Endgame Doldrums: Can They Be Solved?

This is the thread where I throw down the mantle of shame that I have carried for lo these many years, JFC, decades even, for not actually finishing various canonical and/or highly respected video games. I like exploration; desperation; options; chances to fail; new NPCs; old NPCs who are still alive and have new things to say; undeluged biomes; new shit (weapons, armor, accessories, summonses, etc). Endgame content is never really content. Endgame by definition is a narrowing of content into a single boss fight, with your chosen package, and one big endgame play experience, and then HEY! welcome to World 2.

The Reddit threads on this topic are probably already at Endgame. People definitely, surely, brought this up on Usenet, back when MMORPGs were just MUDs dreaming about having bigger boobies and 40,000 arms.

Why is it still a problem and who has said the most clever things about why it will never be solved? Is it possible to tell a story that has an ending and yet continues on to greater possible endings? History did it. Is history that hard?

When I was young I conceived of a game where your character would start fully tricked out and gradually get weaker as the game progressed, find that the kobolds you'd be sawing through off the top were posing a greater and greater challenge toward the endgame. The only game I've seen that does that is Sword + Sworcery

When I was young I conceived of a game where your character would start fully tricked out and gradually get weaker as the game progressed...The only game I've seen that does that is Sword + Sworcery

Kileak: The DNA Imperative, a PS1 launch title, was kind of like that, if memory serves. you'd start out as a mech easily blasting your way through hallways. the only problem was that your mech was powered by batteries which were hard to find, and as your battery power decreased, your movements would gradually slow until you were craaaawling toward corners searching in desperation for more battery power while getting attacked from all sides by little squirts that were previously overmatched. all on like, the 1st or 2nd level. it's possible that i just didn't understand how the game worked.

i have little to say about endgames because i keep getting bored during midgames

a modest proposal:

ban games which take longer than five hours to finish

brief thought to be expanded on later: the kind of games Tombot is broadly thinking of are works whose main exposition is thru space rather than time - roughly the difference between say visual art and music, the former is predominately about space, the latter is largely about movement in time.

i favour art (loosest sense of the word) tha explores space, the Endgame is where the space is squeezed thru the necessities of time? i feel much the same about the ending of a lot of fiction too.

history doesn't tell stories with endings tho. historians squish events into narratives.

I like games that take more than five hours to finish but I wish there were more that I could realistically get through on a lazy afternoon.

I didn't realize for like maybe a couple of weeks that I had "beat" Skyrim (i.e. had completed the one among a dozen half-finished missions that was apparently considered the central storyline).

I pretty much never finish a game unless it's IF/adventure. Not finishing goes against my instincts but as someone without natural coordination most games just get too hard for me. I love to collect and explore, I love blowing shit up, hell, I even like grinding, but I'll always reach a point where I can go on no longer.

When I was young I conceived of a game where your character would start fully tricked out and gradually get weaker as the game progressed, find that the kobolds you'd be sawing through off the top were posing a greater and greater challenge toward the endgame. The only game I've seen that does that is Sword + Sworcery

― fgti, Sunday, July 17, 2016 2:43 PM (5 hours ago)

There's a pretty good piece of IF where you have to reverse all the actions a Zork-like adventurer had performed. Obviously a bit different to this but similar concept. Can't remember the name now, though.

Zero sum game

there's a certain structure that used to be in vogue in RPGs and adventure games where there would be 2 acts of linear story + exploration and then for the 3rd act it dropped you off in the now-mostly-explored world which suddenly had a new layer of quests and side-quests to be done in any order. while i do like nonlinearity, it also felt like these games dropped all their momentum when they did this and i ceased to feel any urgency to push forward to the final dungeon/boss/etc. several games i consider among my favorites i've never actually completed due to this.

can you name some? I feel like Terranigma kind of did that

I think of it as a FFVII thing - it happens in all the other Final Fantasies I've played, but specifically in that one because it echoes through the game - Congratulations you've escaped the city here's a whole world (though you can only visit one town and then the railroading begins again) - now you've got an airship (but only one real destination) etc etc and then by the end there's so many places you can go (and get your head handed to you by Weapons) and a clear marker for "you can't go past here".

It might be because of what you like in games - it was the chances to fail that stuck out. When I think of games whose endings I've loved I think of the classic adventure games.

i like games where there isn't an end condition beyond "seen everything, bored now" tbh

narratives can sometimes function as a spur to exploration, if we must have them

Elder Scrolls have tried real hard at this, with greater or lesser success

no reason why Pokemonesque collect 'em ups couldn't go harder in this direction

i really like the 2 Endless Ocean games which are even closer to this ideal than ES but i recognise are about as niche as commercial games can get

[as an irrelevant aside I'm getting quite a gamified version of midlife sadness lately when i reflect on the unsatisfactoriness of not being able to go back and explore alternate plot-lines. this shit is too much on rails.]

"narratives can sometimes function as a spur to exploration, if we must have them"

think I'm misunderstanding something, how could RPGs like Elder Scrolls have no narratives?

I mean I played 120+ hours of Oblivion and I know that the "main plot" was pretty lame but is that what makes a good game for you? I guess I spent a lot of exploring but only in the course of doing various quests in order to level level level, become the chief of the thieves, etc.

like I can see why no narrative is better than bad narrative but bad narratives aren't inevitable; in the last few months I've played through Red Dead, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed 2, AC Brotherhood, and now I've started AC Revelations. they all have pretty good narratives for video games.

like if there's a norm of progression in a game that'll keep me playing, provided the game play is fun. narrative is one norm of progression. maybe you're saying that exploration is another norm of progression? but exploring...for what? game worlds aren't as rich as the real world. I've been so disappointed with GTAs bc I thought those game worlds would be super rich but really they're just pocked with "serious" amorality and they're so boring for that.

what other norms of progressions are there? getting a really high score? beating your friends? this is why multiplayer has been so big I guess.

collecting might be one non-narrative or narrative-light way of incentivising exploration - Pokémon, Endless Ocean etc

I've just been reading about survival games as a genre, a small genre maybe but there are enough examples where engagement with a narrative is more or less optional depending on how you approach the game

I'm not making proposals for what other people enjoy tbh but thinking about what in the game brings me please/keeps me playing and it's as much about spending time in Skyrim I think than chasing around the place for the next bit of the quest - even tho I end up chasing about the place for the next bit of the quest. the narrative maybe structures or incites my exploration but it isn't what I come back for, and I can imagine non-narrative (ok, maybe less linear narrative) ways of doing that

"brings me pleasure" I meant

like I referred to earlier, literature or music use "narrative" structures, maybe are forced to use them because they operate in time, but the pleasure of following the narrative is not necessarily the only pleasure those things afford

is there a narrative in endless waves of Galaxians/Tetris blocks etc etc?

there's apparently enough narrative in tetris to support the forthcoming trilogy of tetris movies

[as an irrelevant aside I'm getting quite a gamified version of midlife sadness lately when i reflect on the unsatisfactoriness of not being able to go back and explore alternate plot-lines. this shit is too much on rails.

i've often thought that life is basically a watered-down, disappointing version of panzer dragoon

also survival games don't eliminate threat or the possibility of failure, it's just that the narrative might be player-generated or daydreamed outside of the game itself?

thinking about it bg Hollywood in 2016 might be another example of narrative becoming irrelevant to the pleasures in the product

society of the spectacle innit

first superhero film that is just clowns in costumes tearing the shit out of each other and assorted landmarks with no story or context can only be a couple of years away

batman vs superman is at least halfway there already

so my son told me

I don't know survival games but yeah, if they're fun they'd be no need to drive any further narrative in game.

I dunno I grew up playing 2600 where the "point" was just to get higher & higher scores, and so we constructed our own dumb goal, flip the score. otherwise what's it matter to blow up another wave in Megamania or whatever.

so my mind was blown when I got Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle, with an in-game endpoint goal besides "do this really fast" or "get a really high score". and then SMB where your score flipped every 100 coins instead, and the goal was again to rescue someone.

so I think I'm just rehearsing my prejudices here. I don't get endgame doldrums because I'm happy there's an endgame, particularly in a world where there are so many great games to play and so little time to play them: I need *something* to push onto the next one, particularly since when it's down to "explore the world and collect all the Borgia flags" or whatever I'm just super bored & only playing out of completist compulsion, which makes me feel bad about myself

my biggest problem finishing games these days are those big open world games where i get distracted from the main story line and then get bored by the content before i ever finish it. non-open world games i don't really have the same problem with.

yeah between the last 2 posts that's my ideal I think and it does only apply to open worlds as far as I can think: lots to explore until I'm bored of exploring and then walk away. I don't find I need the push in open world stuff, even tho I can be a compulsive one-more-leveller in other kinds of game

[as an irrelevant aside I'm getting quite a gamified version of midlife sadness lately when i reflect on the unsatisfactoriness of not being able to go back and explore alternate plot-lines. this shit is too much on rails.

i was just thinking yesterday that life is a roguelike

and then SMB where your score flipped every 100 coins instead, and the goal was again to rescue someone

just thinking, if there was a procedurally-generated SMB where the Princess is always in another castle would there still be a narrative. And does knowing or not knowing whether this is the case impact on your sense of narrative?

good question! tbh I didn't know for sure that it would end until I beat 8-4. but each world and even level was novel, unlike earlier games (thinking chiefly of Pitfall). Maybe narrative is a cheap way of providing novelty? Q: how to end a game at a good point?

When I was playing Skyrim I felt like my main driver was exploration, and that the quests were just something to keep me occupied as I wandered around the world. But eventually I hit a point where I'd completed all the questlines, yet there was a specific chunk of the map, around Falkreath I think, which I still hadn't spent any significant time in, I'd just passed through there once or twice. And I was pretty surprised to find that I didn't have any motivation to go back and cover that area properly. It might have just been fatigue, but I suspect the quests were driving me more than I thought they were.

And thinking about other open world games I've "completed", there's a similar pattern - There's a Fallout 3 area I know I never really dug around in, a Just Cause 2 island I never visited, there's a massive amount of the GTAV map I've hardly scratched the surface of, etc (*). These games that try not to have an endgame end up having one anyway it seems, for me. I do find that quite a natural and satisfying way to wrap up a game though, the "ok I've spent enough time in here now, what can I play next?" ending. Certainly it's a ton better than boss > credits > new game plus.

(*) GTAV is perhaps an exception in that I remember intentionally leaving parts of the map untouched so that I didn't feel like I was retreading old ground when the single player expansions came around...but then those expansions never came so I never went back there.

if there was a procedurally-generated SMB where the Princess is always in another castle would there still be a narrative

I think yes, as long as I didn't know it was procedurally generated. That's the killer for me though, for some reason - I've never wanted to explore a minecraft map, I was bored of proteus within 5 minutes, and No Man's Sky doesn't appeal at all.

(I love spelunky mind you - that's not about exploration though, the way a mario game is, for me).

Dark Souls games for me = play through the main game, then play multi-player until the next game comes out. i like the weird interplay between the two in these games, it feels more interesting than games that are explicitly designed around multi-player.

There's still a chunk of Falkreath and the Reach that I feel I've underexplored and tho I'm v late to Skyrim I've put a lot of hours in over the last 6 months. That's scary territory tho

For me Fallout 3 will never have an ending, I've unintentionally ended up playing it that way. Every now and again I'll revisit and complete some missions or loot and explore. It's pleasant in small doses and part of me doesn't want it ever to be over.

I love Minecraft but not for any exploration aspect. You can still have a great game just building and living in a small section of the world, maybe venturing out further for some rare resources as and when. I find that the end comes when you have dozens of chests full of expensive resources not being used. Now I tend to play it purely in creative mode to build stuff.

Did anyone continue managing a city in Sim City once they'd filled the map or unlocked all the buildings etc?

Mods the ability to map edit have kept me playing the same map in Farming Sim for the past year or so.

Mods AND the ability, sorry

i was just thinking yesterday that life is a roguelike

otm

hardcore permadeath run

how is anybody supposed to get better at it under these conditions?

Just look up the spoilers.

i was just thinking yesterday that life is a roguelike

otm

― fgti, Tuesday, July 19, 2016 5:17 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thirded.

Spoilers are useless when you've got AC -23 already, got some coins and nearly everything you need in your ascension kit, but still get offed by surprise by a Jackal zapping a wand of death at you, and that happens like, all the time, in real life. The analogy holds up.

At least a third of my deaths on ADOM (once I got good) came from trying to squash Keriax at day 60 (or 90) when I was clearly not pumped enough to make the attempt

What does this mean about my real life

Am I going to die confused and unable to see my enemy, driven by my own impatience and hubris into a position for which I was not prepared

Depends - are you David Cameron's career?

I think the open world third act problem is mostly what I was thinking of. Especially when the third act is when the whole world's basically gone to shit because of the Big Bad and dontcha know it's UP TO YOU to save everything, like, why do I want to save everything if I don't get to enjoy it? I spent the last 30+ hours finding all these neat new places to see and things to do and all you nice NPCs to talk to and now it's all covered in Foreboding Smog™ and everybody is just telling me I have to go beat Ganon again or whatever. At which point it'll be quite clear I've peaked at a young age and there'll be once again nothing to do.

I am too busy to fall into a proper roguelike wormhole rn but I am playing Brogue again, picking choice seeds as uncovered on the Brogue forums and enjoying delving into the depths

Or you know, just build it in:

http://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-xv-s-first-half-is-open-world-but-it-s-s-1785784414

“As for Final Fantasy XV’s structure, it has both an open world part and a linear part. The open world element continues throughout the first half, and because of the story, the second half progresses linearly.”

As noted in the article, that's the reverse of the traditional FF formula where it's super linear to begin and becomes more open world at the end