Do you 100% your games? Do you care about trophies or achievements?

I personally could care less if I 100% anything. The only thing I care about is that the game is fun. I will finish the main stories and if a side quest interests me I will go do that but I really could care less if I have completed every single thing a game has to offer. I don't care if I catch all of the different fish in Twilight Princess. I thought the fishing sucked in that game anyway. Also do you guys care at all about trophies and achievements? This ties into the first question so I guess some will but to me it's not important and has nothing to do with my enjoyment in a game. I look at how many I have on occasion because I am curious but beyond that it doesn't matter. I was just curious what everyone's take on this was. I understand the completionist aspect but some of the trophies and achievements are just not fun to do (like jump in place 20 times).

Depends on the game, if I really liked it i'll go for 100% in my second playthrough if i don't get tired of it, which i often do. In fact I have completed only a handful of games to 100%, my first was "Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!", great game and quite long if you go for 100% but it was never boring getting there or felt like grinding. Some games aren't meant to completed 100% like Just Cause 2. The game is huge, it has 75% complete achievment but not 100% achievement so that tells you even the developers thought it would be crazy to go for 100%.
I mostly don't care about achievement's. The ones you don't get for completing the game are usually grinding. However I do like it when I do something epic and the game recognizes it, like for doing some insane stunt with a car, landing in a pool and killing 20 peple and then F**k yeah!!! achievement pops out. But that almost never happens.

I don't worry about completing achievements or trophies, but if I feel like it, I might make an attempt for it if it makes sense. Needless to say, I'm not going to go crazy just to get them all. As said previously, there are some games that requires major time investment or are pretty much impossible as far as trophy collecting goes.

I do applaud those who do take the time to hunt the trophies/achievements. You have every right to brag about it, especially the hard to platinum ones!

It depends on the game and the purpose. I 100% games like Rayman Origins because it's both fun and easy to keep track of which levels still have objectives in them still to achieve. Likewise in shooters or whatever theres usually going to be a ton of achievements like "kill x dudes with weapon y" so I'll do my best just to knock them out while I'm playing just to spice the gameplay up a bit, like an excuse to try new weapons etc. I'll go back into a level or something to knock out a few interesting achievements as well, stuff that's readily doable or adequately fun.

In Dishonored, I based my first playthrough around the achievements of killing noone and never being seen since it felt like the best way to play the game, and I found it to be very fun indeed.

I won't however go to extraordinary lengths to do stuff that just isn't fun. GTA hidden packages and pidgeons I'm looking at you. Just completely innane stuff that really serves no real purpose. I've loaded up Just Cause 2 like 3 - 4 times in the last few months with the express intent of wanting to go and explore and blow up more places to reach that elusive 100% destruction rating or whatever it is but every time I do it I get about 3 - 4 settlements in and realise that it's just a horrendous chore not worth the effort, all down to how the stupid heat system works. You can barely sneeze in Panau without gaining Heat and it takes bforever for it to go down, annoying since blowing stuff up is so much fun.

Originally Posted by: Chronoja

I've loaded up Just Cause 2 like 3 - 4 times in the last few months with the express intent of wanting to go and explore and blow up more places to reach that elusive 100% destruction rating or whatever it is but every time I do it I get about 3 - 4 settlements in and realise that it's just a horrendous chore not worth the effort, all down to how the stupid heat system works. You can barely sneeze in Panau without gaining Heat and it takes bforever for it to go down, annoying since blowing stuff up is so much fun.

I keep Just Cause 2 permanently installed just so I can load it up whenever I feel like it and goof around, and I slowly make a little more progress. It's been a while since I last did though. I also at first thought the heat system was annoying, but then I realized that it actually works in your favor once you figure out how to take advantage of it. Some things are a bit easier in some ways if you keep it as low as possible, but it's actually not a problem if you slip up and it goes up because that means INFINITE FREE HELICOPTERS. When you first start playing, helicopters being sent after you seems horrible, because you're already surrounded by all the other reinforcements shooting at you, and flying high caliber guns coming after you is a disaster on top of that. The solution is to charge straight at them, hijack them, and use them to kill everyone else and blow up the settlement. Then just hookshot around from radar blip to blip on the map picking up the rest of the upgrades and stuff, and you've cleared the area in a quarter the time it would've taken normally. Problem solved. Plus you have a free ride to the next place. Heh.

How much of a game I complete depends on how much I like the game and how tedious the optional stuff is/how much it feels like grinding/padding. If there are side quests or bonus missions that feel like more of the stuff from the main game, just not mandatory to complete the game, I'm very likely to do those. If the achievements are clever ways of solving problems or put interesting restrictions on ways you can do things that make it a fun challenge, I'm reasonably likely to do those if they're fun. Stuff that's just an enormous timesink without much/any reward (even just in the sense of entertainment value) is much more likely to be ignored completely.

The problem I have with it is that it becomes completely self perpetuating after a certain point and it ends up dominating the playstyle. I'd prefer to be running around planting c4 etc or choosing when I want to use a helicopter to wreck stuff but once the Heat level starts to rise you are almost inevitably going to be forced to hijack it or spend the next while hiding in the jungle or whatever. Attacking/hijacking the heli and using it to destroy more stuff just ends up like you said, with an infinite supply of heli's which is annoying when I don't really want to use or deal with them.

JC2 just missed out on having the aggro reset mechanic that was the Pay n' Spray garages in the GTA games that would have done the job nicely but I do understand it, its all part of the whole chaos theme going on in the game etc.

Interesting topic! For me, it really just depends on the game. I usually try to go for 100% in 2D/3D platformers or open-world sandbox games. Most other games, I just do what I can. Of course, there are exceptions. I just went back through Portal 2 to get all the single-player trophies, and I hope to get all the co-op trophies this summer. I make a rule out of it to 100% any LEGO game as well. As far as trophies/achievements go, I normally only reach for 100% if they're progress-based, and able to be accomplished within one playthrough (Portal 2 being an exception here). Bethesda games are normally pretty easy to 100%, and doing so is actually one of the best ways to experience those games, I find.

Unfortunately, the problem with getting everything in a game is that sometimes I will feel bad after I've completed it... Like I've totally gutted it and left nothing new to discover or ponder about. Anybody else ever get that feeling?

I very rarely go for 100%. Most of the time I get bored/distracted.

Let's see... Only notable things I've done is catch all the Pokemon in HeartGold (and by ctach I guess I mean traded for), and completed Dragon Quest VIII and IV. VIII took over 100 hours, but IV wasn't too bad... I planned on completing five but the bonus boss there kicked my butt just a little too hard for me to want to try again. xp VI is kinda weird with completion and getting in the bonus dungeon, so I'm not sure what I'll do with that.

But really, I don't go for 100%, like... ever. RPGs like that are the very limited exception.

100% complete or not, well I guess that depends. Like on older games pre-PSX to 100% complete the game really meant just beating it, everything was for the most part linear, if you beat it, chances are you did it with 100% completion. Like Castlevania not really much you could miss, or the first Zelda. Even for some more recent games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, you had to beat the scenario objectives to get the next scenario, and the last scenario would count as completing the game. Some games like the .hack series up through the third one there wasn't much on the side, grunty races, raising grunties, and beating the time challenge levels with the best three times, finding the OVA secret locations, some trading, and that is about it, and that stuff just seems to get done without really being a chore. Then there are games like the Elder Scrolls series, and there is so much to do you can literally spend hundreds of hours and still not have everything. I loved Oblivion and Skyrim enough I 100% or as close as one can on the systems 360 Oblivion and PS3 Oblivion had some bugs in it that made some missions impossible to complete.

Then there are achievements I will try to go for these sometimes there are some pointless ones, and sometimes there are some taxing ones that could take days to try and complete without much success, so I guess that depends, got to remember Achievements didn't really come about on counsels until PS3/360 at least that I know of, there more on the system then in game. I have fun getting what I can.

My real thought is whether or not to tackle the DLC content, some DLC stuff seems lame and pointless and yet others seem worth while.

Overall it depends on the fun factor, if I am really hating a game, or find the game to just not be fun, I'm not going to bother going for any extras, I just want it over with, so I am certainly not going to bother with the achievements either, and if I love a game and one of the achievements is say run 500 laps around _____ City, and one lap takes 1 minute and it serves no purpose to the story, rest assured that is one achievement that will not be completed, unless I am super bored, and willing to do something stupid and pointless.

Originally Posted by: Chronoja

The problem I have with it is that it becomes completely self perpetuating after a certain point and it ends up dominating the playstyle. I'd prefer to be running around planting c4 etc or choosing when I want to use a helicopter to wreck stuff but once the Heat level starts to rise you are almost inevitably going to be forced to hijack it or spend the next while hiding in the jungle or whatever. Attacking/hijacking the heli and using it to destroy more stuff just ends up like you said, with an infinite supply of heli's which is annoying when I don't really want to use or deal with them.

JC2 just missed out on having the aggro reset mechanic that was the Pay n' Spray garages in the GTA games that would have done the job nicely but I do understand it, its all part of the whole chaos theme going on in the game etc.

It definitely would've been nice at times if there had been an easier way to reset it, but it sounds like I had less of a problem with getting into trouble with it in the first place. If it got high enough, I had no problem abusing their own helicopters against them, but it's not like it was something I did on a regular basis, just something that made it not a threat and made me not have to worry anymore. Most areas seemed to have spots on top of buildings or wherever that you could hide without having to run away, so except for the particularly exposed ones or ones with lots of military presence, liberal application of the hookshot reduced the problem for me. If I fired it up right now, I have a feeling the lack of direct reset mechanic would probably bug me a bit more than before having just finished Saints Row 3 though, which has something like 14 different ways to do it, pretty much all instant and free. Heh.

Depends on how much I like the game. If I don't like it very much, I'll do the bare minimum. If I'm enjoying it, I'll look around and do extra. Games I love are the only ones I bother to 100%.

Achievements...I'm kind of an achievement whore on the 360. I don't really bother to get them until I've already played a lot of the game though. PC and PS3 achievements I don't care as much about for some reason, especially PS3.

I try to go for as many achievements as I can when playing through a game, but some games I just want to get through to the end and finish up, it really depends on how much I like the game and if there are different endings based on completion percentage.

No and I never play through the same game twice to play the new game+/harder difficulty. It doesn't add enough content to feel like it's worth my time. I have like 2-3 games 100% but they are my all time favourite games :p so no I always go for the main story mission and maybe som side quests if I feel like it.

I'll just leave this here:

Originally Posted by: nalgas

I'll just leave this here

Thank you, that was entertaining, and made my morning.

If the game doesn't have an achievement system, I'm going to beat it 100%. If it does, I better like it a lot. Either way beating a game with every doohicky and sidequest finished just feels better than leaving it like that.

Originally Posted by: nalgas

I'll just leave this here:

Awesome!!! This is exactly how I feel about the whole 100% completion thing. Thanks for posting this. Hilarious!

I understand it's a highly subjective thing, so I won't begrudge anyone for it... but personally I find achievements, trophies, and modern online "gamer cred" to be a frivolous waste of time. My own enjoyment of a game comes from exploring it slowly, overcoming its difficulties on my own, and eventually seeing the credits. If I get the "bad ending" or I miss secret weapons or I only get three achievements, I could not care less. I walk away from the game with my own experience of it that is unique and defined by how I played it myself. To go back and try to achieve ludicrous artificial glories like "1000 head shots" or "Tea Bag Team Leader" or whatever... I just don't have any inclination for stuff like that, nor do I have the free time even if I did. I definitely don't have enough free time to try and 100% games. Even when I had that kind of free time, that sort of obsessive compulsive behavior didn't exist in me. Also I prefer solo offline gaming to multiplayer online, so I don't have a gamer tag that "needs" embellishment at any rate.

or "Tea Bag Team Leader"
lol I would feel real bad if I misses an opportunity like that

I totally get that, Exhuminator. I once spent an entire summer just playing games that were renowned for their "easy 1000 GS." Ended up getting about 30,000 GS that summer alone. Three months later I got a PS3 and essentially stopped using my 360 except for exclusives. I understand why people do it, because it does give a small amount of gratification to unlock an achievement, but now I only try to platinum games that I care about.

I guess I'm still a little hung up on trophies... my PSN account is in my brother's name. I could easily make a new account for myself, but I'd lose all my trophies. I won't break my hands to obtain them... but once I have them, I like them well enough.

Originally Posted by: burningsoup

I totally get that, Exhuminator. I once spent an entire summer just playing games that were renowned for their "easy 1000 GS." Ended up getting about 30,000 GS that summer alone. Three months later I got a PS3 and essentially stopped using my 360 except for exclusives. I understand why people do it, because it does give a small amount of gratification to unlock an achievement, but now I only try to platinum games that I care about.

I guess I'm still a little hung up on trophies... my PSN account is in my brother's name. I could easily make a new account for myself, but I'd lose all my trophies. I won't break my hands to obtain them... but once I have them, I like them well enough.

I know nobody will ever look at my achievements or give a shit, but getting them in games I enjoy playing is a lot of fun. Especially when it challenges you to do stuff you wouldn't normally do otherwise and it gives me more to do in that game.

However, there was a competition I was a part of that had actual prizes and involved increasing your gamerscore higher than everyone else and I ended up renting a bunch of "easy 1k" games that were absolutely terrible games. It was such a chore, I don't know why anybody does it just for the sake of it and I swore to myself that I would never do that shit again, it was so awful.

I mostly play single player as well and actually very rarely have my PS3 online at all. I am guessing that it is a social thing as far as the achievements go but from the majority of the responses that I have seen on here very few people really seem to care. Which makes me wonder why is the whole share all of your crap with your friends being pushed so hard with games now? I don't know about PC's but it seems that all of the consoles are doing it. With Sony and the new "share button" on the controller, to Nintendo and their "hints" that you can drop in game, to Microsoft and what I will assume is going to be more "achievements" in games it seems the major companies are trying to push everyone to only play with each other. Personally I would much rather play a single player campaign. Multiplayer is fine to extend the life of the game, but if you have a bad story I won't want to play your game. I blame it on COD that seems to be the popular answer everywhere you look LOL.

Because multiplayer keeps people invested in a game, and when your friends move on to the next game, you pretty much have to buy it. They don't want you to play through a single player campaign for 6-8 hours and then never touch the game again.

But yeah, I use consoles for single player games. I have a bunch of XBL time cards that I have yet to use...

Originally Posted by: pongsifu

Because multiplayer keeps people invested in a game, and when your friends move on to the next game, you pretty much have to buy it. They don't want you to play through a single player campaign for 6-8 hours and then never touch the game again.

But yeah, I use consoles for single player games. I have a bunch of XBL time cards that I have yet to use...

Being vested in a game only matters to the publisher/developer if you buy any DLC. If not then they really don't care because they aren't getting any more money out of it. Of course there is the whole 'all my friends are playing it so I will have to buy it too" but short of a few onine multiplayer games such as the obvious like COD or Battlefield and MMO's how many people actually spend time with online multiplayer? I really don't know. I really hate it when a game tacks on a shitty multiplayer simply to say it's a multiplayer though. I really wish they would spend that time making a better single player game. It would be a much more productive use of time.

The only game I truly got 100% completion (Platinum Trophy) is inFAMOUS 2. it took too much of the time and I find the achievements of other games to be too far fetched that's why I dont 100% complete them