A Kotaku's Article last week about Portal 2's completion got me thinking about completing games. It reminded of a topic I've always want to talk about: "The (Non) Completionist Syndrome".
The short version of the article goes like this: From the Portal 2 Completion Page, apparently 10% of players miss out on the first achievement in the single player game (which is obtained within 10 minutes of starting the game) and 50% have gotten the first achievement in the co-op game. The completion number drops to 50% and 25% for the end game achievements, respectively. Let's suppose that single player and co-op play is mutually exclusive (which they aren't), this still means that at least 25% of players gave up on finishing the game. (For the record, I've finished single player; haven't started multiplayer).
If you know me, you know that I've been terrible with completing games. If you check my Backloggery, you'll noticed that at best I've finished 15% of my games. My TrueAchievement listing shows a much worse pattern: I rarely get the game started (and this pattern holds true for all other platforms as well). Sure, I'm a terrible person, but maybe I'm not the only one?
I've attended and read a few GDC talks that says otherwise: Bruce Phillips' of Microsoft Research and Jesse Divnich of EEDAR both arrived at a similar conclusion: Most people don't finish their games. Bigger, shorter, and more popular AAA titles have a slightly better chance of being finished, but an overwhelming majority don't. Obviously there's no clear answer why this is the case, but knowing this fact should give designers ways to re-examine what they do: Are people abandoning the games because the difficulty spikes are too high? Is the game getting too repetitive? Maybe the game became uninteresting? Or perhaps the player has "already experienced it all" and feels no desire to play anymore? Whatever the symptom is, it's an interesting fact, and it's something I hope designers and developers take a hard look at and try to address.
Or perhaps there's a simpler, easier explanation: we've becoming a society with ultra-short attention spans, and frankly, something as well done as Portal 2 still isn't good enough to hold our attention span to the end.
Oh well, their loss...
I think no matter what happens, there will be players who just won't finish a game for any given reason.
ReplyDeleteMaking games shorter so they're more completeable might be an option, but when you look at longer titles like DragonAge or Fallout 3, they still have the content for those who do want to prolong their playthrough.
In fact, I'd suggest that players who completed and really enjoyed DragonAge and Fallout 3 only did so because they played beyond the necessary mission tree.
I do agree that having more players complete the game should be a goal in game design. However, I think that should be something considered in preproduction and early production, and not something as crude as paring down content, or 'streamlining for accessibility' (read: over simplifying) later in development.
Maybe I overstated my reach: I don't think games needs to have "completion" as a main goal for all games. Is there "completion" in Wii Sports? Sure, unlock all events. But in that game, the experience of the game itself is the point. In this light, games that are heavy story/event driven (Heavy Rain, LA Noire, Braid, to name a few) should have completion as a goal.
ReplyDeleteI look at GTA and Saints Row as a great example of two games in the same genre that look at this issue with opposing views: As sandbox open world games, GTA strives to push players along for the ride, the story; Saints Row says, hey, here are some toys, go mess around. Personally, I have yet to properly finish either game's latest incarnation, but I feel I've gotten way more out of Saints Row by experiencing it. For me, I feel guilty of not having finished GTA4, but also not wanting to dread through the gameplay's handholding just to finish the story.
"...something as well done as Portal 2 still isn't good enough to hold our attention span to the end."
ReplyDeleteI think it also depends on what that player is looking for. If some dudebro who mainly plays CoD picks up Portal, expecting some kind of combat, it's likely that he'll be disappointed at the lack of it throughout the entire game.
"GTA strives to push players along for the ride, the story; Saints Row says, hey, here are some toys, go mess around."
I think GTA relies very heavily on its story, where Saints Row, like you said, hands out toys to activities. However, that being said, if the gameplay in GTA isn't very good (or gets old fast), people are going to want to advance the story without playing the game. And if playing the game is going to be no fun, then the game isn't going to be completed.
Which brings me back to the point that "completion" should be considered during preproduction. I know there's such a thing as gaming beyond completion, like in sports titles or puzzle games, but even if we're not talking about games with a defined ending, we should be trying to identify what makes people enjoy a game, and want to play beyond completion. That's the goal of every game mechanic, I think.
"I think it also depends on what that player is looking for. If some dudebro who mainly plays CoD picks up Portal, expecting some kind of combat, it's likely that he'll be disappointed at the lack of it throughout the entire game. "
ReplyDeleteIn this case, it's a mismatch of the market entirely. There's not much any designer can do about that. If someone's who's never played a fighting game and jumped into Street Fighter, they either learn quickly to what fighting games are, or will be left in the cold. You can handhold them to a point, but as an interactive medium, if the audience isn't willing to give it a chance, there's not much a game can do, right?
"Which brings me back to the point that "completion" should be considered during preproduction. I know there's such a thing as gaming beyond completion, like in sports titles or puzzle games, but even if we're not talking about games with a defined ending, we should be trying to identify what makes people enjoy a game, and want to play beyond completion. That's the goal of every game mechanic, I think."
It's nice to think that it can be considered during pre-production, but how would you anticipate changes in between? I'll confess now, I haven't dug into Alan Wake as much as I have, but from everything I've seen, it seems that the game veered from a story driven game to a much more mechanically focused, gameplay orientated design. What happens when you plan out a game where "story driven experience" was thought to be the lead, only to have the core mechanics be the more influential factor in design?
GTA4 was horrible. The story was slow and over-gritty, the cars you had at the beginning drove like shit, and you couldn't just explore and rampage right from the get go without painfully completing enough of the game to unlock anything decent. They took all the fun out of it. I tried multiple times but just could not keep playing the game, so I don't blame you for not finishing it either. If you're not having fun, why continue playing the game?
ReplyDeleteIn long games like Oblivion, I don't think completion should be the goal. You can get so much more out of a game like that than a typical standard game and still not even be 1/3 of the way done.
Even though I sort of try to 100% every game, even bad games I hate, if I'm not getting anything more from a game, I quit it. In order for people to complete games, games have to be fun from the beginning to the end, and not stagnate anywhere. Plus, if it's too easy to beat a game, is there really any fun in it?
You've sort of hit on the same point with my experience with GTA4. I should try the expansions and see how those fared.
ReplyDelete