Gamers Can’t Finish Games
Only 40% of players finished Assassin’s Creed II – but why could this be?
Ubisoft has just announced that only 40 per cent of players finished Assassin’s Creed II. We say “only”, but when you consider that the game’s sold well over 6 million copies, that’s still a heck of a lot of people anyway.
Still, it got us thinking. Why do so many gamers not finish games? Is it because they haven’t got the time, the inclination, or simply the capacity to take it all in?
Peter Molyneux rather famously revealed the other week that 20% of Fable II didn’t players didn’t change their weapons. What’s the world coming to?
Are the games themselves at fault for these misunderstandings and shortfalls, or is it those playing them? One could hardly accuse Fable II of being a badly signposted experience, but then it’s fair to say that, due to the highly accessible nature of its gameplay and world, 20% of players may not even have possessed the mechanical reading skills to be able to pick a named sword off a menu. Not because they were stupid – just because they were, perhaps, too young to read. Assassin’s Creed II, meanwhile, is a game of such wide possibilities that ‘finishing’ the experience is open to wider interpretation than just reaching the end of the linear adventure. Maybe rennovating Ezio’s villa was enough for some, or fully upgrading his skills, or jumping off all the towers.
It boils down, perhaps, to what developers actually want their players to do, and it’s interesting to see their desires reflected in followup titles. Molyneux, for example, has now made Fable III’s stock menu system a physical space, in with a player can wander around the halls of their home castle visiting an actual armoury to pick out a sword, or change clothes. It’s quite a departure in gameplay terms, feeling rather more involved, but then changing weapons becomes a more organic experience, included in the narrative, and in that way becomes, automatically, a more important moment in gameplay.
We’re all older now, too. When once we were children, ploughing 47 hours into exploring the entirety of Planet Zebes’ network of underground tunnels, or replaying Monkey Island ad infinitum till we had every puzzle down to memory, the majority of gamers are now in their late twenties to early thirties. A film’s over in two hours. A game of equal weight and sophistication, our industry tends to say, ‘should’ last around seven hours minimum. Not many people have that amount of free time.
Ultimately, though, it seems wiser to look at the modern videogame as an experience open to interpretation; a good game is not a jigsaw puzzle. The beauty is in what each player gets out of it on their own terms, though we appreciate the developers’ statistics to keep steering the course to make that experience palatable to all.
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I’m one who hasn’t finished ACII..
main reason…. i got bored after the craptastic 2hours of tutorial BS.
i’ve been gaming for 25+ years and 95% of the time I finsih a game.. and ACII has by far the worst opening few hours out of any game i’ve played. walking down the hall with the JOKER was way more entertaining then then Fleeing at the beginning of ACII ( i almost turned it off during the fight in the Parking Garage ) brutally crappy fight…. the only reason i continued to play was I really liked ACI.
now i may go back to ACII at some point (im in the country side for the first time) but the to get to this point felt like a chore so i moved on.
Well-written article Peter. I think the onus is on developers to make a game compelling enough to finish. I finish approximately 60% of my games. Not a number to be proud of but that number is there for a reason.
I play RPGs but senseless grinding halted numerous games for me. Other games are more subjective. I play sports games, fighters, and racing games. What constitutes finished? Those are experiential games and not objective-based games. The term finished is relative (agreed) but for so many reasons. Nice article though.
i’m now 31, work 12 hours, i have games not even visted the disk drive,i’ve been a gamer for 20 years and games are becoming so repetitive to the point where i feel i’m wasting time instead of having fun.
Buying a game and then not finishing it just seems like a waste to me, if you know you don’t have the free time to play through it then why bother getting it in the first place? That’s just sheer stupidity.
It’s a different story if you get stuck on a boss fight and simply can’t go any further but if you stop playing a game just because you don’t have the necessary attention span to see it through then you can’t call yourself a real gamer.
I would gladly spend 200+ hours doing everything there is to do in a massive RPG like Final Fantasy XIII or White Knight Chronicles. When i hear that people can’t be bothered completing a measly 16 hour campaign in a game Batman: Arkham Asylum or AC 2 it just goes to show how many uber – noobs there are in gaming today.
I think there are different reasons. One of them is the following: we have too much games to play them all.
For me it’s kind of addiction to buy a new game from time to time. May it be a retail game or one from PSN (yes, I’m a PS3 user). I read about a good new game and BAM, I buy it. For me it’s often the anticipation for a particular game that counts most. Or, if I don’t buy them, I borrow them from friends.
Actually I’m essentially playing some big hitters [God Of War III (borrowed), Ratchet&Clank:ACIT (borrowed), Demon's Souls (my own!)] and then there are some PSN games that I’m currently playing like PuzzleQuest:COTW, Go: Sudoku
. All of these games are not finished yet. Also 75% of my PSN games at all.
Last week I sold NFS:SHIFT and LBP; and they both weren’t finished.
Beside the reason of having not enough time there are some TIME EATER GAMES (?) like online games (currently Battlefield, soon BlackOps) that prevent us from playing single player games (with stories and ENDINGS).
Greetz from Germany,
Gregormeister
I loved the first Assassins Creed and finished it. Assassins 2 was a travesty and they destroyed the ip. I’ve gone off other UBI games too – they’ve lost their way imo.
However, it is a good point they’re making – I cant finish a lot of my games because the difficulty curve ramps up too high so that when you take a break (because you have a life) and come back to the game later you just can’t make any progress.
Tombraiser underworld or whatever it was called had it right with “tailoring” options where you could make the game easier by reducing enemies and bullet hits required on the fly as well as get hints and clear instructions if you were stuck.
When I have to go to the web and find a guide I get very sad.