re: The Complete Vs. Mode Featuring MTV News' Stephen Totilo Vs. Level Up's N'Gai Croal on Patapon

ThomasElla — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:19:59 GMT

I was totally with this whole discussion until you got on the subject of grinding. For one, it seems that Stephen has a very different idea of what grinding in games really means to people, or at least to me. I don't consider God of War a grind at all, and to be frank, I have no clue where Stephen is coming from in this respect. God of War never forced me to go back through levels I had already completed to gain more experience points so that I could defeat a boss. No boss in God of War requires you to have anything beyond the essential "story" items you gain naturally over the course of the game.

And so, I think that is where we differ in what the "grind" of a game really is. Grinding, to me, does not simply mean repetition. It is a special brand of repetition. Yes, in God of War, you are essentially doing the same things over and over: ripping dudes into shreds. So Stephen may consider that a grind, but that would be far too picky since all games usually have just one objective they focus on like that. In Burnout, it's driving; in Halo, it's shooting. But that's not a grind yet. That's just the genre.

No, the grind comes in (for me) when a game forces me to go back through levels I've already completed so that I can meet a requirement to move on. The reason why this is bothersome is because it represents a problem in the way the game's difficulty scales upward. If there is a particular spike that requires the player to return to previously visited areas and replay whole sections to overcome this spike, then it's a grind. That difficulty spike should have been ironed out. Games shouldn't be artificially extended by those means.

There are ways of making that grind more tolerable, and this is where we can use Stephen's views as a jumping off point. Stephen considers a game's natural progression to be a grind sometimes, but to most people (or at least myself), God of War never felt like a grind. Why? Because I was leveling up steadily so that my Kratos was gaining power at the same rate as the enemies around him. I was never forced to go through levels again, (nor could I), so I always felt like I was moving forward in the game. Mostly because I, well, WAS always moving forward. Grinding is a grind because your progress in the game is stalled while you wait for your avatar to meet the requirements of the game. You are forced to go through areas you've already gone through, so rather than a repetitious task like fighting that feels fresh as you naturally progress through the game, it feels so stale because you've already experienced this content before. Would you want to go back and watch the first few chapters of The Matrix over and over until Neo is finally able to take on Agent Smith? Of course not.

Therefore, the way to make grinding bearable (if not to just get rid of it altogether) is by reinvigorating that content and make the player feels like they're still moving forward in the story. Whether this is by changing the environment so that now it looks different than when you last explored it, with new music, new enemies, and the like, or by offering the player new objectives as a reward for returning to these previous levels again.

However, there is no excusing the repetition in Rock Band's World Tour mode. I cannot tell you how many times in those "random" set lists that I had to play "Wanted Dead or Alive" and "Gimme Shelter" back to back. I still love "Shelter," but cannot stand "Wanted" anymore thanks to Rock Band.

Good discussion though, guys. I'm definitely going to pick up Patapon (and a PSP) after E3.