Saturday!
Further along in Arkham Knight.
OH MY GOSH IS THIS GAME AWESOME. YOU MEET THIS GUY AND THAT GUY AND THIS GUY SHOWS UP AND THERE’S THIS THING AND NOW YOU CAN SHORT OUT TAZERS AND IT’S AWESOME. Seriously, when I met (mumble mumble) I startled and had to yell to Maribou “DUDE THEY PUT (so and so) IN THIS GAME!!!”
(The other mumble mumble. Not the obvious mumble mumble.)
Anyway, the new thing in this style of game is to give approximately one kabillion things to do. Sure, you’ve got the overarching mission where you have to take on The Scarecrow and his fiendish plan to destroy Gotham and sure there’s the million little Riddler things that you have to find and break and take pictures of. The Riddler has a racetrack that you can get really good times on! And there’s a paramilitary organization setting up little bases and you have to stop those! And there are landmines being dropped in the city and you have to blow them up! And there are firemen who have been kidnapped and you have to find them! And there’s a serial killer on the loose!
So if you wanted to just power through the game and play the main missions, that’d be an option for you. Hey, you have to save the world, after all. You can’t necessarily waste time finding every little dang Riddler Trophy.
But if you wanted to find every little dang Riddler Trophy? That’s *TOTALLY* an option. It’s also what Batman would do.
Now, I know that this was one of the things that drove everybody nuts about Assassin’s Creed 2 (and its many sequels). You spend as much time opening fabric stores and saving up cash to buy every single sword (even though you went out of your way to make sure that you had the best one, like, halfway through the game) because 100% is 100%.
I can totally see how someone would argue that this Assassin’s Creedification of Batman is nothing but padding.
My take is that there is more of it to love.
(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission.)
Yes I understand. I was unhappy with my performance in Skyrim until I had no quests left (except the repeating ones). And then I wanted to play again because doing one quest (fighting for the Stormcloaks for freedom of worship) forecloses other quests (but what does it look like when the Imperials win?) and I wanted to do it ALL.Report
Skyrim and all I’ve never been a completionist for. Some other games, sure… but not those.
(Nor Suikoden II and the Japanese contingent of “how many things can you collect”).Report
Don’t worry, no spoilers here:
Actually, the sorta cool thing about Arkham Knight is that the game finishes…before the game finishes. It’s a nice design. You solve the main question, stopping the Arkham Knight and Scarecrow, and now you’ve won the game, you can go do the New Game Plus. You have ‘won’, in the same sense you won previous games.
But there’s *another* problem that happens during the end of that which is a pretty big spoiler so I won’t say it, but before you can do anything about *that*, you have to wrap up every single remaining quest. Although I had managed to beat every single quest except the Riddler by then, because that’s just how I play games.(1)
And *then* you can do the last remaining thing and the game *really* ends, with one last cutscene and the credits.
Although, don’t worry, if you choose ‘continue’ off the menu after that point you get sent back in time to right before you did literally the last action in the game (Or, to put it another way, there is no save point after that.) and can keep playing, so you can even keep going to try to get all the achievements and whatnot. And then go do the last thing again, I think, if you want to see the final cutscene and credits?
1) In fact, I think you *can’t* wrap up Riddler before that point, because after you beat areas he goes back and puts trophies in there(2), so you can’t collect them all before that. Also, there’s a touching conversation with Selena that would be rather different if you had managed to finish Riddler earlier. I’m wondering a little how this works on New Game Plus, where previously-found trophies are still found. (Although you’d still have to save Selena, but that can wrap up earlier.)
2) Which makes a hell of a lot more sense than previous games, where the Riddler somehow knew where you were going to have to go and put trophies there in advance! In AK, he’s supposedly spying on you and sending robots out *behind* you. This is still *slightly* weird, because he’s put trophies in places he *really* shouldn’t know about or be able to get into, like the Studio and other spoiler places, but still better than previous games, where he somehow knew the plot well in advance of things that actually happened to direct the plot!Report
Cookie Monster likes cookies.
(How’s the three dimensionality?)Report
Well, I’m running into my first bugs.
I am being told about missions that I shouldn’t be told about yet. Missions on an island that the car can’t get to. Now, I’m confident that the bridge will be coming down soon… but, in the meantime, I’m irritated to be berated by various people that I should be doing X when X ain’t yet possible.Report
*sniff* at least the game you’re playing isn’t “find the memory leak”Report
I’m irritated to be berated by various people that I should be doing X when X ain’t yet possible.
It’s amazing how realistic these new video games are.Report
I am being told about missions that I shouldn’t be told about yet. Missions on an island that the car can’t get to. Now, I’m confident that the bridge will be coming down soon… but, in the meantime, I’m irritated to be berated by various people that I should be doing X when X ain’t yet possible.
That’s not a bug, that’s just the Riddler being an idiot.
He will berate you the *entire game*…once you do the Catwoman stuff, he’ll start berating you for not finding all the trophies…in between announcing to the entire city that Batman is an idiot. It’s so stupid that you can overhear one of the thugs wishing for a power outage so people would get off the damn screens. (What sort of zoning board allows people to put up giant video billboards with *speakers*?)
Riddler doesn’t actually care if you can or can’t do something, or if you’re trying to save everyone in the city from dying. He’s the most important guy ever, he’s your archnemisis, start jumping through his hoops, dammit!
Or, in reality, just completely ignore him, absolutely none of that is time sensitive.
Incidentally, it sounds like you play like me, trying to do all the side missions first. Here is information that I wished someone would tell me: As far as I can tell, at absolutely no point do side missions become unavailable, or do you fail them if you haven’t finished them by. Even stuff that might seem reasonable, like the checkpoints and militia stuff going away after defeating AK and Scarecrow, does not happen.
There are certain events you can’t do side missions *during*, like the obvious example of driving people around, but those end.Report