Give me advice to check my completionist tendencies
I find with a lot of video-games, particularly RPGs, I have trouble just doing a casual playthrough. I just can't really stop myself from chasing down every quest marker, so if anyone has advice about how I can keep my playstyle focused on stuff I actually enjoy, I'd love to hear it.
I've found what ends up happening is I will play a game long after the point where the core gameplay loops are fun or challenging for me. This negatively impacts my impressions of games I play. It's like, chewing a stick of gum for way WAY too long. My jaw is sore, it tastes like cardboard. But I. Just. Keep. Going. I don't go into dumb collect-a-thons as much, so I'm not the worst at this, but I end up chasing every side-quest, every "do thing to befriend party member," and so on. Basically everything that counts as "content."
To be clear, I definitely blame the game designers for this. They stretch 30 hour games to 60 with a bunch of filler. And with open-world systems, it's just really hard to tell what's important and what isn't which just triggers my FoMO about missing something cool or plot critical.I just want some strategies on how to work around the bullshit and not have to bother with padding content.
I have this problem too. Short of watching someone else's playthrough, the way that I deal with this is simply to draw a line in the sand between the content that I do and don't enjoy doing. There's never really an external "trick" that will solve all of your problems—the problem comes from within, and it has to be solved from within—but it might help you to articulate your playthrough if you wrote down what sort of quests you are and aren't going to complete on a piece of paper that you keep next to you while playing. Whenever you start a quest, you can reference the paper, and decide to continue it based on whatever characteristics you wrote down earlier. It's not any different from checking your schedule on a calendar.
I'm currently in the process of very, very slowly finishing The Witcher 3. I decided a long time ago that I was not going to do any quest that involved the card minigame "Gwent," because I simply didn't care about it. I also recently decided that I wasn't going to bother discovering any location that wasn't on land or easily accessible. I think I might add a couple more things to the list soon. The point is that you have to just sit down and tell yourself, in whatever medium works for you, where your boundaries are.
I suggest playing the game as if it was real life. Do you go around every single street in your town looking for 'secrets'? If a stranger asked you to go find 10 special things for a 'reward', would you? Do you go around talking to every person you get in sight? No.
Go just to where you want to. Talk only to people that interest you. Ask questions only about what you are curious to find out. Grind only if you are excited about the payout.
Most of the time the important bits will be almost impossible to miss. If you do it's probably because of bad game design, or it just wasn't interesting enough for you. That's ok. You don't owe anything to the game.
I am saying this after wasting countless hours in botw doing the most stupid shit. I finally lost my mind and decided to ignore everything. The first time I passed a new npc and refused to go there and start a conversation it felt wrong, like I was leaving an unfinished important business behind. But man, after a while it became liberating.
One thing I discovered is that ignoring things you are not interested on really helps with immersion, because if you spend too much time messing around you are bound to find things that don't make sense, like repeating dialog, invisible walls and such.
"Actually roleplay the character in your game" was going to be my advice, which is similar to what you have suggested too. I find it a lot easier to ignore my craving to 100% and exploit in-game systems when I force myself to pretend to be the characters I am playing. E.g. It's unlikely that the character/s I am playing would spend hours going through every unlocked bit of storage in a location and pocketing everything they find, so neither should I. Ditto with it being unlikely they would talk to absolutely everyone they encounter and exhaust all possible dialogue options. Etc.
The last game I really made an effort to do this in was Disco Elysium and it turned out great. It's the ideal RPG to try to totally immerse yourself like that in, IMO, due to there being soooooo many potential outcomes that there is absolutely no way you can actually 100% it in one playthrough, no matter how hard you try. Even if you savescum and explore every nook and cranny of the map you are still likely to miss an insane amount of content because of so much of it being locked behind all sorts of barriers and circumstances you can't predict ahead of time (e.g. only chars with X trait above/below Y value will get a particular bit of dialogue and/or outcome, needing to have failed or succeeded on something X hours of gameplay ago to unlock the option, etc.). So if you're trying to break yourself of the 100%ing habit @NaraVara, I would highly recommend checking that game out and playing it like that; Just go with the flow and see where it takes you.
Watch 100% completionist runs on YouTube, or achievement compilations of what you want to hit after it gets boring. You get to scrub around and see everything without having to sit around and wait for everything.
Edit: If you are a PC gamer, also consider installing Folding at Home on your computer, that way, it's more important to fold then to play a game you do not enjoy. Also join Team Tildes. We're starting to tack down and I think we have what it takes to break top 1000.
This is definitely something I struggle with too. There's lots of great advice in the thread from others, but I'll share one more perspective that sometimes helps me.
If you look at games from the design side, a lot of designers want to provide players with options so that each player feels like their choices and playstyle are respected. The downside to doing this is that those options can, from the player side, feel prescriptive. We can be made to feel like we're expected to do each one!
I recently started playing Borderlands again, which has a great example of this. Each weapon type has a "proficiency" that increases as you use them, giving you small perks like increased reload speed and damage boosts for using weapons of that type. Now, it's pretty clear that this is done to reward players for their chosen playstyle. You like shotguns? Well, the more you play with them, the better the shotguns get! Unfortunately, it's easy to see this from the player side and go "oh god, I have to level up each and every type of gun?!" What's intended as an enhancement for all players instead looks like a chore for a single player.
Collectibles are also a great example of this. I think a lot of devs put them in to reward exploration, so that players who enjoy searching around can have fun in an ongoing easter egg hunt throughout their playthrough. Unfortunately, many players don't like this, so the hunt feels like an absurd interruption from the game that they'd otherwise be enjoying! The easy answer is to just not do something we don't enjoy, but unfortunately, skipping them often feels like we're then being punished by the game or we're playing it suboptimally, on account of the fact that collectibles usually have some sort of associated in-game rewards, be that story or lore or resources or whatnot. How can developers successfully reward diverse playstyles without the associated rewards for undone tasks becoming implicit punishments for the player?
I find stuff like this hard to not metagame. Throughout my Borderlands playthrough I've been actively choosing to use varied weapon types in order to level all of their proficiencies, rather than just focusing on just one or two. You could argue that this is a "better" way to play the game (I'm getting to use more weapons after all), but I'm not choosing to do so because it's fun but simply because I get that nagging feeling that I'm leaving something incomplete otherwise.
Sometimes I'm able to see through the fog and realize that my drive for completion is really just pushing myself to be "all players" rather than an individual. There's nothing wrong with not seeing everything a game has to offer, especially if it was never meant to be wholly seen in the first place. On the other hand, sometimes I legitimately do enjoy "checklisting" in a game where I go through everything there is to offer, and sometimes it can be hard to know when I should treat a game as an individual experience versus a checklist to complete.