2232: Pondering Postgame

I feel like I’ve become much more conscious of a lot of single-player games incorporating an almost MMO-like “endgame” these days, though pondering the matter a little further I’m not sure it’s as new a concept as I initially thought it was.

My musings on this subject are inspired by my second playthrough of Megadimension Neptunia VII, which is going considerably quicker than my 62-hour first playthrough of it thanks to its myriad of rather lovely New Game Plus features — faster run speed, higher jump height, ability to turn off random encounters and a bunch of other things besides, including the ability to instantly skip story scenes you’ve seen before — and in which I’m taking aim for the “true” ending and the subsequent postgame, which allows you to continue playing after the credits have rolled to clean up whatever it is you still want to get out of the game.

In the case of Megadimension Neptunia and numerous other games like it — largely JRPGs, with a few exceptions — the postgame is often designed with trophy collecting in mind, with some of the most challenging trophies requiring dedicated effort well above and beyond what the main story of the game demanded. In most cases, you’re not actually missing out on any story by pursuing these additional objectives; you’re simply expressing a desire to see everything the game has to offer, and to push your knowledge of its mechanics to the limit.

This is where the MMO endgame comparison comes in. Take my particular brand of MMO poison as an example: Final Fantasy XIV has a linear main scenario that takes you from level 1 to level 60 naturally, telling an interesting tale while equipping you with the skills you’ll need for high-level play. Once you reach level 60 and beat the main story you have a few choices: you can put the game down, satisfied that you’ve “finished” it; you can keep playing it to see what the new episodes of the story added in each new content patch add to the overall narrative; or you can delve into the endgame proper, which often relies less on story and more on mechanics and grinding, with the promise of significant increases in your character’s power as a reward.

This is exactly the case with modern single-player games that offer postgame content, too. In the case of Megadimension Neptunia VII, there are hidden treasures to hunt down, additional monsters to fight, challenging dungeons to clear and collectibles to… you know. There’s no actual obligation for you to take these extra challenges on if you’re satisfied with how the main story concluded, but the option is there for those who want to spend a bit more time with the game without having to worry about whether they’ll lock themselves out of something by advancing the plot too far.

As I say, I’d got into my head that this was a somewhat recent concept; when I think back to titles that I spent a lot of time with in years gone by, in many cases you had to take care of any and all of your business before you beat the final boss and rolled the credits. Take something like Final Fantasy VII, for example; once you unlock the final dungeon, pretty much the whole world is open to you, and there are a bunch of optional sidequests you can go and complete for some fairly significant rewards if you see fit, though none of them are essential to the plot, and none of them are necessary to beat the final boss. Once you do beat that final boss, though, that’s the end of the game — in RPGs of that era, you often didn’t even get to save a “clear file” to start a New Game Plus and carry over some of your achievements to a new runthrough.

But when I consider things in a bit more depth, the idea of the postgame — of an ostensibly narrative-based game remaining relevant and interesting to play even after you’ve seen the story’s finale — has been around for quite some time. Konami’s PS1 and PS2-era games, for example, often featured a ranking/score screen at the end of the game, challenging you to try it again, but do it faster/better/taking fewer hits. Other games unlocked new difficulty settings, or unlocked alternative (sometimes joke) endings. Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 took the ambitious approach of having multiple ways to experience the narrative: you could play it once as Claire, then see what Leon was up to while Claire was doing her thing; then you could play it “for the first time” again as Leon, then see what Claire was up to while Leon was doing his thing. Each of these four playthroughs, while similar, had its own unique content, making the game worth replaying — and once you’d done all that, there were the super-secret paths such as Hunk and Tofu, which mostly acted as a reward for those who had put in enough time and effort to master the game.

MMO players often describe reaching the level cap of their game of choice as “just the beginning” of your experience. And it’s very much true; pre-Heavensward Final Fantasy XIV sat at level 50 for a good couple of years, but managed to feel like it was progressing at a regular, steady rate, both in terms of new content and character power levels — and it’s doubtless the same with other MMOs that keep adding new stuff to keep level-cap players interested and engaged.

What I find interesting is the idea that a game designed primarily to tell a story — to have a clear end — can have so much beyond that story content, even if it’s a single-player game that isn’t expanded over time with new content, DLC or the like. It’s one of the many things that sets games apart from non-interactive forms of entertainment, and it’s an opportunity to enjoy a different side of a game you’ve taken pleasure in engaging with: having worked your way through the narrative, you’re now focusing on mastering the mechanics until you’re satisfied you’ve got everything you’re going to out of the game in question.

I never used to do multiple playthroughs of games — except for Final Fantasy VII, which my friends and I were borderline obsessed with in our teens — but these days, I very much enjoy exploring the postgame, trophy hunting and seeing multiple endings. Once I’m done with Megadimension Neptunia VII, I’m particularly looking forward to Dungeon Travelers 2‘s postgame; from everything I’ve heard about it, it very much takes the MMO approach of “finishing the story is just the beginning… now prove you really know how to play this game. If, you know, you want to.” — and that is something that has come to appeal to me very much over the years, even as many of my peers are getting less and less patient with lengthy, time-consuming games. I wonder what made me go the other way?

Oh well. Time for bed now; tomorrow I will find out if I’ve actually done all the arbitrary triggers that ensure I will get Megadimension Neptunia VII’s “true” ending, or if I need to do the whole bloody thing through for a third time. (That’s not actually too bad; to put it in context, while my first playthrough took 62 hours, my second playthrough has probably been no more than 3 hours so far, and I’m just coming into the third and final story arc, which puts me maybe an hour away from the “ending”.)

2051: In My Stomach

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is out this week and… I’m not excited at all.

Me not being excited at the latest big new release is nothing new, of course, but this is Metal Gear we’re talking about. I was a huge fan of both Metal Gear Solid and its sequel Sons of Liberty, but kind of fell off the wagon a bit before Snake Eater came out and have still never even touched Guns of the Patriots despite owning a copy. (I fully intend to play them at some point, I might add; I just haven’t done so yet.)

The Phantom Pain feels a bit different, though. My friend Chris and I have been discussing this recently and trying to pin down exactly what it is that’s bothering us both about it — particularly as we’re both fans of the older Metal Gear Solid games as well as Kojima’s batshit craziness.

I think the best way of summing up my feelings towards The Phantom Pain right now is to simply say that everything I hear about it sounds like almost the exact opposite of what I want from a Metal Gear Solid game. Past games were short, tightly focused, highly linear, well-directed experiences that had the pacing and structure of a (particularly long) movie. They kept you always moving onwards because there weren’t any unnecessary side missions or distractions; sure, there were a few secrets here and there that you could dig up if you wanted to, but for the most part things like Sons of Liberty’s dog tags were largely only there for the completionists; I didn’t care about the stats screen at the end of the game — I just liked enjoying the story, and Kojima’s vision for how that story should be presented.

The Phantom Pain, meanwhile, abandons the tight linearity in favour of an open-world environment and (apparently) upwards of 30 hours of gameplay compared to its predecessors’ 6-10. This set off warning bells as soon as it was first announced, I must confess, and what I’m hearing so far isn’t making me feel much better about it. Open worlds are cool technical achievements when done well, but they also often make for rather drab “gameplay by numbers” as you spend all your time looking for little icons on the map, completing arbitrary objectives and killing the pacing of the story, since open world games never, ever have any sense of urgency about them — they tend to be the very worst examples of “the world needs saving, but Armageddon will wait until you’re good and ready”.

Other things that I’m not a fan of the sound of so far are the microtransactions and the resource-gathering, base-building element. I don’t know much about either, to be honest, and it may well be that neither are particularly intrusive to the gameplay experience as a whole, but I don’t like what I have heard so far. I still believe that microtransactions have absolutely no place in a full-price brand-new triple-A game — if you want to get me to pay extra, provide me with some worthwhile content, not a means of paying to win. As for the resource-gathering element, a friend posted a screenshot on Twitter that looked to all intents and purposes like the message you get when logging into a grind-heavy Facebook or mobile game for the first time each day — yes, it’s a Daily Bonus, with rewards for logging in frequently and so forth. Not exactly what I have in mind when I think of the traditionally single-player, offline, “just you and Kojima” experience that is the previous Metal Gear Solid games, though granted I never delved into Metal Gear Online while it was a thing.

Then there’s the fact that several reviews have mentioned the fact that there’s more gameplay than cutscenes, and that the series’ iconic codec conversations have been replaced by cassette tapes that you can listen to while you’re walking around doing things. To be honest, a lot of things are making it sound more like a Splinter Cell game than a Metal Gear Solid game, and this is enormously offputting — Splinter Cell is one of those series that I respected for what it was doing, but just didn’t enjoy at all, and I always greatly preferred Metal Gear’s distinctly “comic book” approach to military espionage action, with all its supervillains, quasi-supernatural powers and giant walking nuclear warhead-equipped death tanks.

I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll end up playing The Phantom Pain at some point, but that time is not right now; the hype is just too much at the moment, and the things I do hear are offputting. I also want to play Snake Eater and Guns of the Patriots (and possibly Peace Walker) before I play The Phantom Pain, too, so I feel it’s going to be a while before I jump into Kojima’s swansong for Konami — if indeed I ever jump in at all.

We’ll see. I’m keeping half an eye on people’s reactions to the game now it’s in the hands of American players, but unfortunately as I’ve said so far, the things I have heard aren’t making me want to dash out and grab it as soon as it hits store shelves.

I’m also kind of bummed that Until Dawn came out last week and is promptly going to be forgotten about amid Metal Gear Solid mania — why the hell didn’t they hold that one back until Halloween? Who knows why these people do anything?