With all of the free time on my hands recently, I’ve found that I’m more willing to dive into the minutia of gaming, picking over stuff that I would have previously forgone had I been more engaged during the day with other activities (like working). Given GamerSushi’s recent obsession with a certain post-WW2 detective game, most of the article will center around that, but we can delve into other games that do this sort of thing as well.
While random collectibles are more endemic to sandbox games, it’s not unusual to see any manner of game in any genre throw in bits of random junk for you to accrue to either flesh out the story or just to have you hang on to your games a little longer instead of trading them in. Call of Duty has its Intel, which unlocks cheats, and Crysis 2 has dog tags, landmarks and emails which gave you more insight into what exactly was going on when you weren’t killing mechanical squids.
Now that I’ve finished L.A. Noire, I’m driving around in free roam trying to find all the golden film canisters and the street crimes. Rockstar has done this pretty well in their last couple of games, which is good after the horrible showing in GTAIV; it was kind of weird for them to stumble in this regard, Rockstar is typically great about extending the life of a game after the main story is done.
I’ve always been partial to completing games 100%, especially after the introduction of Achievements (not that the lack of them has held me back in PC and PS3 games…), but I’m wondering how you guys feel about them. Do you go for them, or pick up any that you come across? Do you like finding them, or are they the bane of your existence?
I think that collectibles that add more story (like text or audio logs) are really cool. It’s a cool bonus for anyone who wants to invest more time in the game and get a simple but intriguing reward. I started noticing how cool audio logs were when I was playing ODST. As I think back on ODST, I realize how much I loved the atmosphere and those audio logs. I don’t HATE when a developer throws in collectibles; as long as I don’t have to scour the planet for these collectibles in order to continue the base story, I can ignore them if I want. I like when developers add more content to a game, even if it’s just collectibles.
Personally, though, I don’t usually find myself searching for collectibles. Whether they’re flags, newspapers, map locations (even in Fallout 3), or alternate story lines (even in Mass Effect), I tend to get bored wandering around a game without any new story. It feels like I’m ruining my memories of the game by scrounging every corner or replaying every mission. In games like Fallout or Mass Effect, I wind up making the same choices in gameplay and dialogue that I made in my first playthrough. In Fallout 3, there is more variance between the story if you’re a good or an evil character, but in Mass Effect, you’re still going on the same missions. I don’t like making a game feel stale, so I have this kind of irrational fear of replaying a game or hunting for collectibles. If finding those collectibles gives me extra story, I’ll consider it, but then I run into the issue of losing interest. See, while Fallout has a lot of variation, I just never felt like going back and seeing a new side of the story when I realized I was just making the same decisions and letting the game get reduced to a tedium of equipment management and forcing myself to be an asshole.
That’s why I’m starting to see the merit in linear games, where I can experience the whole game in one playthrough, or at least that there’s some bit of story to search after as I collect bits of whatever. I suppose where others seek finding all 100 of something or defeating all the bosses or finding all the secret rooms or experiencing all the different dialogue options, I seek a seamlessly-executed story that either can be appreciated in one go or feels really different each playthrough, so that I’m not going through the motions of missions.
I would like to, but I have too many games to spend that much time sniffing around for that stuff.
One day..
I rarely go for 100%. I sometimes go for the “hidden items” in games and usually try and get as many achievements as I can. I need to go back through Black Ops and get everything there and I do plan on doing the same for L.A. Noire. Ill be honest, I usually skip over them entirely, but sometimes it can be fun to try and find them.
If I happen to come across them, its good. But I don’t go out of my way searching high and low for them
…
It used to be awesome to find something truly sweet and go tell your friends about it, only for them to say “yeah F**king right, that is NOT there”, and have them hunt high and low for it. (anyone remember the Pokemon rumors?)
Now’adays they just scroll through the Steam list of achievements to see if it’s really true or not (for the most part).
If it’s listed in the achievements, it’s just stupid. The good stuff is still hidden. I feel like “the good stuff” is becoming more and more a thing of the past…
I got all the blast shards in inFamous and feathers in AC2. Since then I’ve never bothered with them. I now hate them. Unless they’re easier to find than those ones.