mZuzek said:
Maybe I shouldn't be quoting this post, because if I'll be honest I barely read the first or second lines... not to be disrespectful, it's just, it's 5:30 AM here and I'm way too tired to read lol (that is to say, I hope I find the energy to read your post tomorrow). But, basically what I've been doing these last few hours to stay up so late was playing Prime 3. It's been about a couple of years since I played it and I felt a second playthrough was long overdue - it's the only (good) Metroid game I am yet to beat twice. I have to say, the game's opening wowed me quite a lot, I remembered it being impressive but even then it blew my expectations away, I love the way it sets the game up and from then throwing you straight into Bryyo (the most interesting planet imo, I even had a thread for that today) makes it even better. I have to say though, all the scanning became really, really tedious after a while. There's a side of me that just wants to ignore it and run past everything, and I do have more fun when I do that, but I can't help but feel I'm doing something wrong so inevitably I stop to scan everything again, and it's pretty annoying how every little thing you have to scan takes a good 3-4 seconds to do it. In any case, I do appreciate a lot of what scanning brought to Metroid in regards to deeper lore about the civilizations, locales and creatures (I also don't like how it takes away a lot of the mystery of a lot of things, but I've already talked about that earlier). I just think it's not balanced well enough if it comes at the cost of the gameplay's pace. I think the game that perfected this was actually AM2R. It had a logbook just like the Prime games for you to know more in-depth stuff about the planet, but 1. it scanned automatically in parallel to your gameplay, and 2. it was only used for big lore stuff rather than, you know, every single thing in the whole game. I think that was the way to do it, because it essentially makes the feature a lot more optional in the sense that it doesn't detract from the gameplay ever (so you only get to it when you really want to), and it retains a lot of the mystery of the little things by only talking about broader stuff. I just think moments like the one there in Bryyo when you enter a crashed ship and find a dead body would have a lot more impact if instead of you just looking around for stuff in the scan visor, seeing a dead dude and knowing about how he died, you just entered the ship, didn't pay much attention and eventually found a dead dude and wondered how did that happen (same applies to every "dead body" situation in the Prime games ever). (edit: also, automatic log scanning means you'll never be missing out on important lore just because you didn't find it or read it out of order or whatever.) If anything, I'd still keep active scanning around for creatures in general (enemies, bosses, what have you) because it's nice to have more knowledge on those and it would be weird to just have it show up on your logbook midway through a battle or something. |
I wouldn't mind active scanning, although personally I'd prefer having the option to do either. For me, there's an element of manually scanning things that feels like I'm actually the one discovering things rather than having it just be given to me.
With that said...maybe I just don't have any sort of completionist tendencies, but if scanning is tedious for you, then...don't scan? Especially if you're playing Prime 3, where your scans carry over from one game to the next. If you keep scanning and feeding that niggling little voice in your mind that says to do stuff that makes you enjoy the game less, then it's only going to get stronger and you'll just have less fun with the game across the board. Ignore it for long enough, and it'll go away; there's no reason to do something you hate just to satisfy a weird little desire that you'd rather not exist anyway.
