Last night I completed Batman: Arkham City. But this post isn’t about the game itself, but the little statistic of how much of the game you have completed. Because mine is nowhere near 100% even though I’ve seen the ending!

BAC is of course one of those many games where completion of the main quest/storyline in no way means you’ve actually completed the game. Indeed, this is one of the most striking examples of that I’ve seen in a long time; I think I’m at about 40% completed now. There is an absolutely enormous wealth of things to do, from collectables to challenges to side missions. And of course I have varying degrees of enthusiasm for these. The side missions and challenges are pretty much great fun and I imagine I’ll do many if not all of them as I continue to play; the collectables (Specifically the Riddler trophies) rather less so. I have always found collectables to be a very boring and tedious way of extending gameplay. I can’t really bring to mind any games where it has been done well, except perhaps Final Fantasy X because the collectables there (movie spheres) show Auron, Jecht, and Braska.

I’ve very rarely 100%’d any games actually. Partly because I’ve got a small core of games I play a lot that aren’t really open to that as a concept; sure you can WC as Haiti on Very Hard but there’s always another campaign to fight in Darkest Hour, you know? And open-world games generally just annoy me with their hidden collectables and so I end up running over innocents or whatever instead!

What about you? Are there games out there you can say you’ve completed 100% of, explored every last nook and cranny, done every sidequest, found every hidden room and item, reached level 99 with every character, whatever it might be? Or are you like me, and more prone to put a game down well before that point?