I've had this intention for a long time, to play all the Heroes of Might & Magic games, from the start (or at least from I to V). But then I got to HoMM3 and I've been stuck on it for literally years, because (gasp shock) I kind of hate the campaigns in that game. Not only do they tend to be really hard, and untill Shadow of Death offer no choice of difficulty, but they are also chock full of missions with victory or loss conditions I hate, most of all the damn time limit, which absolutely ruins all fun for me. Finally I realised, I'll never play through them all. So... I'll never beat the game, right? But there's other stuff in HoMM too. What if I just play all the single scenarios that I like? Can I mark it as "completed" then?

And that led me to thinking about "beating" other games. There are so many games that offer more than just the story campaign. When do you "beat" those? Can I say I beat a Lego game when I completed the story mode? Or only once I collect everything, unlock bonus levels, 100% the whole thing? Did I complete an RPG if I ignored all side quests and only saw one of many possible endings, so ignored like 60% of the game? What if I only did the side quests because the story sucks, and spent like a 100 hours on it and then just quit once I felt "done"? Did I complete a Batman Arkham game if Riddler is still out there, because seriously, f*** the question mark collecting busy work?

And what about using walkthroughs or finding hints or answers online? Did I beat a game if I only looked up single thing online? I'd say "yes" if it's just one thing in hours and hours of gameplay, but what if it's 5 things or ten... where's the line? 50% of things?

Don't get me wrong, I know there are no actual rules about this, and everyone shoud just roll with whatever's the most fun for them. I'm just curious how you guys individually see "beating" a game.

I have been thinking in a similar vein lately. My conclusion is about quality. I will list several games of good quality in my opinion.


RimWorld
STALKER Anomaly
StarSector

What do these have in common?
Each allows for random world generation= lots of replay.
Character building to match player way of playing, not dev enforced.
An end goal or series of goals, with an open sandbox and freedom to accomplish a goal the way the player feels was the best way with what player had available.
Tell your own story with risk of permadeath. This forces the player to care. Else be punished by not getting anywhere.

But what about beating the game? Simple. Games like these, you can also play to meet your own goal and stop like eating. When you enjoyed the experience, yet had enough.

Similar feeling for a few other games, but 2 in particular. The goal is day to day survival.
Unreal World
Cataclysm dark days ahead

Only game as of late I could find similar was The Last Starship....which is currently alpha build status and broken. Interesting but broken.

When the credits decide to show up. Exceptions are true sandboxes like Unreal World or Dwarf Fortress; but even those have crowning achievements.

For example, you can keep playing past the end of the tech tree in the Civ games, but you've probably already done everything there is to do with them.

I don't really think about "beating" a game. Thankfully, the according threads here are just called "Games Finished in 202X".

But semantics aside, I usually consider a game as completed or finished when I've played through the official campaign(s). Sometimes even when I've almost played through the official campaign(s) only but then watched the ending on YT because I got fed up trying to win the tedious last boss battle or annoying maze sequence or whatever (in my experience games often tend to be less fun during the finale). I care less about actually "beating" the game with skill than about having seen all or most of what there is to see in terms of story and mechanics. Not to say I won't make an effort to beat it, but if it stops being enjoyable and starts to feel like a chore, I stop caring about that. I'm not really a competetive player anyway.

I also try to do any side content, challenges, finding collectibles and such BEFORE finishing the main story, because I know from experience that as soon as I've seen the story end and/or the credits roll, everything else will feel pointless to me, all of a sudden (although most likely it was already "pointless" before).

But yeah, officially I would say I've completed Neverwinter Nights, because I've played through all the campaigns once, even though I'd insist that the campaigns are not its selling point and that you can never really complete the game, and I will probably keep playing it as long as I can (the endless user-made content for it, that is). Weird. But I guess I just need to draw some arbitrary lines sometimes in order to find closure or something, heh.

When I grow tired of it. Or is that to be considered as the game 'beating' me?

For me I consider a game finished when I completed let's say in percentages of total content between 90 and 100% of the game.

Let's consider a game that was on GOG since the very launch day (namely The Witcher 3 as an example).

If I play only the main story I can finish it pretty quickly but it is finished? For me surely not. I can easily get myself lost in side quest or some other things to do.

I also tend to wait for complete editions for almost all games and that also means DLCs that count toward the completion when the DLC adds something meaningful to the main game (not counting cosmetics, hard modes, arenas etc.)

Some other good examples even if they did not have any DLCs

God of War (2018) - you can go straight ahead for the main quest - but atleast in my opinion main quest means you are playing like 60-70% of the game and you are losing on some awesome side quests and encounters.
Same goes for God of War: Ragnarok - in this game they even give you a quest to explore the rest of the world to encourage you to explore and play (they basically tell you hey pal you're not done).

There are even some games that punish you for going only after main quests only with not so good endings (Here comes to mind Metro Exodus and Mass Effect Trilogy).

Finishing all official single player content.

In your case, I would not consider the game beat. I am in a similar boat. I finished all RoE and Armageddon's Blade campaigns but still have to get around to finishing Shadow of Death. Other content like skirmish or scenarios etc., I consider as just extras and my completion status of the games is not contingent on playing an X or Y amount of them.

In case of Lego Games, I'd consider them beat upon finishing all the story missions. Then it depends if you want to 100% it, but I'd have the game already marked as completed.

As for walkthroughs/looking up hints, it depends. I will avoid doing it unless absolutely necessary and always feel bad for doing it later anyway. I will mark the game as finished, but will always remember the taint of having to look up outside help.

Also, I'd recommend looking for hints first, rather that the straight up solution. UHS can be very useful for adventure/RPG games: https://www.uhs-hints.com/

Feels slightly less dirty :P

Normally I'd probably agree, but in this case I'm gonna have to set that as my "completion" criteria, or else I'll never get to move on. And I really want to. I remeber the campigns in HoMM4 being actually much more interesting, at least in terms of story, and I do want to give 5 another shot. I always had very mixed feelings about it.

Also, I actually always had more fun with these single scenarios than campaigns in the Heroes games. Mostly because they are more customisable, I can play whatever castle and hero I want usually, but also because the story in most campaigns in games 1-3 was rather lackluster, but in single scenarios I would just make up my own if I felt like it. I feel pretty much exactly the same. To this day I feel kind of bad about looking up one thing in Desperados, a difficult game I was very close to beating entirely fair and square. The thing is, I didn't really want to look up the answer, I was just so utterly stuck I was convinced hte game may be bugged and I', just wasting time. But trying to check if that's the case online inevitably led to seeing the actual in-game solution I missed.

And something similar has happened to me a couple times. I'd get stuck so completely, certain I've done everything I could, it seems something must just be broken. And sometimes it indeed is. So it's this damn if you do, damn if you don't choice of either trying to solve a possibly insoluble, malfunctioning thing, or risking seeing that nothing's wrong, and I just missed something I've now been told.

And yes, UHS is pretty great. I used it often for some classic point & clicks I just felt were way too tedious with their moon logic but I still wanted to finish. It's a great way of getting over such obstacles without loosing all fun of playing the game for yourself.

I consider game beaten when I finish it from the beginning to the end (outro, end credits) at least once (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights) or multiple times (Jagged Alliance 2). I very rarely come back to the beaten game just because I've skipped a few side-quests. I think that example of a game which can't be really beaten is OpenTTD.

This is generally how I look at it as well. Once I've played through the single-player campaign/main quest and seen the credits roll, then I generally consider myself to have beaten the game and to have seen most of the content there is to see.

I might set myself additional goals, in terms of side content and collectables. For example, with the Batman Arkham games, I try to find every Riddler clue, because I find those fun and challenging, but I didn't go out to beat every challenge map, because there are too many and it would just take too long. Although, I might come back to them and have a go at some of those, from time to time.

Do I go out to find every heart container in a Zelda game? I mean, it's kind of optional ... probably depends what sort of mood I'm in and if I really feel like 100%-ing it.

I'd say 'beating the game' and `100%-ing' the game are two different things. I also hate using hints/walkthroughs and will only use them as an absolute last resort. I had to use one to find the last 'Spirit of Arkham' in Arkham Asylum. I understood the clues and was looking in the right place, but I just didn't understand what I had to do mechanically, to get it to trigger.

That's probably why I can't get anywhere in Nethack ... ;-)

Typically, I consider "beating" a game to be the completion of the main quest and seeing the game's main ending. For example, I consider Celeste to be beaten once Chapter 7 (A-side) is complete; the rest is just extra content. (Although there is a second ending if you manage to beat Chapter 9.)

There are, of course, edge cases where this definition breaks down:
* Early game ends. For example, Metal Saga (PS2; no relation to the SaGa series) makes it possible to get an ending before you first gain control over the character. For that specific case, there's a specific ending that actually feels like a real ending to the game (it involves going through an area that could reasonably be considered the final dungeon; I don't remember if there's a boss fight at the end); I consider that to be beating the game.
* Another tricky early end case: Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. Once you get enough of a certain resource, you can fix the portal home, go back, and get an ending, complete with a code that you can enter for the sequel. I'm not sure if I count that. (To give you an idea of when this can be accomplished, it *might* be possible to get this far in the demo.) Geneforge 1 also has an early end, though I'm pretty sure you do at least need to leave the demo area to achieve that.
* I've played incremental games that are unfinished and don't have a proper end. I would consider the game to be beaten if I run out of new content, or if I get an upgrade (or something like that) that is supposed to unlock something new, but that something hasn't been unlocked yet.
* Similarly, if it is outright impossible to progress past a certain point, I consider the game to be beaten at that point.
* Some arcade-style games have kill screens, where it is basically impossible to continue. I would consider reaching level 29 in NES Tetris, which causes the blocks to fall too fast for a player to move a block to the side (unless using certain modern techniques that are not ergonomic) to be beating the game, for example. Or that one level in Donkey Kong where an overflow results in you not having enough time to complete the level.
* In an arcade-style game, once the difficulty stops increasing and every level is cleared at max difficulty, that would definitely be considered beating the game. Then again, if the game has cycles, completing one cycle could be enough. (Clearing Donkey Kong's first cycle could be considered beating the game. Similarly, completing stage 18 of Castlevania 1 (where you fight Dracula) could be considered beating the game, even though you can play another loop. Or completing the first quest of Zelda 1.)

I think it depends on the game and how much it "feels complete" without the uncompleted bits being obvious filler. Eg, I've always viewed Skyrim as no different to Morrowind / Oblivion in being "completed" after all the static content is done, and the new addition of infinite "Radiant Quests" doesn't really change that, as they've always felt like tacked on "cheap padding". On the other hand, a game like Age of Empires which has strong infinitely replayable random map / skirmish playability never really feels "finished" even after completing the finite story campaigns.

An FPS like Deus Ex still feels completed if you accidentally miss a minor side quest or two as the devs made such a strongly written main plot the focus of everything (23hrs Main + 6hrs Side = 29hrs Total). Deus Ex Mankind Divided on the other hand (16hrs Main + 15hrs Side = 31hrs Total) feels like the main plot was watered down vs earlier games and the rest padded out with 2.5x the 'sidequest spam' because, well it was... so missing more sidequests there left many with a far 'emptier' feeling... Same goes for cheap padding of "ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: You played the game on medium. Now replay on easy / hard mode for 2x more!" very definitely doesn't mean you need to play the game 3x over to "complete" it. That stuff is mostly mindless empty filler for the OCD crowd / glorified telemetry. Same goes for multiple endings - very few people will spend +100hrs replaying the same 50hr game they just finished purely to watch 2x other slightly different 5min ending cutscenes. They'll either reload a save from just before "the choice" or watch the ending movies on Youtube. Entirely subjective. If you just copy / pasted a walkthrough line by line for a point & click adventure, then the experience will certainly feel shallow. Conversely, let's not forget that some puzzles in early adventure games were written to be deliberately obtuse + filled with 'dead ends' in order to sell more hint books / use premium rate helpline numbers. I definitely wouldn't feel guilty about "I'm about to start an 'old-school' Sierra game and just looked up silent dead-ends in order to avoid wasting 6-8hrs getting locked into an unwinnable game right from the start because I didn't pick up a 1 pixel sized item hidden inside a locker in the first room" thing. At the end of the day, people play games to have fun and if they're spending 2-3x longer getting frustrated unlocking / grinding to tick some arbitrary "completionist" box, when they otherwise would have moved onto another game they'd actually be enjoying, then they're doing it wrong.

In the Civilization games, I'd argue that you beat the game as soon as you've achieved some type of victory. (Note, however, that at least in Civilization 3 there's the degenerate case of playing without any opponents, but forgetting to disable Conquest victory, which will cause you to win on the very first turn.)

Also, "when the credits show up" isn't always the best choice:
* Fake credits. There's at least one game where the credits actually play before the final boss, after a game show type sequence.
* Early credits. I believe that Final Fantasy 6 will show the credits early on, after the opening cutscene showing the frozen Esper, but before you actually gain control of ??????, Wedge, and Vicks in Narshe (in other words, before the game really starts).
* Some games allow you to view the credits from the title screen, even without playing the game.

Once upon a time i unlocked all steam achievements in Skyrim, visited all dungeons and used numerous mods. I also beat the main quest and side quests numerous times as several different characters. Usually play as argonian but also tried several khajiit and nord characters, even tried dark elves and orcs. Steam timer broke at something like 900h... so do i consider beating the game? of course not!
I haven't played as all ten races, neither did i meet the infamous ebony warrior at level 80, or tried playing on legendary difficulty (not a fan of bullet sponges). And while i have probably something like over 2000h gameplay steam + gog, that's nothing compared to some madman with 10 000h gameplay and up.

Similar with Witcher 3, never got all 36 endings.

Now the game you point out HOMaM 3. I started playing recently, mostly random generated maps (see where i'm going with this), haven't considered campaign mode. Yet even some random generated maps weren't beatable because of enemy placement. And then there's the horn of the abyss the unofficial expansion.

Similar case is with games like civ or anno, because of random map layouts = endless replayability.

Tomb Raider: Legend, now this is a game that i have completed on all difficulties including time trial, found all collectables and unlocked all skins, cheats, concept arts (now that's what i call proper achievements) etc. So yes this is an example of a geme that's considered to be completed.

Well i suppose, if a game is linear, it's story line is considered completed when the credits roll.

This are also some examples of why time to beat is pure BS, because some games don't have a time limit and can be played indefinitely!