[General Discussion] Completionism in RPGs....

When I play an RPG, I play it for the story. To me, the challenge level makes the game rewarding where my efforts lead to more story being revealed. So, for example I would not bother with a sidequest if it only involved a boss fight that didn't gain me a unique, useful item or reveal more of the story-line or develop the characters a bit more.

So, I guess I would have to say that for the most part I am not a "completionist," as I see that as a button-mashing waste of time. Now, on the other hand, doing something like getting the pirate's treasure in Might & Magic VI required locating all the monoliths and putting together the word puzzle that could be found on them. The pirate's treasure yielded powerful, useful items, and it actually took some skill/puzzle-solving to acquire vs. simply power-levelling. Another example would be Zelda: TP. I beat the Cave of Ordeals because I wanted the item (I forget what it was now though?) but after I beat the game there was zero reason for me to round up the remaining Poe's souls.

I'm hearing some sentiment in this thread that when we were younger/the genre was still evolving (i.e. every single game was about levelling) there was more completionism simply due to the nature of RPG's back then, and I agree. Might and Magic VI basically ate up a year of college for me - I logged somewhere around 500 hours. That would only be about 1.3 hours per day for a year, so that's probably not an exaggeration. I just couldn't do that at this point. For me, Zelda: TP dragged on for an exhorbitant amount of time (or at least it seemed to). Shadow Hearts was just aobut the right length. I think for me, an RPG coming in around 35-40 hours is just about right.

Jam it back in, in the dark.