{"id":2877,"date":"2011-01-03T12:32:27","date_gmt":"2011-01-03T17:32:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=2877"},"modified":"2011-01-03T15:47:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-03T20:47:00","slug":"so-when-are-you-finished","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2011\/01\/03\/so-when-are-you-finished\/","title":{"rendered":"So When Are You Finished?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was a guest on this week’s Jumping the Shark podcast<\/a>, and the topic for the week (once you get past all the “what are you playing?” stuff) was whether we complete the games we play. This was not about whether reviewers have to, but about what makes us finish a game and whether we feel compelled to move on if a game isn’t doing it for us. The whens and the whys are pretty important.<\/p>\n

I don’t play games that really have ends. I mean, they have end games<\/a>, but when can I say that I have finished War in the East<\/em> or Bronze<\/em>?<\/p>\n

On the show, Todd Brakke boasted about having finished Dawn of War 2<\/em>, but which he meant he had finished the story based campaign. I commented that, from my perspective, he had only barely started Dawn of War 2<\/em>. Sure, he had completed the story and had some fun with the squad based tactics stuff, but he only played one race, he never tried the skirmish, he didn’t engage with any of the territorial control games that Relic designs so well.<\/p>\n

Some strategy games clearly have end points. Lionheart: King’s Crusade<\/em> is nothing but two campaigns (one Crusader, one Saracen) and there is no reason to play the game once you have claimed the Holy Land for whatever god your hero worships. A few years ago there was a spate of WW2 real time strategy games that, similarly, had nothing beyond the missions that were strung together.<\/p>\n

No matter how many times you play Mass Effect 2<\/em>, though, you can speak of having “finished it” so long as you see the story to a resolution. No matter how many times I conquer the world in Civilization<\/em> or beat back the Zerg in Starcraft<\/em>, I never feel like the game is finished. Playing a new skirmish whether online or alone feels like a new beginning in a way that restarting Dragon Age<\/em> doesn’t. As one of the Gameshark panelists noted, I already took my guy through that story. The first time is what really happened – everything else after that is just exploring new plot points or grinding for achievements.<\/p>\n

There is a world of difference between “I finished Starcraft 2” and “I am finished with Starcraft 2.” Does the first even make sense?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was a guest on this week’s Jumping the Shark podcast, and the topic for the week (once you get past all the “what are you playing?” stuff) was whether we complete the games we play. This was not about whether reviewers have to, but about what makes us finish a game and whether we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9,21],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-Kp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2877"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2879,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877\/revisions\/2879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}