I don’t like completing games. I used to; for
a few years in the early 2010s—god that makes me sound old—I put a lot of time into achievement
and trophy hunting, and to clarify that's what I mean when I say completing a game— just getting
all of the trophies or achievements in a title. I completed stuff largely for one of two reasons.
The first being that I enjoyed playing them so much that I wanted to stay in those worlds for
as long as I could, and working through the achievement list got me to spend far more time in
them. And the second being that when I finished a game, I had a pretty high percentage of trophies
done, so I figured I’d just knock the rest out. With nearly every game though, by the time I
completed it, I kind of hated it. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and despite how much I may have
loved a game, it’s impossible to look back without some frustration. The best memories of the game
faded away and were replaced with the most mundane and tedious bits of gameplay. Whether it be
getting feather in Assassin’s Creed II or waiting in empty lobbies so I could complete the co-op
levels in Far Cry 3 or grinding out play after play trying to stay in the pocket for 10 seconds
in Madden 11 (why did I get this platinum), there’s almost always something about a completion
run that leaves me wondering if I would have enjoyed the game more had I stopped playing
after initially beating it. To complete a game, players often have to engage with it in a
way that is different from what most likely convinced them to complete it in the first place.
It goes from being a game to being a checklist, and while I end up playing for longer, I
rarely get more value from that extra time. The reality is that most titles aren’t
designed around being completed, and yeah, they shouldn’t be. Completionists
make up a tiny percentage of players, and given that most people who
start a game don’t even finish it, putting a ton of focus on making a title that is
enjoyable to 100% is low on the priority list. With that all said, every game on Xbox and
Playstation are required to have achievements, and almost every title on steam has them as
well, so regardless of whether or not they really want to, developers have to put some thought
into the completion criteria of their game, and depending on how they approach this,
it could inadvertently end up wasting a ton of time for players who choose to complete it. And
as is customary for a Razbuten videos like this, I imagine a handful of you are saying: if you
don’t like completing games, then just don’t do it. And that is fair, but it isn’t taking into
consideration that I have a lizard brain that tricks me into thinking it would be a good idea
to get all of the achievements in games I like. So, with all that in mind, I wanted to examine
what goes into games that are actually worthwhile to complete and try to figure out what sorts of
things actually deserve to be achievements, so to get a fuller picture I reached out to a handful
of developers as well as someone who has 100%ed more titles than anyone else on the planet
(probably), Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil. And I found in all the conversations I
had that the heart of making completion enjoyable starts with finding ways
to connect the journey to the reward. “That to me is the most important part is 1)
how cohesively the piece is from start to finish and 2) with completion in mind and completion
criteria outlined, is it worth that extra investment, that extra polish, that extra time, to
get to that golden pot at the end of the rainbow.” With certain tasks, being rewarded with just an
achievement isn't enough. When titles have me doing things like gathering collectibles for
the sake of gathering collectibles, I almost always either end up resenting the game for
wasting my time or quit. In order for me to feel like my time is being well spent, I want
some sort of reward that impacts gameplay in a meaningful way. A series that is pretty bad
about this is Uncharted. Take Lost Legacy; there’s a section called the Western Ghats. It’s a
non-linear area that allows players to explore at their own pace, and there’s an optional quest
to collect 11 tokens that are used to fill up a mysterious wall, and the reward for doing so
is a bracelet that alerts the player when other treasure is nearby. As the Uncharted series
doesn’t have any sort of permanent upgrades, this is about as good of a reward as
I should have expected, but I still somehow felt let down by it. The item makes
it easier to get all the collectibles, but after spending a few hours roaming the Western
Ghats to complete the sidequest, the last thing I wanted to do was scour the area again just to
clean up the treasures I had missed. Knowing that this kind of reward would be the most useful
thing I’d get in return for finding every secret, it didn’t feel worthwhile and made me question
why these kinds of collectibles were in the game at all beyond giving me a meaningless
task that would pad out my playtime. The best way to help curb this sort of feeling
is by providing meaningful rewards throughout the process. Take Ori and the Will of the Wisps.
The various collectibles spread throughout the map are used to either upgrade Ori, in the form of
increasing health, energy, and abilities, or rebuild the wellspring glades, which changes how
the area looks, unlocks sidequests and pathways to other areas, and almost always gives the player
one of the upgrade for Ori as well. On top of that, as the game gets progressively harder, the
best way to get past difficulty spikes, aside from just getting good, is to find more upgrades,
which means it is always on the player’s mind. “When you design the game in such a way that every little trip you take off the beaten path gives
you something beneficial for your main objective, you almost turn everybody into a
little bit of a completionist I think.” By tying character progression to exploration and
discovery, it not only makes it more likely that players will want to search every nook and cranny
of a map, but it also leads to them feeling more satisfied for putting in the time to do so than
they would have had they just gotten a thumbs up. With all that said, I do want to clarify that
while this kind of approach makes completion more enjoyable, I don’t necessarily think it is always
the right design choice. For example, take Breath of the Wild. The major collectible in the game are
the Korok seeds, which are densely packed across Hyrule, making it nearly impossible to not stumble
upon some secret with every step Link takes. This leads to the world feeling full and encourages
players to explore anywhere that seems interesting as it not only leads to a fun puzzle but also
has the useful reward of more inventory slots. The thing is there are 900 korok seeds, which is
far too many to collect. And that’s because they aren’t meant to all be collected. There are
so many because the developers wanted players to constantly encounter these little moments of
mystery while playing no matter where they went, and by having so many korok seeds, they ensured
that would happen. This choice makes 100%ing Breath of the Wild a maddening experience, but I
don’t think it was the wrong choice because had they scaled back the number of Korok seeds, the
world would have far less magic to it. Nintendo doesn’t have achievements, but I have been
wondering if they did whether or not collecting every Korok seed would be an achievement or not.
Given that the reward for getting them all is a golden piece of shit I assume the devs don’t
think it is worthwhile to gather all of them, I imagine they wouldn’t, because including it as an
achievement might encourage more players to do it, which most likely would lead to a lot more people
leaving Breath of the Wild with negative feelings. Obviously, the argument could be made that
excluding an achievement like that would technically not be completing the game, and
that ties into another thing that came up in all of the conversations I had: which was
that when it comes to creating completion criteria for trophies and achievements, it
isn’t really about having players experience all of the content; it’s about encouraging
them to interact with it in interesting ways. “We’ll come up with a bunch of ideas based
on what we think will be cool with the feats. It’s more pointing at a feature of the game
that we want players to see that is weird. So when you read the feats list, you’re like
“what, I didn’t even know that was there.” The best achievements give players a reason to
keep playing beyond just wanting to check things off a list. They get people to approach things
from a different angle by promoting playstyles that the developers find interesting. When done
right it not only makes the process of completing a game more engaging, but it also gives players a
new appreciation for how the game can be played. For example, a few of the achievements in Hades
got me to experiment with various keepsakes, which called for me to approach rooms in
dramatically different ways whether it was playing it safe as to not take any damage
or going balls to the walls to clear a room as quickly as possible. This actually led
to me discovering my favorite build of the plume feather and fists to get up to a stupidly
high dodge percentage and make Hades look like an idiot. Fuck you dad. An achievement in Shovel
Knight pushed me to become a pseudo-speedrunner, and I started to look at what I originally
thought was a slow-paced platformer in an entirely new lens. And the ones in
Bloodborne actually convinced me to do the chalice dungeons which turned out to
be some of my favorite late-game content. Of course, achievements are a double-edged
sword. While their ability to encourage players to engage in certain behaviors can lead
to positive experiences, it can also push players to engage with some of the most uninteresting
and tedious aspects of a game if done poorly. “So yeah, it’s like not giving the player the
right amount of control, breaking the spirit of the game, being to homogenous, being too
much of a time or skill commitment, and, like, these are all really subjective things, which I
think kinda just shows that this is a interesting part of design. This is not just a afterthought
that a lot of people maybe consider it is. It’s this aspect of giving a player a full meal, and
like sometimes that’s not articulated well.” With achievements, there are a lot of these
little traps that many developers fall into, and they end up getting players
to try to chase challenges that they don’t have much control over,
which sort of defeats the purpose “I think some of the things we avoid is
anything that’s based on randomness. We want the player to feel like it’s attainable
and understandable from the beginning, it’s not something that’s just
like, “find the red thing.” There’s an achievement in Dark Souls called
Knight’s Honor, and it asks players to acquire all the rare weapons. This calls for them to do
multiple playthroughs in order to collect boss souls to make the various weapons, which I think
is perfectly fine. The issue comes from weapons that can only be acquired from random drops;
to get the achievement players need to grind certain areas and hope for the right drop. And
this doesn’t lead to fun gameplay. I know because I spent over 8 hours in the Duke’s Archives
killing the same 3 channelers over and over praying for that 1% drop to come
before I ran out of brain cells. Once I got it, I didn’t feel like I had
experienced more of the game; and I wasn’t particularly proud that I had finally gotten the
drop; I mostly just felt dumb for wasting my time. One of the biggest complications with
achievements is that due to them being relatively new there is no real consensus on who
they should be tailored towards. I imagine a lot of people would say that they should be made
for completionists who want to get recognition for doing every challenge a game has to offer,
no matter how tedious. I would argue that they shouldn’t be. I have no data to back this
up so take it with all the salt you have, but from what I’ve seen the vast majority of
people who get 100% of the achievements or trophies in a title aren’t all that concerned
about engaging with every aspect of a game; instead they just want to extend their time with
it in a meaningful way while still having some sort of definitive stopping point and recognition
for the extra effort. Also, alternatively, some people just want a really high
gamerscore, but I think the same ideas apply. Achievements provide developers with
the opportunity to outline what they believe is worthwhile for players to complete, and I think having curated completion criteria
that doesn’t simply ask players to do everything and instead directs them towards all of the best
things is what developers should strive to do. Admittedly, this is a lofty goal that
skews towards my personal preferences, and maybe this is something only I want. I’d be
wager a guess that more traditional completionists would prefer for achievements to reflect the full
scope of a game, which is fair. I just think that there is a camp of people who want more out of
a game than just finishing it but also have no interest in doing menial tasks that don’t reflect
what made the game great in the first place. I do want to make it clear that I
recognize that when it comes to me not enjoying the process of completing
games, I am part of the problem. It takes a certain kind of person and approach to
enjoy completing a game, and through talking to Jirard I realized that one of my biggest issues
came from how I went about it. With the vast majority of titles, I only decided to complete
them after beating the main story, which made it so the achievement clean-up felt separate from
the core of the game. I did tasks without a whole lot of rhyme or reason, and inevitably felt
unsatisfied when my final moment with a game was grabbing a note that I had missed earlier.
It felt like a checklist because I made it one instead of finding a way to have the journey of
completing a game be a narrative in and of itself. “So to me, the idea of how you approach a game
in completing it is a narrative in itself. So, if you are the kind of person that’s
like ‘I want to be the maximum level character by the end of the game,’ you
have to plan in advance how that goes. That narrative process of building out those
things is so much more fascinating to me than the prospects of just getting to the end of a game
and then thinking about starting to complete it.” This sort of approach where conscious
thought goes into the order and strategy behind completing a game leads to a far more
satisfying result than just kind of going for it. In the spirit of making my own narrative of
completion, a few months back I decided to play and complete Hades. So I put a lot of thought into
how I’d approach each achievement, and I did what I could to structure my playthrough in a way that
ended on the most exciting note which was doing a 16 heat-run, and I know a lot of your probably
don’t think a 16 heat-run is all that impressive, but please give me credit, I need more validation.
I think the nature of it being a roguelike helped mitigate some of the typical obstacles I bump
into when completing games as the whole point is to play it over and over, but planning
out the best and most interesting way to get through the achievements made the process a
lot more engaging throughout. It is one of the few games that I’ve ever completed where I walked
away appreciating it more because I completed it. I don’t think this approach works for
every title, but I do think it helps. WIth that said, for it to work, players
need either go into a game planning to complete it or decide pretty
early on that they’d like to, and personally, I don’t have the time, patience
or interest to complete every title I play. I hope as time goes on, developers continue
to shift how they look at achievements, and instead of basing them around aspects
that really aren’t meant to be completed, they look at ways to highlight what makes a
game good and get players to do more of it. While I don’t complete nearly as
many games these days as I used to, I do find myself getting pulled into that trap
about once a year, and so far, it almost always ends up the same way as the rest with me never
wanting to think about a game I adore again. So for now, all I can do is try to ignore the
voice in my head that’s telling me to complete any game I have an emotional connection to,
and then pray that when it eventually does convince me to to go for that 100%, whatever
game I’m playing is actually worth completing. And speaking of things being worth it, let me
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Thanks again to Raycon for sponsoring this video. For all of you still watching...did you like
the twist at the end of Sixth Sense. Like, it’s dramatic I guess, but also it makes a
lot of stuff in the movie not really make sense? I don’t know. Uh I guess have a good day
and/or night and I will see you in the next one.
I also watched it. It’s really good
I really enjoyed that. I wonder what he thinks of communities like this, PlayStation trophies, etc. Clearly we are as minority but it sure would be nice if developers would quit wasting our time with bullshit trophies.