Fundred percent completion
I’ll probably keep playing this game for a long time, even if I don’t have any more objectives to chase therein.
I remember when I stopped caring about getting 100% completion in a game, and I remember the game. It was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and after having done the hard work necessary for 100% in both of the previous games, what stopped me this time was nothing like a challenge too difficult or a mission too irritating. No, it was a bug.
San Andreas consisted of three cities – Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas, functional stand-ins for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, respectively. Each one had little tokens you had to pick up throughout the city for 100% completion; so far, so good. San Fierro asked players to take snapshots with the camera to imitate the standard San Francisco tourist. Only one little problem emerged – I snapped one of the pictures, and it marked as cleared, but the completion wasn’t noted by the game.
Getting the shot opportunity back was impossible. Going back to an earlier save was impossible. Just like that, the game had rendered 100% unreachable no matter what I did. And I was angry at the time… but then I realized that the game had kind of given me a blessing by freeing me from crap I didn’t really want to do in the first place.
Telling Stories: The in-character post
Having a million more ways to interact with people online than we had back in 1997 has meant that people have gotten creative. Very creative, at times. Instead of just doing all of your roleplaying via the game now, you can have in-character journals, Twitter accounts, Tumblr accounts, and so on. Even I’ve gotten in on the fun; as I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m running an in-character Twitter account for my shaman over in World of Warcraft, largely because the roleplaying communities on my servers have mostly dried up.
The question, of course, is whether or not it’s worth it.
I’m not going to tell anyone they should stop doing something they find fun, obviously – if writing an in-character journal online is a really fun and relaxing activity for you, go for it. The question, rather, is what you’re getting out of the time invested in making this happen. Writing stories about your character and sending off tweets take time and energy, and it’s an open question of whether or not it actually contributes to your character or just comes out as the roleplaying equivalent of masturbation.
Challenge Accepted: I earned it
I have the tools to kill all of these orks, so I will kill them and get their stuff, because that is how this works.
In real life, overcoming challenges sometimes leads to rewards. Emphasis on “sometimes.” Sometimes overcoming challenges just means you’ve overcome a challenge. You climbed to the top of the hill, and your reward is seeing the other twelve hills ahead of you while you climb down this one. Or you climbed halfway up the hill when a falcon randomly deposited a sack full of money at your feet. How hard you work has some connection to success in real life, but it is not a perfect correlation by any means.
Games are not dissimilar. The notion is hardwired into gaming that a challenge equals a reward so long as the challenge was not completely self-inflicted (playing Metal Gear Solid one-handed is definitely going to be a challenge, but the game isn’t going to reward you for your determined efforts to make it harder). Yet there are challenges with rewards that seem either far too big or too small for the effort put in, because it turns out that properly balancing a challenge and a reward is really difficult.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy V, part 3
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
So Lenna is convinced that her father’s wind drake is on top of the nearby mountain, and the rest of the party agrees to go along with this because, well, they weren’t doing anything. Also there’s no other route to the water crystal than via the air at this point, so that’s a good motivator. The trek to North Mountain isn’t terribly interesting, with its very name making it pretty clear where you’re heading.
As with most dungeons that take place on mountains through the series, this is not a particularly interesting or ornate area, largely linear and without much in the way of hidden passages. What is interesting is that you’re probably moving along nicely with your character jobs by this point, unlocking some abilities to toss into your secondary slot and probably considering swapping jobs on some characters. This is actually reasonable, since later job levels take more and more ABP to learn, but later enemies reward more ABP for clearing a battle. If you haven’t been constantly swapping, as you move through this dungeon you’ll start picking up some real options.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 