bioware did a great job of making all the side-missions feel pretty unique. Combined with a strong plot, I never came even close to giving up on Mass Effect 2 (nor on any other Bioware game I can remember).
I find myself strugging a lot more with Japanese RPGs these days, because that genre as a whole (and there are rare, welcome exceptions) has not yet grown out of the idea that levelling up is about running in circles for a couple of hours fighting identical monsters. I have twice tried to play through Star Ocean: The Last Hope and have run out of steam both times because of the sheer quantity of the grinding needed (the game has weird difficulty spikes - the bosses are much, much harder than anything else in the game). I struggled through the grinding in the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata because I was so deeply in love with the game's concept, plot and style, but I would have enjoyed it far more without the grinding (and I did come close to dropping it several times). Even Valkyria Chronicles, which I would rate as arguably the best game of the last 5 years, frustrated me because of the need to do multiple replays of the skirmish engagements for experience points.
I wasn't always this way. I remember playthroughs of Final Fantasy VII where I spent many hours levelling up in and around Midgar so I could beat the Midgar Zolom the first time I met him (nabbing the Beta enemy-skill far earlier in the game than you were supposed to be able to get it). But these days, the thought of doing that just makes me despair. I constantly find myself wishing that Japanese developers (and it is primarily Japanese developers at fault here) were confident enough to make a game as long as it needed to be, rather than trying to deliver the 40-60 hour playtime that they think the fanbase expects.
It's not just RPGs where I find myself increasingly intolerant of repetition. Even in action and platforming games, I hate (really, really hate) being made to replay sections I've already completed. Action games which have no quicksave function and which think it is funny to be sparing on checkpoints are likely to get dropped (Halo: Reach came close several times and had the campaign been slightly longer it probably would have). While I generally liked Mario Galaxy 2, I hated the fact that the lives system meant I found myself repeating sections of levels that I could do with my eyes closed just to get back to the section I was stuck at.
This isn't to say that repetition always means I will drop a game. Where there's a compelling enough reason, I can tolerate it. I've played through Persona 3, its FES "director's cut" and Persona 4 despite their grindy nature, just because the game's social mechanics are so unusual and compelling that I wanted to see them through. But I don't think that enforced repetition ever adds much to a game. Developers: please, work out how long your game needs to be to tell its story, deliver the gameplay experiences you want to get across etc. And then make it that long (or if you only had a 3 hour game left, you may need to go back to the drawing board and rethink your concept). Don't think that we're all sat ou
Those extra people who game now are - axiomatically - more casual gamers than the people who always gamed.
Casual gamers are less likely to finish games.
Wow, people get paid to analyse this sort of non-puzzle? I'm in the wrong job.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I think the combination of bad game mechanics and bugs can cause some games to just be too frustrating to play for some. But this coupled with the new trend in DLCs, I think most people probably feel the game was never really completed or they aren't getting their money's worth.
Mass Effect 2 for instance made me incredibly frustrated by the cover system employed (that I could avoid in ME1 using crouch), constantly getting stuck on things when trying to sprint around, and then crashed on me several times. Had I not been enjoying the story so much or been so enamored by the franchise because of the first game, I probably wouldn't have finished the game. In fact, each time I buy one of the DLCs Bioware produces I find myself getting re-frustrated by the same things after months had passed and I had forgotten about them.
Fallout 3 was also known for quite a lot of bugs, so much so that I have several friends that just stopped playing out of frustration as well. I had fond enough memories of the game that I decided to buy the DLCs and found myself getting annoyed at the same bugs and frustrating crashes all over again.
Because of these experiences, I have absolutely no plans on buying the new Fallout:Las Vegas after videos were reported of the same bugs and crashes. And depending on how they change the game-play in Mass Effect 3, I might be skipping that one as well until the "ultimate" edition with all the DLCs are on sale for less than $10.
I'm just not willing to buy a game for full price when I know it's going to make me just as frustrated at times than entertained. Not only because it feels like a waste of money that's really only getting myself annoyed, but also because these same companies are trying to subvert the game market with the DLCs. Most of the games packages that include the DLCs (like the "ultimate" edition I mentioned) also include DRM that won't let you sell it used. This drops the value of the game to me if I can't share it with a friend when I'm done or sell it if I hate it.
The more they devalue their own products by making bad decisions not only inside the game but also in business practices, the less likely they'll be successful with sales since it would be more likely drive someone will avoid buying it (either to avoid the product entirely or pirate it). While I've never pirated a game, the current trend has led me to investigate video game rentals in lieu of buying using services like OnLive or Gamefly.
Which from what I've heard, has already been eating away at game developer revenues. But as I'm trying to stress, they're doing it to themselves.
I can't speak for anyone else, but the main reason why I rarely complete games these days is 'Real Life'; much as my disposable income has disappeared with the arrival of children, so has my disposable time. Years ago I could fritter away hours at a stretch playing Civilisation, but no more. It's very rare that a game comes along these days that I can muster the enthusiasm for to invest time and effort in to complete.
The last game that I played through from beginning to end was "Enslaved: Oddesey To The West", which was an almost perfect title for me; the overall length of the game was quite short (the whole thing was completed over a couple of evenings), the learning curve for the controls was slight and it had a character-led story that I actually wanted to see through to the end. Generally though the sequence goes something like:
GTA IV is sitting on my hard drive, barely touched - I liked what I played, but I just don't have the time to spend on it. Likewise Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect 2, Arkham Asylum and so on. It took me at least three attempts to finish Bioshock (and I'm really glad that I did), but that's one of the few exceptions. Nowadays I'm finding myself playing more and more 'casual' games (Cut The Rope, Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies mostly) rather than 'serious' titles - maybe after the kids leave home and before arthritis fuses my hands into impossible shapes I'll get time to play properly again.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
Does anyone remember Myst? Great story, superb graphics (navigating through stills to provide high res scenes), and great use of Quicktime mini-windows for animation in the days before full 3D rendering. I finished that game many times.
I remember Myst. The story was barely there, not even worth mentioning compared to LucasArts and Sierra games of the time. The graphics, were prerendered not impressive. Again the hand drawn graphics from other adventure games at the time were far prettier (e.g. King's Quest IV). I will say that the design that went into it was quite good. As for the gameplay, it's about the same as a magazine rack logic puzzle book. That's OK, I guess, but I expect more from an adventure game. By taking notes, I was able to finish Myst in one sick day home from school. Other adventure games kept me busy for days or weeks.
Yeah, I remember Myst. It was my first experience with casual gamers shitting up a perfectly good genre. The success of Myst changed adventure games from interactive stories to puzzle books with illustrations. I think that is what really caused the crash of adventure gaming in the late 1990s.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm glad someone else felt the way I did about Myst. It was, quite possibly, the shittiest adventure game of all time. All the puzzles were mechanical things, you had no interactions with the only other characters, the plot was, literally, 'find six things'.
Sure, it looked nice, but that's damn easy to do with first-person still photographs.
And, yeah, it did kill the genre, although that was more other companies fault for jumping on the 'acclaim' of Myth. 'Oh, let's make adventure games with as beautiful graphics as possible. Which means we can't have characters or an interface.'
As opposed to the 3-D games which had just become possible, and were quite well received by actual adventure gamers. And as opposed to the FMV games, which weren't really catching on, but were also getting there, and actually had a chance to improve the adventure game genre. Okay, both those were slightly early, but Tex Murphy pulled it off, combining both those into a perfectly good adventure game.
Sierra, of course, saw the value and went ahead with FMV, whereas Lucas decided to go with just 3-D.
Everyone else attempted to turn adventure games into damn postcards displayed in hypercard. Myst was incredibly well selling to people who'd never bought a computer game in their life. Why, those people are the perfect customers! Let's finish developing the games we've started, and then develop a game exactly like that!
Half those damn games came out straight to the $10 rack.
Then there was the infamous problems at Sierra, causing it to be sold and dismantled, and the LucasArts just giving up on the genre because of the fact the market got flooded with crappy Myst clones, the bottom dropped out because no one was building 'adventure games' because that had come to mean 'wander around and poke things with a stick while reading a background novel you get two pages at a time', with no actual plot or characters or anything.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?