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Following todays session yelling at the cheaty funt botcars in RR6, was wondering when other dakka folk consider a game finished

My benchmark is generally completing the main story, usually dont go back chasing secrets and wotnot, Lego games are a slight exception as due to the design finishing the storymode is usually only 50-60% of the game

Have at it

Greatly depends on the game. . .

Bog standard Call of Battlefield game, its completing the story.

Auto Racing games, whenever I finally get bored of it, or a new version comes along.

Games like Skyrim I dont know that I've ever "finished" the game in the sense that I put it down and dont ever come back to it. . . A game like that, I come up with a character in my head and play out "their story". . . this means sometimes I skip the bards college while doing companions/DB stuff. Or, I'll do the bards thing and the mage school, but forgo the fighty stuff in the companions.

Depends on the game and genre (and how fun it is).

RPGs my default is to do multiple playthroughs and try to do everything. Sometimes the game frustrates that desire, with unfun sections that are just horrible to play through.

As do multiple restarts as I learn the system and go for a different character then what I originally intended. Sometimes I just don't have the will to go through the early game again.

Dragon Age Inquisition had both of these flaws, for example. I started with rogue, but hated it, and replays of the game always grind to halt at the French dance party in the capital sequence, as its randomly on a point based timer.

But finishing the story is usually a minimum, as are most of the sidequests. Not doing that is a very bad sign.

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Wargames and 4X it depends on how fun the various factions are and how deep the gameplay is. Civ6, Stellaris and etc have all hit the boring threshold for me.

The interesting comparison is Total War. I was 'finished' with three kingdoms at about 33 hours, but total warhammer is still going strong at several hundred hours.

At Victory, its finished...

I tend to explore a lot and i started gaming when "automap" was a piece of science fiction and we had to make our own Maps, so.. many good games get pretty close to completion = 100%.
RPG : Main story and any quest and the whole map.... but i don't play online.
Jump&Run, Plattformers etc : do my best to get as far as i can get... but yes i Managed to complete some older games who didn't have saving points and must be done in one go.
4X games like CiV: give me 20 Nations and I'll play them all, give me 5 types of government and i'll try all 5 up to the end.
Wargames, Strategy etc : Usually play every scenario / Map from start to finish. And I will try to use every tool available, every unit every vehicle...
Or classics like Pirates: I will play every era and nation and I will try almost every difficulity setting.
Racing games: I'll join in multiplayer with friends but Iis not my special interest so.... to complete the races your friends drag you in counts for something, yes?
Run&gun, shoot em up, etc: I'll try to complete the game and i do my best if i am cooperating with a friend.

I don't give up easily but there are games which aren't worth the bits and bytes I think i just erased one ( to save us all from this disgrace of a game ) and sold 2 or 3 . I know there are games no one can win because they got bugs but the only flawed one i had to suffer was IWD 2 . bugged endgame.

As the vast majority of the games I play are story-based, then for me it would be the completion of the main story. I get bored really quickly of supposed "endgame" content that is really just fighting optional bosses, collecting missed collectibles, and otherwise just doing more of the same grindy stuff that you already did during the game, but with no story to drive you forward. Achievements are meaningless to me, and while I like things that make my characters look cooler, I want to see that cool looking stuff in the game's story sequences, not while I'm just randomly running around the open world clearing out that last marker on the map.

A good example I can immediately think of is Final Fantasy XV. Sure, it would be cool to obtain the flying car after the main story, but why do it? Just to fly around for funsies?

Some open world games do this better. Skyrim and The Witcher 3, for example, still have lots of side stories to see and do after the main story is done.

Mostly just finish the story.

However, Zelda and Arkham Games compel me to get as many of the odds and sods as I can.


Indeed, in Arkham City, the only trophy I’ve never got is a Riddler one, which requires precise timing I simply cannot be bothered to master.

@ Doc, those Riddler things got right on my pip too, as even when you figure how to do it, like you say the flawless timing was just beyond me

I think the only game Ive got really blobby minded about of late was FTL which I dun fighted until Id unlocked all the ships and finished with all of them on hard mode (even if one relied on 2/3 random events in a single game)

I also did KOTOR 1 both light and dark as the final boss is either a right grind or comically easy as lightside was largely party buffs and heals kind of subpar 1 vs 1, but darkside lightning hands got the job done no probs

For Arkham, there are so many ‘why can’t I just blow off the lock?’ Riddler challenges.

But for the most part they’re fun, rather than frustrating.

For me, usually two playthroughs is good. Once on normal, once on “hard” mode.

Arkham games, except Knight, I got all the collectibles, just LOVED them all, except Knight. Fallout games I usually play though a few times, different character types, I’ve played New Vegas through so many times I’ve lost count. Possibly 1000 hours by now. It’s my favourite game of all time. Bioshock series I played through for all the different endings.

Not big on most racing games, but GT 3 on PS 2 I played through till it was just the crazy things left, like 24 hour races, or 300 laps of a really hard track. When goals felt like a job rather than fun, I quit.

I’m not big on sandbox games like Minecraft or Fallout 4... where story takes a back seat to providing a setting to build your own story in. After New Vegas’ excellent story and multiple interesting factions, FO4 was a huge disappointment. I played through once, killing my son on a “I can always reload” and then getting out of the institute and deciding not to bother, and just grinding through the rest of the story as fast as possible.

I’m also not big on competitive online gaming. I’d rather have a person across from me in a “real world” game, like 40k, Magic, Godtear, or other board and card games. My kids are really into Fortnite, and I got into it for a bit, tried my hand in the Arena mode and quickly discovered my skill cap is low. My reflexes are too slow, running on a console, just not that “into” the sandbox-y build mechanics... I hit a wall where whomping people in the open mode got boring, and facing the level I got to in Arena was frustrating. Coupled with a lack of single player story mode, and it just isn’t for me.

Doom 2016 is another interesting case for me, where I collected everything on “hard”, then tried Nightmare 1.... and couldn’t get past one of the early gore nests. Tried a couple times for about an hour each, got close a couple of times, but kept getting “cheap deaths” from behind, or in the middle of a glory kill, or missing a shot by *this much*. Love the game but for the first time in a game I’ve played, the monster AI was too strong for me to overcome.

I’ve played Civ: Revolution a hundred times on my console. I considered the game defeated once I had beaten Divine difficulty with each faction, in each of the 4 goals. Still play now and again for the giggles.

Nightmare modes can be frustrating especially in FPS when often it just means loads more psikik bullet sponge bots

depends on the game. I rarely have the time these days for games with in-built time wasting mechanics in the style of mmorpgs, so most of what I play are either light arcadey games like Hades, Katamari Damacy or Dead Cells, or games that basically have no pretense of "you will complete this game" like TW or Civ. If I play a story focused game, I want to keep it under a 20 hour total playtime if possible, and I will quickly drop a game if it ever opens its mouth to utter "Open World Mechanics" at me.

I got DA: Inquisition on sale for 10$ the other week, and I opened it up and was like "Oh, this looks neat! I'm excited to see where this go- oop, I've been dropped into a map with a vague objective and 15,000 little markers on it, I'm out see ya."

the_scotsman wrote:
depends on the game. I rarely have the time these days for games with in-built time wasting mechanics in the style of mmorpgs, so most of what I play are either light arcadey games like Hades, Katamari Damacy or Dead Cells, or games that basically have no pretense of "you will complete this game" like TW or Civ. If I play a story focused game, I want to keep it under a 20 hour total playtime if possible, and I will quickly drop a game if it ever opens its mouth to utter "Open World Mechanics" at me.

I got DA: Inquisition on sale for 10$ the other week, and I opened it up and was like "Oh, this looks neat! I'm excited to see where this go- oop, I've been dropped into a map with a vague objective and 15,000 little markers on it, I'm out see ya."

I did 2 DA: Inquisition runs to completion, but each one ran upwards of 100 hours and a fair chunk of it was MMO-esque, if that's understandable. I didn't dislike it, but it was grindy.

I used to be all for the 100% need a guide completion. These days I play mostly to the credits roll, but I try to find as many secrets as I can along the way. Gives the playthrough a bit more of an organic and unique feeling while giving me a better balance of challenge and grind. How much extra I do basically comes down to a question of how much I enjoyed what I played.