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.
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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.