Brad’s backlog is reaching scary heights, so is going ham on his pile of shame. He covers Empire of Ember, Don’t Forget Me, Fez and Subnautica whilst Stu tries out pseudo-VR using Vorpx, heroically defers in Bravely Default II and tests out GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon in early access. They also discuss feedback on the topic: when is a game ‘complete’?
Time Stamps
Bravely Default II (1:00)
Empire of Ember (8:40)
Don’t Forget Me (21:50)
Fez (26:30)
Subnautia (28:20)
GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon (30:35)
Discord – Completed Discussion
B0FHY
Very game dependant! For me it usually involves story completion (if there is a story) and also 100% unlocks, and all achievements too. But I tend to play the game for story first, then achievement grind it, and then play to completion or just for fun afterwards
Brent
I use the terms “beat” and “complete” differently. I say I beat a game if I’ve completed the story once, regardless if it is the true ending or not. I say I’ve completed the game if I’ve done everything to do in it. For instance, beat it on the hardest difficulty, beat it under par time, found all collectable, and seen every ending.
wev
I don’t think I’ve ever 100% a game that doesn’t feature a particular brand of Danish construction toy.
I’m mostly in it for the story, not the collectables, and if a game has multiple endings I’m normally fine with getting the one i end up with, provided it feels like a satisfying conclusion.
I’ve never been an achievement/trophies Hunter either.
Vorgot
Depends on the game. If I get very emotionally involved I’ll want to do everything. So a Persona game, I’ll always got for a platinum. But another big RPG? Getting to the end is enough. Ni No Kuni grabbed me enough to go for the Platinum though. For most games though, I’ll consider getting to the end as completion
wev
Nier Automata is an outlier, I already sort of knew it had multiple endings, though I didn’t know how many, and I knew it did these endings differently, and from playing the game Yoko Taro plays with what people expect in a game, like Kojima and Suda51, so im intrigued to see what else he does with this game
Brent
As for if it’s important, I think it’s up to the player. I don’t believe that there’s any one correct way to play. If you are having fun, then keep playing! That’s what games are for!
Brent
For me personally, I complete games for two different reasons. I will complete games that I thoroughly enjoy and have no hesitation to replay multiple times. The other is for gamerscore during challenges. There have been a few earn 10k gamerscore in X number of days to get 10k MS rewards points. I prioritize completing games due to saving HDD space, download times, switching and launching different games, etc.
moosegrinder
Completion = any story mode seen to the end. I’ve never been able to get all the achievements for any game except Horizon Zero Dawn and something I forget on the 360. I used to play a lot of games and go “I’ll see this through to the end of the story then mop up all the side bits” and I wouldn’t, without fail, just stop playing. Once the story is done my interest falls away.
Talvalin
I used to just finish games, maybe play through again on a harder difficulty if I enjoyed the game (eg: Halo), play multiplayer if it was fun (Halo 2 onwards) and stop. Then achievements came along and kind of broke things for me.
I found myself trying to do every single achievement in games, even the horrifically grindy ones in RPGs or ones with absurd multiplayer achievements like the Gears of War series. This carried on to the extent that I was using the TrueAchievements website to create boosting sessions to help with some of the more tedious kill-X-people-with-Y-in-multiplayer ones, started by Gears of War but some other notable culprits included Rainbow Six: Vegas and Condemned 2, Lost Planet etc.
Since moving to Japan in 2015, it’s been harder to set up boosting sessions at sensible times (and less so now that I’m married with a wife who is quite tolerant of my gaming but has no patience for things that cannot be paused, like the multiplayer sessions that are often the focus of a boosting session) so this kind of obsessive completion for the sake of completion has dropped off sharply, but I do find myself thinking that I should go back and complete old games in my collection instead of starting a new game that has reviewed well and I should be playing now whilst it’s still being discussed.
Knowing that I can be obsessive about games is one thing, but I’m still not entirely able to stop myself from doing this or thinking this. For example, there are some incredibly grindy achievements in Lost Planet 2, including a few leaderboard based achievements that are virtually impossible to get now because Capcom refused to reset said leaderboards and also because a few utter cunts were going around getting multiple leaderboard places even though they didn’t need them (that said, leaderboards are there to get competitive times, so this is more on Capcom for including such a ludicrous requirement). And yet, this still bugs me, more than ten years on.
