The Endgame After The Endgame: The Definitive Review
For When NG+ Isn’t Necessary
In my desperate attempts to continually write about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2,1 I’ve managed to spin out another month of play by simply exploring the entire map in chase of a mythical achievement for discovering all locations.2 It’s been absolutely lovely, if you must ask. But then I have made no secret at all that I adore that game. It’s not that much of a surprise that despite getting a narrative ending, I don’t want to leave The Zone. I don’t want to backtrack my saves to follow other endings, either. I just want to do more S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stuff, and the recent arrival of a spangly new patch with vastly improved A-Life conveniently justifies it somewhat more than the woollier absolutions I had prior. Unusually, in exploring the endgame environment of Pipryat, I actually stumbled into two3 of the greatest firefights I’ve had in the entire game. I’ll save the explanation for a footnote, but they really were spectacularly good shit.4 A big part of the reason why is because I was at the apogee of the game’s systomic arc, and for me this turns out to be a focal point in so many of the modern open-world games that I truly adore.
A friend remarked that upon finishing the story for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, they had found plenty of pleasure in touring the glorious environment and, to quote, “fucking up any baddie that crosses my path”. That this offers more reward than concluding a narrative shouldn’t be surprising. One of the great ironies of the modern videogame is this: the content it formally offers when you’re at your most powerful and knowledgeable is generally less in quantity than the content offered for that mid-game march of building loadouts and skill trees. And this includes the time spent gaining the experience required to use skills and equipment optimally. While it’s great to have lots and lots to do when the game is charming you during the honeymoon period, I can’t be the only one that wishes for even more when you’ve really got your shit together. For any Assassin’s Creed, it’s often the late stages where the systome starts to really sing. You might find the same in the average Far Cry, too. This chimed precisely with my S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 post-ending exploration.5 Both that and Shadows offer stunning environments that more than earn their keep by being virtual spaces to simply inhabit and witness, but by the endgame you have built such a great relationship with the environment and its systems that the fun has a quality all of its own. This isn’t entirely reliant on the environment carrying its own worth as visually-rewarding explorational content. I have the fondest memories of abandoning the dam in Fallout New Vegas to wander the Mojave in search of places I hadn’t seen, and dispensing justice to the patrols of raiders and legion assholes. I had done much the same in Fallout 3 and Oblivion before it, and all three carried that same sense of needing more to simply do with my fully matured spec and loadout. The shining glory of the open-world map with spawning baddies archetype is that you can make your own fun very easily in those surrounds and systems, and for me plenty of fun was had. Much of it at the narrative’s expense.
It should come as no surprise that I did exactly the same in Skyrim, as completing the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves’ Guild questlines sorted me out with a stellar stealth archer spec. This left me happily noodling around the fringes of the map for cunningly-hidden Daedric quests and marked locations that only the truly curious would ever find. The only bother was the threat of fucking dragons appearing and ruining the fun. Naturally, I didn’t get anywhere near finishing Skyrim’s main quest, mostly because I really could not give a fucking shit about it. Likewise Oblivion’s grindy-ass gate closing, which became surprisingly boring very quickly indeed. There was far more fun to be found in exploring the land with peak loot. And this was exactly what I did in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint and Metal Gear Solid V. Oh and Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 4 and even Starfield. Not being a soulsborne fan, I have no idea if players do the same for those titles, nor do I know if people make it work for the Red Dead Redemptions. One thing I can attest to is that I often found all the GTAs to be surprisingly poor in offering much to do in the late-game that decently exploits its systome and the player’s knowledge of it. They suffered too much from treating the world as a passive backdrop instead of an actual world for my tastes. In this sense, I would probably get more out fucking around in the average Watch Dogs endgame than I would GTA V.
The real gold standard for fully-equipped, fully-knowledged player content is IoI’s peerless Hitman: World Of Assassination series. As I’ve mentioned previously, the modern Hitman is a miracle of asset and map re-use, rewarding those who put the time into exploring every pixel and probing the intricacies of each level’s mechanical timings. Not having the space to install it on my lowly Series S, I watched Outside Xbox’s run at the recent James Bond/Mads Mikkelsen elusive target. They show off the beauty of knowing Paris inside and out, and of understanding how to fully exploit the systome to get the job done. And of course, Hitman has enjoyed nearly a fucking decade of content to keep the fully-versed engaged and replaying. The provision is remarkably generous in the light of what passes for the norm. In my bit on Cyberpunk’s Phantom Liberty DLC, I remarked that the ideal situation there is to treat the city as you would a Hitman map. The service game economy should shift from providing raids for drops to providing missions and targets that, much like Hitman’s elusive targets, cater for the expert as much as they do the newbie. It can be argued that the elusive targets and escalations are really for experts to one-shot, but they all end up being freely selectable in the end, I think?6 And thus, they’re fine extra content for Hitman virgins to try as much as the formal missions the maps originally came with. Of the many things that modern Hitman gets so right, this continuation of fresh content and fresh challenge, along with brilliantly fun twists on convention and expectation, is perhaps the most valuable lesson that it teaches other games. I’ve written before that the absolutely splendid open worlds that have become standard in the modern videogame are rarely exploited to anywhere near their maximum, and perhaps we should all be fuming that it’s only Hitman that really seems to care about even attempting to maximise its environments for players who really know how to get the most out of them. Once again, maybe I just have to hope some post-2027 AI apocalypse makes this pipedream of never-ending late-game, seasoned player content possible. I mean, it can’t be worse than what we have now, right?
[21]
Look, I know, I know, but I’ve just installed I Am Your Beast, so expect a Rollerdrome review soon. Like this year, maybe?
Mythical in the sense that it only exists in my imagination.
Ok, right, so, right, I was picking through some housing complexes in the city and working towards uncovering a location marker when I entered a large quad flanked by housing blocks with a kindergarten in the middle. I'm not sure if it was a glitch or not, but I'd actually run into a firefight between two factions, both of which were hostile to me. One had infinite spawns while I was in the quad. This created a bonkers intense firefight that had me really cosplaying as a soldier on a crazy plane of existence. I was ducking behind cover, dashing to safety, burst-firing all over the place. One faction was holed up in the kindergarten, so clearing that out while dodging fire from the other faction through the windows was amazingly intense. After emptying the building, I was left with the infinite spawners, who were coming in squads of five or six every five minutes or so. The residential blocks that made up the quad had explorable sections that the respawners would quickly occupy, so that again became a pretty intense hour of searching for loot drops and dirty fighting. I loaded up until I hit the 70KG threshold and lumbered back to base, fully satisfied with a play session that consisted of one long firefight.
So after the Kindergarten battle and getting back home to the Pipryat settlement, I headed back out and found a bunch of Monolith troops defending a long, ruined residential building a few streets on from the Kindergarten. This wasn't a marked location, but I figured I'd pop inside to have a look as it seemed to be brimming with Monolith and therefore ripe with drops for yellow-condition guns I didn't have in my stash. Little did I know that it would turn out to be the BEST FIREFIGHT IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME. The building was exquisitely modelled as the kind of wartorn structure that you'd associate with Stalingrad or, of course, the urban fighting of Mariupol or Bakhmut. Dense and claustrophobic, the building had a route through it consisting of apartments with various connective holes in the walls, floors and ceilings linking them together in a linear dungeon of sorts that, combined with the small rooms and tight corridors, was an amazingly evocative pressure-cooker of brutal close-quarters combat. It was fucking nasty - I had the shotgun going almost constantly, as you'd peek into a room and see three enemies turn and react, then you'd pump the room full of shot, only to take fire from a room behind you, empty the shotgun into that lot, rapidly loot and press on. You'd take damage constantly, have to rest to apply medkits and reload, and hear the scuffling and barks of enemies shifting around mere meters from where you were. It was wonderfully, beautifully taut stuff. The entire building is in darkness no matter what time of day, so it's all done by torchlight and the modelling for the ruined interior was amazing. In the last third, I'd burnt through my stockpile of shotgun ammo so was having to loot shells off corpses and be precise with my shots, which put a beautiful cap on the sense of pressure and being in a desperate battle to survive. At the end, the sun was coming up and I cleared a final room to find a very fancy exoskeleton as a reward for having battled through this single, unmarked building crammed with baddies. Absolutely top-tier shit, seriously. That single hour-long battle, completely divorced from any mission or narrative component, is one of my highlights of the entire generation so far. It was a perfect confluence of that stellar environmental modelling, the mood it creates, the interactive design, the combat systems. A fucking colossal chef’s kiss. And it came after you'd normally expect any value left in playing to be completely exhausted!
Technically pre-ending, as the game dumped me to menu after playing the cutscene I'd earned. I had to load a pre-final-mission save to get back to The Zone.
Am I right? I cannot be fucked to check.