Pacing yourself

[RockyRan]

The "Game Length" thread got me thinking on something. I wanted to ask you people what you thought about pacing yourself in a game.

 

I ask this mostly because more than ever we're getting games with metric fucktons of things to do, and I have a particular "problem" where if I finish a game, I don't want to play it anymore, period. Even if I loved the game, loved the side quests/collectibles, and even if the vast majority of the game consists of doing the side stuff, as soon as the credits roll I want to play something else. Yes, it's incredibly silly, seeing how a lot of games are hardly "over" when the credits roll, but something in my brain certainly makes me think so.

 

I made an experiment about 3 years ago when I played Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. I absolutely loved the game, but I was nearing the end and I had quite a lot of stuff left to do in it. Well aware of my "problem", I said to myself "then I'll just not finish it and only beat the game when I have everything". Sure enough, I played for well over 10 hours at that point getting all the T.T. Tropies and other missions I hadn't done before, 100%ing the game and getting all 121 Jiggies before I went on to beat it.

 

Funnily enough, I tried to do the same with Assassin's Creed II a few weeks ago. Again, I absolutely loved the game and didn't want it to end, so I just tried to the same thing, except it didn't work out too well. Tedium set in quickly for some reason, and doing side missions, even the interesting ones, got "boring" after a while. I didn't even want to go out looking for the feathers. I only collected "all" of a few things. I got all the paintings, glyphs, villa statuettes, and weapon/armor/villa upgrades, almost all of which were trivial to get once you had enough money. But as far as the treasure chests/side missions/feathers went, I simply got sick of trying to collect them. Even if I tried to sprinkle these side missions in between main story missions, I eventually started to feel like I was wasting time.

 

I'm wondering how you guys paced yourselves in games. Do you guys keep playing games after you beat them? Do you jump between main-quest-and-side-quests? Do you do a bunch of either main or side at a time? Do you not even think about such things?

[Luftwaffles]

Depends on the game, honestly.

 

For the Fallout games, I have played all of them through more than once (with the exception of New Vegas, which I'm working on now), and that's usually with one good character and one evil character. Probably my favorite parts about those games, however is how I can blow 25-40 hours in a week on one of them and then come back after a weekend break and keep going without any sort of tedium. Often times I will spread those out into a bunch of sidequests followed by a bunch of main quests, to answer your original question.

Even the campaign of Call of Duty 4 I played about 6 or 7 times when it first came out, figuring out how to break all the scripting, unlocking all the collectables, and playing through on "Film Noir" mode and whatever that cheat was where people broke into tires when they died. And oddly enough, I never really got bored.

 

There are other games, though where once I was finished with them I wanted to put them right down in order to preserve my good memories of them. Far Cry 2 is one of those. In my 3x3 I listed it as one of my favorite games ever, but I've only played the campaign once and only dabbled in the multiplayer to test the map editor. The reason I've never played it again is I'm afraid all the problems other people have with it will come out again in my second runthrough and I'd like to keep it on my favourite games of all times list because, at the moment, it really is one of my personal favourites. I put 30ish hours into it in one playthrough without getting bored in the slightest, but I feel like if I tried to play it again it would get boring fairly quick.

 

A lot of the time I would delete games right after I play them to free up HD space, though, but that rarely had anything to do with whether or not I liked the game.

[Mr W Phallus]

I've always been the kind of guy who will make sure I've fully explored the area I'm in before proceeding onwards (it doesn't really matter what genre). In fact one thing that always frustrates me in video games is when it is unclear which path leads onwards and which is a branching path leading to hidden goodies etc.

 

Basically I think I have a similar 'problem' to you (Rocky) in that I generally can't replay a single player game immediately after I just finished - I have to wait until I've forgotten a lot of what happens - and so I have a fear of missing anything in my first playthrough that I might regret, and won't be able to come back to for some time. This can be problematic in some games like Fallout 3 (just too much of everything to do this) and Assassin's Creed 2 (too many side missions in each town not to space them out with real missions) and I have sort of taught myself to sometimes just get on with the story.

 

Which in itself is another problem - my desire not to miss out often conflicts with my desire to have what I guess you could call a 'cinematic experience'. What I mean is when I play any game, I like to play the game as I imagine the character I'm playing as would act. For example, in Assassin's Creed there a few things more satisfying than pulling off the perfect assassination - getting right up to the target without alerting any guards, killing him, then getting out of there before anyone fully realises what is going on. Often, if I mess up and end up in a fight with a bunch of guards, even if it won't actually stop me from killing the target, I'll restart from the last checkpoint because I'm supposed to be playing as badass assassin, not some amateur. So when I go running round cities collecting feathers, looting chests and generally wasting time it can be jarring, because in my mind I'm thinking Ezio wouldn't really be doing this, he'd be protecting his family, or hunting down his father's killers or whatever the next mission is. That was a bit of a long winded example. Basically I'm conflicted between playing the story through 'as it would happen' and exploring the shit out of everything in case I miss something good (obviously I still end up missing a ton of stuff anyway, you always do).

[Yantelope]

I had the opposite effect in Fallout. I was ready to quit because I was doing all sorts of sidequests and it wasn't until I focused on the main story that I finished the game. I immediately quit after that though. I need my game to kind of nudge me along down the story line or I get bored and don't finish it. Contrary to being bored with Oblivion I played Borderlands non-stop for quite a while simply because it had more structure to it and was a little more linear so I felt like I was actually making progress.

[Hocking]

I have a tendency to just stop playing a game for a little while if there is too much to do and I don't want to miss out on things. Assassins Creed 2, AC: Brotherhood, Just Cause 2 Mass Effect 2 and Singularity are games that I can think of recently where I've done this. Dead Rising and Dead Rising 2 I've never gotten around to finishing because I think the story progression and it's sandbox are a bit cock-eyed, even though I do actually want to finish them and experience everything they have to offer. L.A Noire is another outstanding game that I've yet to go back to and tie up, but I think some of that is to do with the idea that I was actually expecting it to be a lot better than it actually is.

 

With games like Oblivion and the Bethesda Fallout titles, I tend to avoid the main story as much as possible until I'm happy with my level of discovery outside of it. I've been playing Oblivion on/off since release but have only ever completed the main quest line the once; I'm still finding things I've not seen before. It's the same with Fallout 3, I've only ever completed the main quest the once. Borderlands is a hard one for me, as I picked up a copy for the PC at launch but didn't really enjoy how it felt on the computer. This year I picked up a copy for the 360 and managed to progress hell of a lot further than I had done on the PC version - but I've put it aside again as I want to finish all the side missions before I finish the main plot.

 

In general, if I finish a game, I can't start up another play-through and go again for a little while. Like you guys I need to not have the plot details fresh in my mind if I'm going to sit through it all again. The Mass Effect games are probably the biggest annoyance for me in terms of this. I love the stories and the characters a lot and I want to experience all of the plot twits and all of the outcomes to the decisions you can make. My current setup with these games is that I have a Paragon Male-Shep Solider and Renegade FemShep Adept. The male Sheppard is my primary character and it'll be his save that I play through Mass Effect 3 with first. The FemShep however is my secondary and I only actually completed her ME1 play-through about a year after ME2 had come out; I'm only about 1/4 the way through her ME2 run. On top of this though, I also want to start from scratch in ME1 with each of the other classes and see how differently I can do things and what the outcome of that is. So as much as I love Mass Effect, it's a real pain in the ass because it takes quite a while for me to be ready to dance with it again.

[Saturnine Tenshi]

Generally, I only spend extra time on games I truly enjoy. Those would be the "platinum" games on PS3. I usually approach extra content as a listless passenger, unless it's a game I'm really into. At that point, I'll make a point to do everything I can before advancing the story.

[AllYourGame Nick]

I'll often do all side quests that have story to them, but if they are just collection types, I'll skip them. Just like with your Assassin's Creed example, I skipped all the feather and treasure chest collections just because I knew that it would only mean running around the city as a scavenger hunt without learning anything new about the game. When it comes to games like Mass Effect or Deus Ex: HR, I've done the side quests because it's storyline that I would have missed otherwise - not to mention it offers experience that helps you later in the game.

 

All that being said, I try to finish my games as quickly as possible. Time is limited these days and I only get to play video games for maybe 1 or 2 hours per day max. A 30 hour game will take me a month to finish if I play that game and nothing else - but I've always got my multiplayer games to play, so that's just not realistic.