My new PC is up and running. All of the parts arrived about a week before Halloween, I put everything together on a Friday night, and I started installing drivers over the weekend. Since then, I've installed and tested a few somewhat-high-performance games, namely Crysis, Alan Wake, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, L.A. Noire, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. They all run rather well on the highest graphics settings. I've also played a bit of Metro 2033, which I got for practically nothing from the Humble THQ Bundle last November, and it performs well enough on maximum settings as well. There's some stuttering, but that's probably the result of poor optimization and there might be a fix somewhere.
For obvious reasons, I don't own any truly "next-generation" games at the moment, so I'm not sure what kind of performance I'll get out of those. In any case, however, I'm better off with this new rig than without it. My old PC worked surprisingly well with some games (running the Metro 2033 demo at a playable frame rate on low settings), but it totally failed to work with others (namely L.A. Noire which, for whatever reason, was getting about two frames per second). Games ported to Windows from the upcoming generation of consoles can certainly be expected to work my new PC much harder than anything I've played so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs. On the other hand, I can't really say I'm looking forward to seeing what my new favorite toy can't do. After all the time spent on this thing, from finding the parts to powering it on, I want to believe it's perfect.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the final parts arrived — with any luck, I wouldn't have to shop for computer parts again for a few years — but there was still plenty of stress ahead of me. The first hiccup was a return of my supposedly new Gigabyte motherboard to Amazon, since the retail box was not sealed and had some rips in the corners. In other words, it looked like it had already been opened, though the parts inside were still in plastic. Despite my complaints, however, the replacement's box was in roughly the same condition, perhaps slightly worse. Again, however, the inner parts were still in plastic.
I don't know if Amazon was trying to screw me by selling me returned hardware as new, or if Gigabyte was to blame, but I figured I could just get it replaced if it was indeed broken or damaged so I decided to use the motherboard anyway. This might prove to be a mistake, but I was getting impatient. Besides, if Amazon couldn't send me a box that looked shiny and new, I'd have to buy it from elsewhere, and I wasn't confident that other sellers would be more trustworthy than one of the biggest online retailers in existence.
So I started building the computer. Long story short, the motherboard was not dead on arrival, and I've been careful to keep all the paperwork I received for warranty purposes in case something happens later. All of the parts, in fact, seem to be working nicely, even the cheap optical drive. The process of actually assembling the computer was quite an experience, though, since I'd never done it before.
Now that I have done it, building another would probably take less than an hour, but this first build took several. Most of that time was spent reading instructions, looking up computer-building tips, and wondering how hard I need to push to get one part to slide into another. Getting the stock CPU cooler into the motherboard was particularly terrifying, because there's no way to accomplish this without pushing harder than I ever though delicate electronics should be pushed. The same was true of installing the processor itself. I was afraid I'd break it, but those fears were unfounded, since I was doing it correctly and there was no other way.
After getting all the parts into the case, I experienced another momentary freak-out when I thought the fans on the case were totally incompatible with the motherboard. (The motherboard had four-pin headers and the fans had three-pin connectors.) I was wrong — they can, in fact, be plugged in — but it doesn't really matter now anyway, because I opted to plug the case fans directly into the power supply instead. My only concern now is that I might have created air bubbles in the thermal paste when installing that troublesome CPU cooler, since I picked it up again after letting it make contact with the top of the processor. So far, however, the temperatures don't seem to be reaching dangerous levels.
Given all the minor difficulties I encountered — all of which could have been much worse with a little bit of bad luck — I completely understand why the path I chose is less traveled than others. Most people buy consoles or pre-built computers instead, and I don't blame them. Consoles, in particular, are super easy; they plug in and work. You don't have to worry about whether a game is compatible as long as it has the right logo on the box. Moreover, they're affordable, and while performance might only be "good enough" instead of great, it's hard to tell when you're sitting on a couch ten feet from the screen.
People who choose PCs over consoles are sometimes seen as elitists in the so-called "gaming" community, and it's probably because some PC users feel the need to participate in the embarrassingly pathetic "console wars" that break out between fans of competing systems. Xbox fans and Playstation fans like to argue amongst themselves about which console is best, letting their brand loyalty metamorphosize into some kind of vendetta against everyone who bought the other product as they collectively provide Microsoft and Sony with all the free advertising they could ever want. But the PC user, whose system is built from various parts by different manufacturers, doesn't necessarily have any brand loyalty unless he has an affinity for AMD over Intel, or vice versa. The stereotypically elitist "PC gamer" thinks he's above the petty squabbling of console owners, but he stoops to their level nonetheless when he proclaims that his PC is better than any console and says not-so-nice thinks about everybody who bought one. So I'm not going to do that.
It's true that a good computer can outperform any console, because a console is just a specialized computer and it's never made of the best hardware available. For the right price, a PC can surpass a brand new console on the day of release. Even a cheap PC can beat a console in mid-generation, since PC parts continue to improve while consoles stagnate for up to eight years. The PC user, in a way, is right about his system's superiority. That's why console fans who brag about graphics will usually turn around and claim that graphics don't matter once the PC guy joins the discussion. Either that, or they'll pretend it costs over $2000 to build a PC that plays console games at console-equivalent settings, or they'll insist that the only games worth playing are console exclusives.
But there's really no need to grasp at straws so desperately, because consoles do have their purpose. While a PC is good for the hardcore game enthusiast, a console is a much easier solution for casual play, most often for a lower price. A console is a hassle-free, plug-and-play, guaranteed-compatible alternative for the living room. Let's just leave it at that. I might have considered buying a console myself if I weren't in need of a new computer anyway. It was a choice between a console plus a cheap computer, or one good computer, and I chose the latter.
The worst thing about choosing a personal computer over a console is all the second-guessing that comes naturally with an abundance of choice. Now that I have my PC, I won't be buying another for a few years unless something goes terribly wrong, so I won't get to try all the other hardware presently on the market. I guess that's why some people get paid to review this hardware, but there's nothing like first-hand experience, and I'll never be able to make my own comparisons unless I go and buy more parts than I can afford. Console users have fewer decisions to make when buying their hardware, but people are generally happier this way because they don't have to worry as much about making the wrong choice.
As for me, I'll just have to clear my mind of all those what-ifs, and be content with what I have. That is, unless it breaks.
Showing posts with label deus ex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deus ex. Show all posts
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Boss Fights & The Suspension of Disbelief
I've been playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the past couple of days, and it's been an interesting experience.
Just as when I played the original Deus Ex and its slightly awkward sequel Invisible War, I'm afraid my perfectionist tendencies (though not, I'd like to think, a lack of skill) are to blame for the amount of time it's taking me to finish the game. It's hard to resist loading my last autosave every time I trip an alarm or waste an item, but part of me still knows it's more fun to improvise when facing the consequences of a stupid mistake, so I'm trying to keep the save scumming to a minimum.
In terms of item hoarding, though, I'm still hopeless, just as I am in every game with an inventory. When I bought Human Revolution, it was on sale, but so was all of the downloadable content, and like a fool I bought the whole package. The end result was an inventory full of extra stuff — a few bombs, a silenced sniper rifle, and a double-barreled shotgun — and I've been carrying it around thinking "hey, I might still use this." More generally, my inventory is full of crazy things that I've been waiting for the right time to use, and some of these things are loud and explosive.
But they're going mostly unused, because I've decided to take the non-lethal stealth approach. It seemed like the easiest option in the beginning of the game, and it continues to be the easiest option now that I've had plenty of practice at sneaking and very little practice at shooting. Like its predecessors, Human Revolution doesn't seem to encourage players to charge in with guns blazing. Perhaps this would have been a viable option if, earlier in the game, I had picked up a nice assault rifle and every combat-oriented augmentation I could afford. But I didn't, and despite my extensive experience with more generic first-person shooters, I found myself dying very quickly whenever I made the mistake of being seen.
So I stuck to sneaking around, as the developers intended, and at this point it only seemed right to avoid killing people whenever possible. My weapons of choice are a tranquilizer gun and my own metal fists. I've probably left about 150 unconscious dudes in my wake, and I hope their imaginary families appreciate it. There have been times when lethal force would have made things easier, but I've already come this far. If it takes me twice as long to complete a mission because I've committed to carefully sneaking past the guards instead of blowing them up with fragmentation grenades, so be it.
But even a non-lethal run through the game will involve some necessary bloodshed. The bosses in Human Revolution are notorious for taking that element of choice away from the player; with one exception (or so I've heard), they all must be killed. So far, I've fought two of them, and both fights were an unwelcome departure from the playstyle I had already established. Unable to sneak away or knock my enemy unconscious with a punch to the face, I was forced into a brutal fight to the death. I realized it was a good thing that I kept all those lethal weapons in my inventory instead of dropping them on the ground when I made that commitment to imaginary nonviolence.
Of course, there are always weapons lying around in the room when a boss fight occurs — the developers make sure these fights are winnable — but running around the room collecting loot (and accumulating damage) before even starting to fight back is an easy way to die.
In any case, as with most boss fights in most games, I died more than a few times in each fight before getting the hang of the enemy's attack pattern and thereby developing a viable strategy. And in each case, the strategy I ended up using wasn't exactly as fun as I hoped it would be. It wasn't the jarring transition from methodical stealth to ultra violent carnage that spoiled the experience. It was the transition from a semi-realistic world into one in which a dude can take multiple shots to the head from a high-powered sniper rifle and not die, and in which a chick can happily absorb a hundred rounds from a heavy machine gun after stepping on a couple of landmines and then blow me to pieces. Yeah, I get it, they're mechanically augmented, but so is the protagonist, and the superhuman feats do need to be kept within reason. Even metal parts can be blown up.
When I nail a guy in the head with a sniper rifle (or any other weapon) I expect him to go down, or at least be severely wounded. Even with a pure adamantium skull, he should have a concussion. If the developers want a boss fight to be challenging, they should be able to think of ways to make it so without giving the enemy so many health points that the suspension of disbelief is utterly destroyed before the fight is half-way over. If they don't want the player to blow the guy's head off in one shot, they should find a clever way to keep the player from doing so, rather than making the guy's head (along with his other parts) nearly indestructible.
I suppose a force field would have been too much of a cliché, while taking away the player's sniper rifle would have been too restrictive. Maybe there isn't a good solution. That is, maybe — just maybe — games that strive for any amount of realism shouldn't be designed with long boss fights in the first place. A fight involving firearms should be over in less than ten seconds if both parties are mortal human beings, with or without super cool prosthetics.
Human Revolution isn't the first game in the series to have boss fights. The original Deus Ex had them too, and some of these bosses also absorbed an unreasonable amount of damage. However, I distinctly remember winning one of these fights in less than a second by blowing the guy up with a few cleverly placed bombs. I walked out of the fight unscathed. It wasn't the manliest way to win, but it was what I chose to do, and it worked. Furthermore, some of the boss fights in the original Deus Ex could be avoided entirely — for example, by using ones investigative skills to uncover a killphrase which causes the enemy to self-destruct.
So why does Human Revolution force players into long, grueling battles, even when the player has chosen stealth over brute force and non-lethality over wanton destruction? I almost think the developers were under the impression that video games just need bosses, which clearly isn't the case here. I'm reminded of the Mass Effect 3 director who took a lot of heat from fans for saying that boss fights were excluded from his game because they were "just so video-gamey." He went on to explain how he didn't want to include boss fights just for the sake of having boss fights. This whole portion of the interview is ridiculous for a lot of reasons (e.g., why the heck shouldn't video games be video-gamey?), but I think having boss fights for the sake of having boss fights — happily fulfilling this particular video game trope without regard for whether it really improves a particular game or the player experience — is exactly what the Human Revolution developers have done. The game might have been better without them, or at least without the necessity of participating in them.
All in all, I think Human Revolution could have learned a lot from its predecessor. The original Deus Ex is outdated, but it still has some good ideas that could have been put to use in the prequel.
For the record, I did finish Deus Ex: Human Revolution last night. My opinion on the boss fights hasn't changed much. The game's third boss wasn't nearly as frustrating as the first two, since I'd dropped the unused double-barreled shotgun and amassed a small collection of fragmentation mines, but it still wasn't particularly fun. Based on my single brief engagement with this particular enemy, I have to surmise that he wasn't very bright. After taking a couple of hits from his plasma rifle, I simply ducked behind some nearby cover, and he just kept shooting (and missing) without attempting to move to a better position.
Since he didn't seem to be going anywhere, I started chucking those explosives at his feet, and from this point onward he was stun-locked by one explosion after another until he finally died. I would have expected him to be reduced to a fine paste after all that punishment, but instead he bled to death rather peacefully as if I'd shot him with a single well-placed bullet. In fact, that's how most of the bosses seem to die, even though killing them usually requires a whole arsenal of heavy weaponry.
Again, suspension of disbelief destroyed. But it didn't really come as a shock this time.
Only the final boss was really interesting, since the fight had multiple stages and multiple targets. This doesn't make it the most original boss fight I've ever seen — a lot of it was still "shoot this, shoot that, press this button, repeat" — but at least it didn't feel like attacking Superman with a BB gun.
Just as when I played the original Deus Ex and its slightly awkward sequel Invisible War, I'm afraid my perfectionist tendencies (though not, I'd like to think, a lack of skill) are to blame for the amount of time it's taking me to finish the game. It's hard to resist loading my last autosave every time I trip an alarm or waste an item, but part of me still knows it's more fun to improvise when facing the consequences of a stupid mistake, so I'm trying to keep the save scumming to a minimum.
In terms of item hoarding, though, I'm still hopeless, just as I am in every game with an inventory. When I bought Human Revolution, it was on sale, but so was all of the downloadable content, and like a fool I bought the whole package. The end result was an inventory full of extra stuff — a few bombs, a silenced sniper rifle, and a double-barreled shotgun — and I've been carrying it around thinking "hey, I might still use this." More generally, my inventory is full of crazy things that I've been waiting for the right time to use, and some of these things are loud and explosive.
So I stuck to sneaking around, as the developers intended, and at this point it only seemed right to avoid killing people whenever possible. My weapons of choice are a tranquilizer gun and my own metal fists. I've probably left about 150 unconscious dudes in my wake, and I hope their imaginary families appreciate it. There have been times when lethal force would have made things easier, but I've already come this far. If it takes me twice as long to complete a mission because I've committed to carefully sneaking past the guards instead of blowing them up with fragmentation grenades, so be it.
But even a non-lethal run through the game will involve some necessary bloodshed. The bosses in Human Revolution are notorious for taking that element of choice away from the player; with one exception (or so I've heard), they all must be killed. So far, I've fought two of them, and both fights were an unwelcome departure from the playstyle I had already established. Unable to sneak away or knock my enemy unconscious with a punch to the face, I was forced into a brutal fight to the death. I realized it was a good thing that I kept all those lethal weapons in my inventory instead of dropping them on the ground when I made that commitment to imaginary nonviolence.
Of course, there are always weapons lying around in the room when a boss fight occurs — the developers make sure these fights are winnable — but running around the room collecting loot (and accumulating damage) before even starting to fight back is an easy way to die.
In any case, as with most boss fights in most games, I died more than a few times in each fight before getting the hang of the enemy's attack pattern and thereby developing a viable strategy. And in each case, the strategy I ended up using wasn't exactly as fun as I hoped it would be. It wasn't the jarring transition from methodical stealth to ultra violent carnage that spoiled the experience. It was the transition from a semi-realistic world into one in which a dude can take multiple shots to the head from a high-powered sniper rifle and not die, and in which a chick can happily absorb a hundred rounds from a heavy machine gun after stepping on a couple of landmines and then blow me to pieces. Yeah, I get it, they're mechanically augmented, but so is the protagonist, and the superhuman feats do need to be kept within reason. Even metal parts can be blown up.
When I nail a guy in the head with a sniper rifle (or any other weapon) I expect him to go down, or at least be severely wounded. Even with a pure adamantium skull, he should have a concussion. If the developers want a boss fight to be challenging, they should be able to think of ways to make it so without giving the enemy so many health points that the suspension of disbelief is utterly destroyed before the fight is half-way over. If they don't want the player to blow the guy's head off in one shot, they should find a clever way to keep the player from doing so, rather than making the guy's head (along with his other parts) nearly indestructible.
I suppose a force field would have been too much of a cliché, while taking away the player's sniper rifle would have been too restrictive. Maybe there isn't a good solution. That is, maybe — just maybe — games that strive for any amount of realism shouldn't be designed with long boss fights in the first place. A fight involving firearms should be over in less than ten seconds if both parties are mortal human beings, with or without super cool prosthetics.
So why does Human Revolution force players into long, grueling battles, even when the player has chosen stealth over brute force and non-lethality over wanton destruction? I almost think the developers were under the impression that video games just need bosses, which clearly isn't the case here. I'm reminded of the Mass Effect 3 director who took a lot of heat from fans for saying that boss fights were excluded from his game because they were "just so video-gamey." He went on to explain how he didn't want to include boss fights just for the sake of having boss fights. This whole portion of the interview is ridiculous for a lot of reasons (e.g., why the heck shouldn't video games be video-gamey?), but I think having boss fights for the sake of having boss fights — happily fulfilling this particular video game trope without regard for whether it really improves a particular game or the player experience — is exactly what the Human Revolution developers have done. The game might have been better without them, or at least without the necessity of participating in them.
All in all, I think Human Revolution could have learned a lot from its predecessor. The original Deus Ex is outdated, but it still has some good ideas that could have been put to use in the prequel.
Update (November 18, 2012):
For the record, I did finish Deus Ex: Human Revolution last night. My opinion on the boss fights hasn't changed much. The game's third boss wasn't nearly as frustrating as the first two, since I'd dropped the unused double-barreled shotgun and amassed a small collection of fragmentation mines, but it still wasn't particularly fun. Based on my single brief engagement with this particular enemy, I have to surmise that he wasn't very bright. After taking a couple of hits from his plasma rifle, I simply ducked behind some nearby cover, and he just kept shooting (and missing) without attempting to move to a better position.
Since he didn't seem to be going anywhere, I started chucking those explosives at his feet, and from this point onward he was stun-locked by one explosion after another until he finally died. I would have expected him to be reduced to a fine paste after all that punishment, but instead he bled to death rather peacefully as if I'd shot him with a single well-placed bullet. In fact, that's how most of the bosses seem to die, even though killing them usually requires a whole arsenal of heavy weaponry.
Again, suspension of disbelief destroyed. But it didn't really come as a shock this time.
Only the final boss was really interesting, since the fight had multiple stages and multiple targets. This doesn't make it the most original boss fight I've ever seen — a lot of it was still "shoot this, shoot that, press this button, repeat" — but at least it didn't feel like attacking Superman with a BB gun.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Perfectionism: No Fun Allowed
I've always been a perfectionist. If I can't do something right, I don't like to do it; when I attempt any kind of work, I obsess over the details until it's just right.
I'm still not sure whether this is a good thing.
In the context of work and school, it translates to effort and dedication, but more often than not, it also slows me down. Sure, it helped me impress my art teacher in high school when most of the other students couldn't give less of a damn, and it earned me some nice grades elsewhere because I wasn't content to turn in half-assed work. Unfortunately, I think, it seems to have gotten a lot worse over the years. By the time I was (briefly) studying physics in graduate school, I found myself wasting precious time writing long solutions to complex problem sets neatly instead of getting them done quickly. As a result, I slept too little and stressed too much.
In the context of video games, my perfectionist tendencies make me a so-called completionist. If I care at all about the game I'm playing, I have a burning desire to collect every item, unlock every achievement, kill every enemy, find every secret, complete every side-quest, or get the highest possible rating on every level.
When I played Metroid Prime — a fantastic game, by the way — I couldn't resist picking up every single missile expansion and energy tank. Maybe I wouldn't have cared if not for the way the game kept track of these things and displayed them as a completion percentage, taunting the mildly obsessive among us. Getting to the end of the game and seeing anything less than 100% felt to me like a minor failure. Of course, missile expansions and energy tanks are pretty useful, so the satisfaction of truly "finishing" the game wasn't the only motivation for finding them. I have no reasonable excuse, however, for scanning every creature, every item, and every bit of Pirate Data and Chozo Lore to fill up the in-game logbook. My only reward for doing so, in the end, was access to a couple of unlockable art galleries. But it wasn't about concept art; it was about not leaving things unfinished.
Only afterwards did I realize that I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if I didn't fixate on finding every little secret. I can't even go back to the game now, because I made myself sick of it.
Games like Metroid Prime are a nightmare for completionists, but we play them anyway because we're all masochists. The really terrible part is that setting aside the carefree enjoyment of the game for the sake of a cruel meta-game in which you pick up a hundred hidden items really isn't as bad as it gets. (With the help of a good walkthrough, if you're not too proud to use it, you can complete even the most tedious item-hunting quest with relative ease.) Being a completionist becomes a real problem when the additional challenges we choose (or need) to undertake are so difficult that untold hours are swallowed up by dozens of consecutive, futile attempts with no discernible progress. In the time I wasted getting gold medals on every level of Rogue Leader and its sequel Rebel Strike, I could have played all the way through several other games. I guess the benefit here is that being a perfectionist saved me some money; I got more time out of these games than anyone ever should.
And what of achievements? I'm no fan, and it's not just because of my wacky theory that they're partly responsible for the decline of cheat codes in single-player games. I think achievements cheapen the sense of accomplishment we're supposed to feel when we do well in a game. A lot of developers have fallen into the habit of giving the player an achievement for every little task, like finishing the first level, or killing ten bad guys, or essentially — in rare and truly embarrassing cases — starting the game. (Only sometimes is this actually meant to be amusing.)
In my opinion, anything that necessarily happens during the course of a normal play-through should never be worth an achievement, but developers so often disagree. In Portal 2, fourteen of the achievements (pictured right) are unlocked simply by playing the single-player campaign. Obviously, there are other achievements in the game, but the player shouldn't need to be periodically congratulated for making regular progress.
Achievements, when done correctly, present extra challenges to the player. But even then, achievements teach players that nothing is worth doing unless there's a prize. We're not encouraged to make our own fun and set our own goals; we're encouraged to complete an arbitrary set of tasks, which may or may not include completing the game itself, attempting the harder difficulty settings, or doing anything genuinely entertaining.
But despite my philosophical objections to the idea of achievement hunting, I can't resist, especially if I only have a few achievements left after I beat the game. Unfortunately, those last few achievements tend to be the hard ones. But hey, you can't just leave the game 99% complete. You can't just leave one achievement locked. Right? Seriously, I can't be the only person who finds this absolutely intolerable.
After beating Trine, I spent far too long attempting a flawless run through the last level on the hardest difficulty to get a surprisingly difficult achievement. (I thought this game was casual!) When I played Alan Wake, I never would have bothered collecting a hundred (useless) coffee thermoses scattered throughout the game if there weren't an achievement for doing so. I even carried that damned garden gnome all the way through Half-Life 2: Episode Two. (Please kill me.)
But even I have limits; a few of the achievements in Torchlight, for example, are just too hard or too much of a grind. They're far from impossible to get, but the game will stop being fun long before you get them, and if you play for the achievements, you'll become suicidal in no time. (Big fans of the game might disagree; most of the achievements will be unlocked naturally if you're okay with playing the game for 150+ hours, but catching 1000 fish just isn't worth anyone's time.)
Similarly, I have no interest in finding every flag in Assassin's Creed, or every feather in Assassin's Creed II, and I don't know why anyone ever would. Even as a hopeless completionist, I can usually tell when attaining 100% completion in a game will lead to more frustration than satisfaction. There's already so much (repetitive) stuff to do in the Assassin's Creed games that I can't imagine why they thought it would be a good idea to throw in a few hundred useless collectibles as well.
Just to bother me, I'm sure.
Collectible items and other tertiary objectives can be good for replay value, but when they extend the playtime beyond the point where the game loses all appeal and becomes a chore — when even a completionist such as myself doesn't want to try — it's just bad game design.
Being a perfectionist doesn't just mean being a completionist. My first play-through of Deus Ex took twice as long as it should have taken, but only because I developed a terrible habit of loading quicksaves constantly, not to avoid dying but to avoid wasting lockpicks, multitools, medkits, and ammo. If I missed a few times while trying to shoot a guy in the face, I couldn't just roll with it and keep going. I went back and tried again. If I picked open a lock and there was nothing useful behind that door, I loaded my save. (And of course, at the end of the game, my inventory was full of stuff I never got to use, but item hoarding is another issue entirely.)
My tendency to needlessly replay sections of a game is probably worst when friendly NPCs can be killed by the enemies. Even if their survival doesn't affect me in the slightest, I often feel the need to keep them alive, and I'm more than willing to reload a save if even a single one of them die. (This used to happen a lot when I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, but eventually I learned that it's sometimes best to save my ammo, let my fellow stalkers die, and scavenge their bodies afterwards. Such is life in the Zone.)
Reloading a save when you haven't lost might seem strange, depending on your play style, but some games encourage this type of behavior with optional objectives that are easily botched. Take the Hitman series, for example. You could choose to walk into nearly any mission with a big gun and simply shoot up the place, but the highest ratings are reserved for players who never get seen, fire no unnecessary shots, and kill no one but the primary targets.
This usually isn't easy, because save scumming isn't an option. The first Hitman game doesn't allow saves in mid-level, and the sequels only allow a certain number of saves per mission, depending on difficulty level. This makes perfecting a mission even more painful, and in my opinion, it's another example of bad game design. While I can see why they would want to prevent players from abusing the save system (thereby adding some real difficulty and making the game more "hardcore"), this is kind of a cruel thing to do with such a slow-paced game that involves so much trial-and-error. If you don't save often enough, you might end up repeating several minutes of sneaking at a snail's pace to get back to where you were.
Somehow, I did manage to master every mission in the second and third games, but I don't recommend it. Having to kill a guy and dispose of his body on the fly because he saw you picking a lock is fun, but in the interest of earning the highest rating, I always had to start over instead. When you try to play Hitman perfectly, it's tedious and time-consuming, and essentially requires you to memorize each map. No fun allowed.
As a result of all this, my extensive backlog of unfinished games is only slightly longer than the list of games I've been meaning to replay without hitting the quickload button and without going off-course to satisfy my obsessive completion disorder. (The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are near the top of that list, but I'd also like to replay those when I get a better computer, which isn't happening any time soon.) Games are more fun when they're played at a natural pace, and I wish it weren't so hard for me to ignore the little distractions along the way.
The best advice I can give to fellow perfectionists, after some soul searching of my own, is the following:
1) Get a screwdriver and pry the quickload button off of your keyboard. Alternatively, I suppose, you could simply go to the control settings and unmap the quickload function. If you can't unmap it, just remap it to a key on the far side of the keyboard, and then promptly forget which key that is. Quicksaving constantly is fine — I won't judge you — but you shouldn't be reloading a save unless you die.
2) Play through the game as quickly as you can; do only the bare minimum. This is normally something I'd discourage, because I believe that games should be enjoyed, not rushed. But if you're getting bored with games before you finish them because you're spending so much time trying to do every side-quest or collect all the items, stop it. Start over. Enjoy the game at its intended pace before you ruin it by attempting a frustrating scavenger hunt. These things are there for your second play-through, and if the game isn't good enough to warrant a second play-through, the optional stuff isn't worth your time.
3) Don't read the list of achievements before you play the game. If you read them, you'll try to get them. Achievement hunting is for replay value, and if it's your first priority, you need to rethink your entire outlook on life. Again, if the game isn't good enough to warrant a second play-through, the achievements aren't worth your time.
I'm still not sure whether this is a good thing.
In the context of work and school, it translates to effort and dedication, but more often than not, it also slows me down. Sure, it helped me impress my art teacher in high school when most of the other students couldn't give less of a damn, and it earned me some nice grades elsewhere because I wasn't content to turn in half-assed work. Unfortunately, I think, it seems to have gotten a lot worse over the years. By the time I was (briefly) studying physics in graduate school, I found myself wasting precious time writing long solutions to complex problem sets neatly instead of getting them done quickly. As a result, I slept too little and stressed too much.
In the context of video games, my perfectionist tendencies make me a so-called completionist. If I care at all about the game I'm playing, I have a burning desire to collect every item, unlock every achievement, kill every enemy, find every secret, complete every side-quest, or get the highest possible rating on every level.
The Dangers of Completionism
When I played Metroid Prime — a fantastic game, by the way — I couldn't resist picking up every single missile expansion and energy tank. Maybe I wouldn't have cared if not for the way the game kept track of these things and displayed them as a completion percentage, taunting the mildly obsessive among us. Getting to the end of the game and seeing anything less than 100% felt to me like a minor failure. Of course, missile expansions and energy tanks are pretty useful, so the satisfaction of truly "finishing" the game wasn't the only motivation for finding them. I have no reasonable excuse, however, for scanning every creature, every item, and every bit of Pirate Data and Chozo Lore to fill up the in-game logbook. My only reward for doing so, in the end, was access to a couple of unlockable art galleries. But it wasn't about concept art; it was about not leaving things unfinished.
Only afterwards did I realize that I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if I didn't fixate on finding every little secret. I can't even go back to the game now, because I made myself sick of it.
Games like Metroid Prime are a nightmare for completionists, but we play them anyway because we're all masochists. The really terrible part is that setting aside the carefree enjoyment of the game for the sake of a cruel meta-game in which you pick up a hundred hidden items really isn't as bad as it gets. (With the help of a good walkthrough, if you're not too proud to use it, you can complete even the most tedious item-hunting quest with relative ease.) Being a completionist becomes a real problem when the additional challenges we choose (or need) to undertake are so difficult that untold hours are swallowed up by dozens of consecutive, futile attempts with no discernible progress. In the time I wasted getting gold medals on every level of Rogue Leader and its sequel Rebel Strike, I could have played all the way through several other games. I guess the benefit here is that being a perfectionist saved me some money; I got more time out of these games than anyone ever should.
The Need to Achieve
And what of achievements? I'm no fan, and it's not just because of my wacky theory that they're partly responsible for the decline of cheat codes in single-player games. I think achievements cheapen the sense of accomplishment we're supposed to feel when we do well in a game. A lot of developers have fallen into the habit of giving the player an achievement for every little task, like finishing the first level, or killing ten bad guys, or essentially — in rare and truly embarrassing cases — starting the game. (Only sometimes is this actually meant to be amusing.)In my opinion, anything that necessarily happens during the course of a normal play-through should never be worth an achievement, but developers so often disagree. In Portal 2, fourteen of the achievements (pictured right) are unlocked simply by playing the single-player campaign. Obviously, there are other achievements in the game, but the player shouldn't need to be periodically congratulated for making regular progress.
Achievements, when done correctly, present extra challenges to the player. But even then, achievements teach players that nothing is worth doing unless there's a prize. We're not encouraged to make our own fun and set our own goals; we're encouraged to complete an arbitrary set of tasks, which may or may not include completing the game itself, attempting the harder difficulty settings, or doing anything genuinely entertaining.
But despite my philosophical objections to the idea of achievement hunting, I can't resist, especially if I only have a few achievements left after I beat the game. Unfortunately, those last few achievements tend to be the hard ones. But hey, you can't just leave the game 99% complete. You can't just leave one achievement locked. Right? Seriously, I can't be the only person who finds this absolutely intolerable.
After beating Trine, I spent far too long attempting a flawless run through the last level on the hardest difficulty to get a surprisingly difficult achievement. (I thought this game was casual!) When I played Alan Wake, I never would have bothered collecting a hundred (useless) coffee thermoses scattered throughout the game if there weren't an achievement for doing so. I even carried that damned garden gnome all the way through Half-Life 2: Episode Two. (Please kill me.)
Too Much of a Bad Thing
But even I have limits; a few of the achievements in Torchlight, for example, are just too hard or too much of a grind. They're far from impossible to get, but the game will stop being fun long before you get them, and if you play for the achievements, you'll become suicidal in no time. (Big fans of the game might disagree; most of the achievements will be unlocked naturally if you're okay with playing the game for 150+ hours, but catching 1000 fish just isn't worth anyone's time.)
Similarly, I have no interest in finding every flag in Assassin's Creed, or every feather in Assassin's Creed II, and I don't know why anyone ever would. Even as a hopeless completionist, I can usually tell when attaining 100% completion in a game will lead to more frustration than satisfaction. There's already so much (repetitive) stuff to do in the Assassin's Creed games that I can't imagine why they thought it would be a good idea to throw in a few hundred useless collectibles as well.
Just to bother me, I'm sure.
Collectible items and other tertiary objectives can be good for replay value, but when they extend the playtime beyond the point where the game loses all appeal and becomes a chore — when even a completionist such as myself doesn't want to try — it's just bad game design.
Self-Imposed Perfection
Being a perfectionist doesn't just mean being a completionist. My first play-through of Deus Ex took twice as long as it should have taken, but only because I developed a terrible habit of loading quicksaves constantly, not to avoid dying but to avoid wasting lockpicks, multitools, medkits, and ammo. If I missed a few times while trying to shoot a guy in the face, I couldn't just roll with it and keep going. I went back and tried again. If I picked open a lock and there was nothing useful behind that door, I loaded my save. (And of course, at the end of the game, my inventory was full of stuff I never got to use, but item hoarding is another issue entirely.)
My tendency to needlessly replay sections of a game is probably worst when friendly NPCs can be killed by the enemies. Even if their survival doesn't affect me in the slightest, I often feel the need to keep them alive, and I'm more than willing to reload a save if even a single one of them die. (This used to happen a lot when I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, but eventually I learned that it's sometimes best to save my ammo, let my fellow stalkers die, and scavenge their bodies afterwards. Such is life in the Zone.)
Reloading a save when you haven't lost might seem strange, depending on your play style, but some games encourage this type of behavior with optional objectives that are easily botched. Take the Hitman series, for example. You could choose to walk into nearly any mission with a big gun and simply shoot up the place, but the highest ratings are reserved for players who never get seen, fire no unnecessary shots, and kill no one but the primary targets.
This usually isn't easy, because save scumming isn't an option. The first Hitman game doesn't allow saves in mid-level, and the sequels only allow a certain number of saves per mission, depending on difficulty level. This makes perfecting a mission even more painful, and in my opinion, it's another example of bad game design. While I can see why they would want to prevent players from abusing the save system (thereby adding some real difficulty and making the game more "hardcore"), this is kind of a cruel thing to do with such a slow-paced game that involves so much trial-and-error. If you don't save often enough, you might end up repeating several minutes of sneaking at a snail's pace to get back to where you were.
Somehow, I did manage to master every mission in the second and third games, but I don't recommend it. Having to kill a guy and dispose of his body on the fly because he saw you picking a lock is fun, but in the interest of earning the highest rating, I always had to start over instead. When you try to play Hitman perfectly, it's tedious and time-consuming, and essentially requires you to memorize each map. No fun allowed.
Fixing Bad Habits
As a result of all this, my extensive backlog of unfinished games is only slightly longer than the list of games I've been meaning to replay without hitting the quickload button and without going off-course to satisfy my obsessive completion disorder. (The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are near the top of that list, but I'd also like to replay those when I get a better computer, which isn't happening any time soon.) Games are more fun when they're played at a natural pace, and I wish it weren't so hard for me to ignore the little distractions along the way.
The best advice I can give to fellow perfectionists, after some soul searching of my own, is the following:
1) Get a screwdriver and pry the quickload button off of your keyboard. Alternatively, I suppose, you could simply go to the control settings and unmap the quickload function. If you can't unmap it, just remap it to a key on the far side of the keyboard, and then promptly forget which key that is. Quicksaving constantly is fine — I won't judge you — but you shouldn't be reloading a save unless you die.
2) Play through the game as quickly as you can; do only the bare minimum. This is normally something I'd discourage, because I believe that games should be enjoyed, not rushed. But if you're getting bored with games before you finish them because you're spending so much time trying to do every side-quest or collect all the items, stop it. Start over. Enjoy the game at its intended pace before you ruin it by attempting a frustrating scavenger hunt. These things are there for your second play-through, and if the game isn't good enough to warrant a second play-through, the optional stuff isn't worth your time.
3) Don't read the list of achievements before you play the game. If you read them, you'll try to get them. Achievement hunting is for replay value, and if it's your first priority, you need to rethink your entire outlook on life. Again, if the game isn't good enough to warrant a second play-through, the achievements aren't worth your time.
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