Maintaining Momentum in Games
As I stare at my huge pile of shame and the games I would like to buy once I lift my puchasing moratorium I am struck by how easily my momentum wanes in modern games. I sat and tried to put my finger on why it was that I would get halfway through a game and lose steam. To me there are several factors prevalent in modern games that cause my eyes to wander towards the many other games in my pile. Since I am planning on playing and beating as many of the games in my pile as I can the remainder of this year I want to identify what is causing these lapses in interest and adjust my play style to accomodate them.
My list, in no particular order, is as follows.
1) Forcing crappy storylines down my throat with onerous cutscenes. I'm looking at you, MGS4. I love a good story as much as the next person but lets face it, most of the plotlines in gaming are not very good. For every game that does storytelling right there are a dozen that force you to deal with long, poorly voice acted cut scenes that sap my will to play the game. Hell, even in Gears of War I was irritated when Marcus ******* Fenix would slowly walk down the hall with some generic general barking orders into his ear like Eddie Murphy's boss in Beverly Hills Cop. I don't care about your piss poor juvenile dialogue. I don't want to walk around listening to exposition. I didn't boot up Gears for a soothing bedtime story I booted up gears to shoot aliens in the face and anything that is preventing me from shooting them in the face is just irritating me. Even stories that are good can get on my nerves like Mass Effect. The story was great but there is just too much damned dialogue. I don't want to hear the exhaustive history of every single planet in the universe I want a good reason to shoot aliens in the face and then give me a gun, slap me on the ass, and let me have at it.
2) Uneven difficulty curves and/or annoying bosses. I can cope with difficult games. I can deal with a tough final boss. What I can't stomach is games that have you slog through 3 easy levels before dumping you into a battle that you haven't been prepared for. Lair did this along with a number of other games including Gears of War. A tough final boss is cool but sandwiching a difficult boss in-between easy sections of a game is poor pacing, imo. Pretty much any time a game suddenly ramps up difficulty without drilling you on the techniques you'll need to cope with the added difficulty.
3) Too much downtime. Farcry 2 bored me to tears with all the driving and respawning enemies. Killing a mindless grunt, walking 20 yards in one direction, doubling back, and then having to kill the same mindless grunt all over again was just tiresome. I hate travelling in MMOs where it is necessary and I have a hard time stomaching it in games where it serves little purpose other than padding the length of the game. Insta-travel please. If I wanted to spend all my time travelling I would have bought a flight sim.
4) Boring repitition. I can deal with doing the same thing over and over if that same thing is fun. Take the latest WOlverine game, for instance. A repititious game but there is enough novelty and variety in the button-mashing attack mechanics that it stayed fun for the entirety of the game. It's also not an overly long game which is alright with me. I don't mind repetitive game mechanics if they are done well. If they aren't then ugh. I can't think of anything I'd rather not spend my time doing than grinding levels in a JRPG. Any game that plays like an MMO without the MM aspects can get bent. Sacred is fun, yes, but it isn't two-hundred-eleventy-two levels worth of fun.
I could go on but those four are the major factors that often make me wander off to another game when I'm presented with them. So how am I going to adjust my gameplay to try to get through some of these games?
1. I'm just going to utterly ignore cutscenes unless they are mandatory. If they are mandatory the game might get moved from the pile of shame to the pile of *yawn*. Sorry Witcher but I don't feel like wandering aimlessly around the city visiting each house ten times so I can have PG-13 make out sessions with slutty looking elf nurses.
2. I am going to force myself by pain of sleepless nights to get through the tough parts in the games. None of this "oh screw it I'm going to bed" moments where I leave my game off at a very difficult part. Invariably what happens is that even if I feel like playing the game I will remember that "oh yeah I'm stuck at the SuperPenguinLand Uber boss who can only be hurt by being flipped over and struck in the belly for massive damage...screw this". No, I vow to go back and beat all those bosses currently mocking me in my pile of shame. I may have to restart the game to be good enough to tackle them but that is the price of being as awesomesauce as I am.
3. Forget games that have you spend more time preparing for battle then actually battling. I'm never going to finish Farcry 2. Never. I know this. I don't have the will to kill 1209847298 generic bad guys whilst driving for hours on end to do the same missions over and over. Can't do it.
4. I'm going to stick to it. I will embrace repitition to the point I am actively NOT enjoying myself. I think sometimes I am the cause of the repitition. Since I hop from game to game I only learn the rudimentary aspects of some of the combat mechanics. This causes repitition based solely on my limited skillset. I need to spend enough time on a game to at least become proficient at the tactics. Once I have fully mastered the combat mechanics even if the game is repititive because I'll be good enough to finish it. Ninja Gaiden comes to mind as this sort of game.
So, starting tonight as I work on my pile I'm going to have a new steely determination to bullrush through these games that I've had sitting around for the past 2 years. I intend on writing my own flavor of reviews for these games so hopefully that will give me some impetus to tough out the rough parts.
Anyway...this is my "I don't feel like going out for lunch today so I'll goof around on the intarwebz" topic. I just thought I'd share some of my thoughts and perhaps it would lend itself to further discussion.
Keep fighting the good fight my friends. That pile will one day be defeated!
Clemenstation wrote:
The De-Pedophiling Theorum of Advanced Bangburgling.
The Drunken Prophet kexx wrote:
Shalalm Baskur
At first, I felt like this.
Then, I realized the problem was that I was spending all sorts of time fighting guys that I didn't really need to fight.
In traveling from place to place, if you're in a vehicle, everyone not in a vehicle is completely inconsequential.
I spent a lot of time clearing out checkpoints. Then I realized what I needed to do was just drive on by, and listen for an engine starting. If someone hopped in a car to pursue, then I would hop on my gun and blast them as they tried to catch up to me. Then back to the driver's seat an onward.
It cut down my travel time to a tiny fraction of what I was spending otherwise.
You should follow me on Twitter: @legion
Steam: *Legion* | Xbox Live: Legion SB | PSN: Legion_SB | Origin: LegionSB
Okami had that problem. The early combat is dirt-simple, and then suddenly you're facing this absolutely brutal boss who will rip you to shreds in maybe 15 or 20 seconds. This is where you first find Okami's big balance problem -- unlimited, instant use of consumables. If you don't figure this out, you probably won't get any further, unless you're willing to spend a lot of time figuring out combat skills that won't naturally happen for another ten or twenty hours. If you do figure it out, combat becomes fairly easy for the first half to three-quarters of the game. Big problem either way.
It's really a shame that they have such a huge, huge barrier so early, because it just gets better and better the more you play. There aren't many games that start fun, but are way MORE fun at 30 hours in. I feel bad for the casual gamers that will have been stopped by that fight, because they missed a real gem.
I realize this is kind of a mixed message, that I'm both saying it sucked and was great at the same time, but IMO, that was Okami's biggest flaw. Well, that and the forced-slow dialog, which was frakking inexcusable. Normally, either of those traits would earn it a place of honor in the circular file, but damn if it wasn't ridiculously awesome anyway.
Elewis17 wrote:
This is definitely a drag, don't get me wrong, but these short hallway walking sections were actually masking load times between big setpieces.
Wait, so you're threatening to refuse to play games with cutscenes or involving travelling, but if the game does something far worse - provide vast amounts of tedious and/or frustrating gameplay - then you're going to work through it? Once again, I don't think I understand gamers who have self-destructive tendencies.
I would think the first rule of PR is to ignore forum people, because they vacillate between crazy and liar. - Elysium
*shrug* It's an individual taste sort of thing. My tolerance for repitition is greater than my tolerance for sitting in front of a game twiddling my thumbs doing nothing.
Repetitive gameplay harkens back to the NES days. Super Mario Bros was repetitive but I stuck it out and beat it. As long as the game is keeping me engaged and moving me forward I can deal with some redundant gameplay. Hell I levelled up my entire party to lvl 99 in Final Fantasy 3.
Other peoples tolerances may lie in a different area.
Besides, if I stopped playing any game that became repetitive in my pile I'd have to toss about 75% of the games. Most games to this day are repetitive on some level. My problem is that I have a bajillion games unlike the old days when I would just play one game at a time until I beat it.
Clemenstation wrote:
The Drunken Prophet kexx wrote:
To be honest, this sounds like a recipe for disaster. I know for myself (Hello Gears of War 2 Fish battle!) that when I come across an unevenly difficult piece or retarded quick-time event, by forcing myself into completing it then and there, I only feed the frustration meter until I am apoplectic with rage. What I find works for me best is to play until the frustration starts brewing. I give it 3 more goes, and if I still haven't succeeded, I force myself to quit. Otherwise it will literally ruin my mood until I lose myself in something else.
So I go off and do something else for a while, and come back. I also seem to find that putting some space in between allows my mind to digest the event subconsciously, and I typically come back and defeat the scenario after less than a handful of "breaks."
I agree with some part of this sentiment though. Particularly as I find myself with fewer available hours to game in a given week/month, I am forcing myself to limit my overall library, and focus on 1 or 2 games at a time until I complete them. This allows me to master (or at least become proficient) in their systems, and forestalls that problem whereby you are much less likely to pick up an unfinished game that sat for a while because it is daunting to re-learn all the intricacies of item use, combat, etc.
I have to agree here. Although many times that I've quit at a difficult section (or just any time, really), I don't come back for days/weeks/years/ever - even if I'm having a great time (hello Mafia, Divine Divinity, etc) - I've also noticed that quitting at a section that's stumped me or beaten me to a quivering pulp, spending some time away and then coming back often results in me defeating that enemy relatively quickly/easily, or seeing something that I missed because I had developed tunnel vision.
Game breakers in the difficulty department for me are insane final levels - I'm looking at you Far Cry - stages which are so out of whack with the difficulty of the rest of the game as to retroactively ruin the entire experience up to that point. It took me a year and probably over 100 attempts to beat Far Cry's final stage, and then only because I threw my hands up in disgust and turned on invincibility.
A massive pile
"Mario teaches them to push buttons, something they're probably going to be doing when they wind up working for McDonald's because you failed as a parent." -MechaSlinky
Especially if the final level/boss/fight uses mechanics that have never been introduced before. Example I can think of is Beyond Good and Evil - after fighting the whole game FPS-style you suddenly have this obscure quick-time-eventish fight in which you have to press the right buttons for the hits mirror-reversed. I still loved the game but this was insane. On the other hand, Zelda games always prepare you for the upcoming boss, something all the games should learn to do. Zeldas are not that obscure games anyway, one would think the designers would notice.
Robear wrote:
I'm an extremely relaxed gamer usually, but the final fight in God of War had me swearing at the TV. The whole f*cking game is based on the blades of chaos, so of course they should be taken away for the final boss and you should use a different weapon instead. Ugh.
SpacePPoliceman wrote:
Steam
Same here; I made it through the entirety of God of War on a high difficulty level (the platforming was way harder than the fighting for me) but had to drop to easy just for the last battle.
My Mercenaries (1) experience was the same as Far Cry; I cruised the game, captured every single card alive, but then got gobsmacked by the final island. Suddenly disabling your ability to use most of the money and airstrikes I'd stockpiled the whole game felt really cheap.
MilkmanDanimal wrote:
I think the point is that sometimes the length of the break is enough to be prohibitive. Sure, it makes sense to stew on a difficult section of a game for a day or two, maybe read some FAQs, but as the interlude between play sessions builds it becomes increasingly difficult to motivate yourself to go back for another helping. Then before you know it, you're onto the next game.
Was the fish battle hard? It doesn't really ever have any good opportunities to kill you; the only asshole-ish thing about the fight is tossing the grenades down the gullet. Sometimes it looks like a direct hit, but the fish disagrees.
On Insane you have to take the tentacles down right quick though. You have about 2 seconds before it pulls the boat under.
XboxLive: Clemenstation
What kuddles said.
There are too many good games to waste your time playing some poorly designed insanely difficult bit over and over. It's just another way to artificially inflate the time it takes to finish a game.
Steam: badkenbad (a.k.a. _/\ Carch, Chuda, Jritsa, Lunui, Ritsar…)
Shalalm Baskur
And these are the reasons why Portal was so perfect.
This is realy some very special kind of insanity, isn't it? Some gamedesigners create games which do a terrific job at wearing down my motivation to complete a game which seemed so promising... And I'm left with a guilty feeling that this is actualy my fault, because I'm not up to the task.