How often do you 100% games/in what circumstances would you try to?
I just got my Spider-Man 2 Platinum trophy and was looking through my trophy list, I wonder how many people will also obsessively chase the 100% or Platinum trophy and under what conditions.
My personal favorite 100% achievements recently and why:
Slay the Spire - I dumped almost 500 hours in this game and finally got Eternal One last year, it was an incredible journey and I definitely feel myself getting better as I play
God of War Ragnorak - I'm a lifelong God of War fan since the originals and getting through this game was definitely a journey. Finishing the final final boss was incredibly satisfying
Resident Evil 4 Remake - Another one of my personal favorite games of all time, I grinded a week for 50 hours to grab this over about 4 or 5 playthroughs
Spider-Man 2 - My fastest platinum, not too difficult but very satisfying (I do love Spider-man though lol)
I rarely 100% games, but I come close. If an achievement has somehting like "Find 1000000 of these small emblems" I will not do it, but if the achievement is doable, fun, and timely, then yeah I'll do them and try to complete as many as possible. Typically in the 85-95% range.
The only game I can remember 100%ing recently is God of War, not Ragnarok (haven't played yet), but the God of War one was timely, not a major timesuck, and incredibly hard at moments.
I will always 100% quests, side quests, and the related, which is the most important bit. If I get locked out of a quest because X decision, I will find a save and complete it before moving back into my primary save.
That's interesting! I feel like I play through games similarly, if I'm into the game of course. It's harder to do with games like Persona 5 (which for some reason I've missed a couple of trophies for) but I generally do that approach as well. Juggling save files is really annoying though sadly. If you liked the God of War 100%, I think the Ragnorak one is right up your alley. Funnily enough it felt very similar to the Spider-Man one, so maybe you'd like that one too!
Honestly, I rarely even finish games these days and I think that's a good thing. If I'm interested I'll lookup an ending depending on how close I was.
Can I ask why is not finishing a game a good thing? Just a time thing? I feel like there's a difference between playing a game and watching it unfold from someone else's perspective.
I'm not the person you responded to, but I also have no problem setting an unfinished game aside if I'm no longer enjoying myself with it.
Time is a big factor, I have a limited amount of free time to devote to gaming, so if I'm no longer having fun and just finishing a game out of a sense of obligation or sunk costs, I'd rather just load up something that I know I'll enjoy.
oh yeah for sure I get that, don't need to finish a game if you don't enjoy it, but I'm kinda curious about that in conjunction to the statement "If I'm interested, I'll look up an ending" since I feel like if you're interested you'd like to finish it right? I guess if you're interested in the plot but not the mechanics?
Pretty much. If I'm invested in the story, but I'm not enjoying the gameplay then the effort/reward ratio isn't there for me. If there's an option to turn the difficulty all the way down, I might take it to finish the game myself. If not, I'll just look for a video. Especially if there's a "best" ending that takes a lot of work to see.
A lot of games are centered around doing the same thing all throughout the game, and that's the main reason why I don't complete a lot of them. Repetition just makes the task feel like work after a while. Fun doesn't last forever. That's why some of the most engaging games to me tend to be things like metroidvanias or story-based games; things are always changing in them and so I find myself being engaged with them.
There are games that can keep my interest even with one set of mechanics through it's entirety, but those are usually arcade style games. Fighting games are the perfect example; they've got mechanics that appear to be very simple but you can go deeper and see that they're actually very complex. They have multiple characters to play through each with their own set of moves, and some very well designed examples will require you to change your strategy depending on the character you're fighting against. More importantly, with arcade style games I can put them down for years and come back to them like I've never left (other than losing some of the skills from lack of practice).
(I'm yet another guy chiming in)
Sometimes I finish one ending but don't want to bother loading an earlier save to complete others. But often it's I don't want to slog till the end at all. I'm interested enough in the game to want to see the endings (as well as other things I may have missed), but no longer interested enough to go through the motions.
Like others have mentioned, it's just skipping busywork (whatever that may be for that game) and getting to the remaining enjoyable parts.
I also rarely finish games anymore. It's time and variety. I get on average 1-2 hours a week to play games so most games get about ~10 hours of time. I also want to play different games, so each game get 2-3 hours of progress a month. Anything exceeding 15 hours for main story that I can bang out in a couple weeks likely isn't getting completed. But I enjoy experiencing games and I'm glad that I don't feel obliged to complete them or I'd be playing the same game for years.
I don't think it's a good thing, but I don't think it's bad either. If you aren't interested in playing anymore, why waste time on it? If you really want to know the end, you can always look it up. Or at least fast track playing it (Just go straight through the main story).
Almost never. 100% completion almost always requires grinding of some sort and I rarely have the patience for that. Worse, there is rarely ever a reward that makes it worthwhile. Trophies/achievements have absolutely no value to me.
The main exceptions are visual novels, where it’s usually a matter of strategic saving and loading, or games that have a piece of storytelling that recontextualizes the plot hidden behind an optional quest/boss
huh interestingly enough the only VN I've ever played was Danganronpa and I just checked, only a 30% achievement completion even though I definitely finished the story. I dunno if I could go back and replay it though.
The main thing that bugs me about Danganronpa is that it's got this conversation system built into it where you select a character inbetween the main story bits to have a side-story conversation with, and the quality of those parts can be hit-or-miss (especially in the first game; it gets better in the sequels), IMHO. Plus there are just too many of them, so there's lots of replaying needed to get all of them. It's just not worth it to me.
This probably isn't a terribly common opinion in the Western world, but Danganronpa is really much more of an adventure game than a visual novel. And as such I'd treat it like a real-world adventure. Trying to experience everything actually makes it much less fun. You've got to do it your way, and while I respect that 100%ing it might be some people's way, it's very much not mine.
interesting! In that case I've probably played about 0 visual novels haha. I did kinda enjoy Danganronpa up until the very end, which i feel like kinda fell flat a bit.
You might want to play the sequel. It's basically the same game, just better. It had a much better ending, IMHO.
i'm literally cleaning up my harddrive right now and debating on whether or not i want to keep it or delete it lol (slow internet) but i'll keep it up to try to get through it eventually!
I have the same type of experience. Bloodborne is my only platinum, and until I got it, I kept coming back to it. Probably will not replay it anytime soon, but thinking about the immersive experience.. a hunter must hunt.
that's an interesting way to look at it! I think I have a similar view, for Slay the Spire, I didn't feel like it was complete until i completely grinded out all of the achievements. Now that I finished it, I dont feel as much of an urge to get back into it because it feels "complete" in my mind (even though I'm still pretty bad and sometimes go back to practice lol)
haha honestly literally same, maybe i'll have to give Bloodborne a shot! I've had it used sitting on my shelf for a while, just never got around to it.
I'm a huge completionist. I like completing games as much as possible as often as possible. Part of that is I feel like I get my money's worth when I complete games. The other part is that I just like exploring everything a game has to offer.
Interesting question!
I don't usually go for completionist, but I found myself thoroughly enjoying 100%ing Vampire Survivors (they keep adding achievements though so I keep having to 100% it again, which I don't mind at all) and Halls of Torment (described as a mix between Vampire Survivors and Diablo, which I agree with).
Vampire Survivor-likes seems to be becoming its own genre, and I find myself strangly good at these games..? And then unexpectedly sinking in 100hours or so a piece..?
So, if another one pops up that I like as much as those two, I imagine I'll find myself trying to 100% that one too!
My proudest 100% is definitely Elden Ring though. I 100% that because 1) I really like Elden Ring and 2) because I play a lot of Powerwash Simulator, House Flipper & Viscera Cleanup Detail and it's funny to surprise people when they assume 'all' I do is play cleaning/designing games.
Dang, the Elden Ring one must be crazy, I should hop on that game soon, I picked it up on launch but got distracted by raising a puppy, and never jumped back into it!
Oof been there, puppy + elden ring commitment is a bit too much yes, hah! The average time to complete is ~140 for completionists, but I think it's closer to 200 for more relaxed completionists (not sure what your style is ofc, but it's not a small amount of hours either way :P)
I hope you get to play it again soon, it really is an amazing game!
Will do! I did the Monster Hunter Rise grind recently and I've been kinda itching for a similar style game and I feel like in theory I should really love those kinda games, but they never really stuck.
It’s actually a bit easier than their previous Dark Souls platinums, as you no longer need to craft something on one save with an item you only get once a playthrough but need three times.
Technically you still need the different endings, but you can savescum those a bit.
If you like Vampire Survivors I'd suggest Brotato, I've been playing that sometimes and it's definitely fun and interesting. definitely very hard to 100% though lol.
Ah, I've actually played that and won! Even though I did like it, there was not enough variety in environments / weapons etc for me to enjoy it enough to play it more after winning a run.
If you liked brotato and VS, let me suggest 20 minutes till dawn back at ya! :)
I'll check it out! thanks for the rec!
Very rarely. Mainly because of "find all the something" ones where the somethibg is hidden and not randomly dropped as a loot. Those times when I had nothing better to do are long over...
Another ones that I hardly complete are multiplayer ones, especially competitive. I can find a friend and do "revive friend 5 times", but I won't even try "win XY multiplayer matches/duels/games" etc.
I love doing achievements that needs you to take dofferent approach or replay some part or the whole game for them to get. Like doing part stealthily or killing everyone (in Metro series, for example).
I have 33% average achievements on Steam and I'm working on this number really hard. I had 25% at one time. Now when I play and finish a game, I tend to look at achievements and do those that are doable in short time (say a few more hours). If the game was really great, I'm willing to replay parts of it or the whole thing for those "other side" ones. When I play a game nowadays, I want to do like 70-80% at least. This is not doable on things like Team Fortress 2 or others that have hundreds of achievement for many random things...
I agree with the TF2 achievements, there's a pretty obnoxious amount of them now.
Yeah I'm not super impressed with multiplayer ones, especially in older titles when servers get shut down a lot. Achievement grinding for difficult, not conventional ways of playing are always fun though! Good luck with your grind, there's so many games out there!
I like completing games when there aren’t tedious motor skill or multiplayer achievements. While it’s fairly modest, I’m a little proud of my 75% average Steam game completion. Can’t say why exactly. Attainable discrete task probably plays into it.
According to Steam, I have gotten 100% of the achievements for five games:
I have gotten 100% achievements in more games, but then they added more achievements, so I'll add these:
I have ~150 games with >0 playtime in them. So something like 4.6% of the time, I do the achievements. I do enjoy achievements, and sometimes I pursue them quite a bit - Slay the Spire, for example, I also added in another personal goal after completing the achievements, which was to finish A20 on all characters. Other times, the achievements aren't particularly worthwhile. For some other games, the achievements are almost another whole meta-game, such as with the Stanley Parable, which I just realized I somehow have only 9/10. I will likely add that to the list of completions soon, as I think I'm only missing "play for the entire duration of a tuesday".
Some games I attempted to do the achievements, got stuck, and uninstalled - one of these is Flamebreak, which is actually a lot of fun, but I got really frustrated at some point and haven't played it in a couple of years.
I will also probably at some point in the relatively near future play "The Room Three" and will likely get all of the achievements.
Edit: after reading @RadioRat's comment, I realized I should just look at that Avg. Completion Rate, and mine is 29%.
Slay the Spire 100% achievements high five! Probably one of my favorite games lol. I also did my A20H runs before I stopped playing finally, I forgot that that wasn't part of the actual achievement list lol.
Yup, it's a totally self-inflicted bonus! Slay the Spire is in my top 3 most played games (see footnote though), right after Terraria and Elite Dangerous. I still return to it sometimes, as the Mac version runs pretty well, so if I'm not at home and want to play something, it's an easy choice, and the daily challenges can be pretty fun.
Footnote: I find the played stats to be frequently wrong because sometimes I just pause the game and then walk away, or sometimes I don't close a secondary launcher, like with Elite Dangerous. Steam claims I have played 2000 hours of Elite Dangerous, but I think that's off by more than a factor of 10. But I've probably had the Elite Dangerous launcher open for 2000 hours. Is this footnote longer than the note?
Literally it is exactly the same situation on my end! I walk away a LOT when I was playing StS, I think Steam logged me at 700 hours, but I think StS has it's own count and it logged me at 400 when I got my Eternal One achievement.
Rarely.
Spider-Man might be my only true 100%. I love Spider-man and it's a great game.
I define what 100% is going to be for myself for each game. Generally that's going to be story missions, side quests, and sometimes collectibles. Achievements/Trophies are not important to me. I get plenty of satisfaction from hitting my own completion goals. So I don't need to grind out for a real 100%.
SN: I don't have a PS5, but Spider-Man 2 is going to be my first game when I eventually get one
I adored Spider-Man 2 so you're in for a treat whenever you do!
I enjoy Sony's Platinum trophies recently, they're still difficult but play with the space of accessibility so well, giving everyone the chance to play and get achievements.
Spiderman is also one of my 100% games. I think I got there because almost all the achievements are available through regular play. I loved the game so much that being able to bust through a replay on higher difficulty on new game + was pretty easy.
I tend to not 100%/Platinum games because so many require non-emergent play styles, or absurd numbers of hours, or to do something that isn't "fun", or requires some amount of scrub saving.
Yea I normally don't play new game+ either, but it was just so much fun. The DLCs were are really good as well
I honestly almost never 100% a game because most of the time it seems to be arbitrary or amounts to collecting a lot of random stuff.
That said, Spider-Man is the only game I've 100%d twice because I just couldn't help myself on my second playthrough. It's just a fun game loop and it's also the only open world game where I truly enjoy the traversal.
I definitely agree that it seems kinda arbitrary, but sometimes it is really nice to just put it on and do something else in the meantime. Spider-man does that for me, and one of my favorite "older" games that does that for me is Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, if you're into those types of games!
Steam says 1.89% of the time (I have games on other platforms, but it's a good reference value).
I'll go for it if 100%ing the game naturally follows from the core gameplay. I don't like to play a game after I reached the "end" (this can be a "true ending," no problem) but I don't mind going back to find a few things I missed or to toggle a few flags. Exploring the world of a game is not boring to me.
What I don't like:
I agree with most of your list besides the first one, Hidden Achievements, just mainly because sometimes devs don't want to spoil their games in the trophy list, which I understand.
I do like some challenge modes, but it really depends on the game. Bullet sponges in general are just bad game design imo lol
I try to be thorough while I play the game and I usually find several hidden achievements. But if I reach the end of the game without finding them all, what then? I'm probably not going to make it to 100% then. I must really like the game if I'm going to bother finding a list somewhere online so I can figure out what I'm missing (never really happens in practice).
I think 3 games. But one was one that the achievements you got were for playing the story (there was no optional achievements if you wanted to finish the game, TellTale's The Walking Dead), one (Horizon Zero Dawn) I just loved so much I wanted an excuse to play more (and only one achievement was really that much a PITA to get and had a pretty obtainable list), and one also had pretty obtainable achievements (well before it expanded, NMS. But I got platinum before they added all the expansons as I was playing since day 1).
Never.
I was going to do all Starfield achievements to sort of "end" the game but I have backed off playing it which was the goal.
I restarted Vampire Survivors wkth the express goal of 100%ing it without any passwords/codes, but haven't come back to it.
I was gonna do Starfield too (and I probably will eventually go back to it) but I just need to put some mental distance away from the game lol, I blasted through it in the first two weeks basically.
Yup. I got sort of obsessed with it and may have killed it for me in the short term, which I'm happy about because now I can move on to other stuff.
Never - I don't have the time, sometimes I don't even finish the game I play until I've had my fill of fun then move on.
Very rarely, and on those occasions that I do it's usually only because the 100% was achievable in a relatively short time span. The most recent games I 100%'d were Dredge and Armored Core VI, the former because it was really quick and relatively easy to do so (under 20 hours), the latter because I wanted to S-rank every mission anyway, and I ended up getting all the other achievements naturally in the process with no intentional grinding, and even then I still only spent 70 hours total to do so.
Any game where 100% means doing something incredibly tedious like completing a mission 100 times or grabbing 2000 random meaningless baubles across a gigantic map is no longer fun even halfway through that process and therefore not worth going for 100%.
Usually I get the urge to do that when the gameplay has really interesting movement, and when it provides some ways of escalating. A good example for me is Armored Core - there's a storyline, where you're free to just to do whatever works. Then you can replay for a letter grade, which pushes you to play better. Because there's room to be really good and pull off neat moment to moment stuff, I'm inspired to just see if I can do all of what it has.
Otherwise I don't really get the urge to do it with anything. Especially very choice heavy games - I just go with my gut and then watch the content I missed.
I rarely 100% them, only when it's easy. I don't like turning games into work.
I did 100% Spider-Man and I'm also planning to 100% Spider-Man 2 but that's mostly because it's very easy to do so.
Rarely as most 100% games consist of fetch tasks or mind numbing tedium. The only games I consider 100% are ones that are relatively easy to 100% (either due to low # of tasks to complete or ease of gameplay) or just enjoyable. So for the former, it would be Kirby games because I feel Kirby games are designed to be accessible to younger audiences and allow 100% completions and the latter being Pikmin 4 because 100% a level is pretty easy and the game is super chill after a long day of grueling work.
.... so basically if it's a Nintendo game made for a wide audience, I'll probably 100% it.
Never, really. Even if I do, it's by accident. Filling bars is a chore, and while I sure feel dopamine when it's full, I refuse to participate.
I very rarely ever bother to 100% a game unless it's something that I 100% enjoyed every waking moment of, and that's a pretty short list. I might do some achievements for a laugh as long as they're not stuff like "beat on super ultra intense nightmare mode" or "be top multiplayer MVP 1000 times". I'm over that kind of stuff. I play games to have fun, and stop playing them when they stop being fun; sometimes that means getting to 99.8% and then just never touching it again. C'est la vie.