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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2709 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm not a person that considers video games his primary hobby but I like them. I mostly like shorter games, so I can actually finish them over huge open worlds with 100 hour playtime but only 15 good hours contained within. I wish there was a director's mode where you only get the best missions within a game and just get your "RPG powers" over the course of the missions, like in ye olde linear days.

I bought Cocoon and I can highly recommend it. I didn't have high expectations, despite the good scores it got based on a game with analog stick and only one button controls. Boy have I been proved wrong. This is really good and I don't even love puzzlers.

I also bought Assassin's Creed Mirage because I read it's "only 15 hours" long which is a positive to me. I'm not far and had to play around with all the obnoxious interface stuff. One has to strike a balance between visual clutter with some information content and immersion while losing out on necessary information. I like it OK so far (2 hours in) but as someone that only play 2 AAA games a year, the quality drop-off from the last few games I played (ex. God of War: Ragnarok) in production is very noticeable.

Anyone with similar preferences for length?

I'm not similar in length preference in general, but two recent games I played that didn't take very long (are right in your length wheelhouse) and were just plain fun were Armored Core VI and Hitman. Of the two, the first you would probably really like. You're in a mech, and you blast through some fun levels with everything from a laser sword to shotguns to massive homing missile racks. There's a great mix of disposable baddies that are incredibly satisfying to blow through, and since it's still From Software, there are some satisfying boss fights too. However, they've maximized fun here; when you get to the boss and die, you can start again right at the beginning of the boss fight without replaying the whole level, and you can also swap out your entire build for a different one if you want or are having trouble, provided you have the parts purchased. And even back at base, you can resell parts you don't want for full price! And save build presets. You can be anything from a tank that can barely jump but has massive weapons and shields, to a lightweight super-dodger, to a normal mech that can do a super-jump and fly above everyone. The controls are tight, some of the levels and enemies are unique, you can literally fly. Beat the campaign? There's also an alt-campaign, sort of a Nier Automata-lite, where you can side with the opposite faction on certain missions, with a few more interesting weapon and mech unlocks. The game equally supports spending a whole day getting sucked in, and also spending no more than a single hour or half-hour session just messing around and having fun, which is a rarity. The only downside is that it's expensive, but I pirated it so... (would re-buy if it was just a little cheaper and I wasn't broke). I recommend Armored Core VI to almost everyone.

Hitman is also just fun. There's plenty of cool locations, the mechanics are mostly pretty tight and consistent, there's some "story" assassination methods as well as some things you can plan out yourself, plenty of routes through most locations, I did one today that also contained a murder mystery (!) in the same level. Just some well-designed games. You can pick up the whole modern trilogy for under 30 bucks right now on Steam.

I think most of my games with playtime over 50 hours are roguelik/tes, as opposed to AAA games that take 50 hours to finish PoI grinding.

I wish there was a director's mode where you only get the best missions within a game and just get your "RPG powers" over the course of the missions

Some of the examples on this list might be what you're after: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StoryDifficultySetting

I don't play games for the story, I play games for the individual missions, scenarios or gameplay segments.

Having them contextualized with a small story is fine, but I'm mainly there for the interaction.

That sounds like you should be playing rougelikes. There must be something more you're looking for, otherwise you'd be playing Slay the Spire and Binding of Isaac and Noita.

My preferences are broadly opposed to yours, but I understand what you mean when you describe a satisfying 15 hr game. There is something very satisfying about a story that you can sit down and casually chomp through over the course of a handful of post-shift evenings. As someone with multiple 100hr+ games in his steam library though, I can't agree on the point with open worlds with only 15~hrs worth of content in them, again with an understanding of what you mean; the only AC game I ever played for more than fifteen minutes was some 2d sidescrolling Prince of Persia-esque sidestory for the DS, played out of a child's desperate boredom and not desire.

The majority of what's on offer from major studios for probably the last ten+ years has been dreck, almost without fail. Titanfall 2 was a rare exception to the AAA studio putting out a mediocre product at full-game prices, and it very predictably flopped as a result. As someone who autisticly gets into the systems of a game, and plays them for that satisfaction, the high end of mainstream vidya has been largely uninteresting and I have ignored it entirely as a result.

Helldivers 2, for all the strangely political discussion that's surrounded it, has been by far my most played game since its launch simply because I can see how much effort was put into these systems I get to exploit (rounds are modeled, counted and persistent in the mag/belt/cylinder/chamber, semi-volumetric ballistics for enemy armor, spalling while not modeled is simulated in the damage characteristics of each weapon, etc.). It was a small AA studio that put out an ambitious nearly decade-long project at an AA pricepoint and people loved it and then got bored and moved on. I've put in 400+ hours and have fun playing it still. We all get what we deserve.

Did you put those 400 hours into Helldivers by playing with randoms?

In my mind playing things with people you know is a different thing than playing merely the designer's game. Of course there is an art to get to an engaging level with multiplayer games where you can shoot the shit and the balance if you want to get into competition. But other people are doing a lot of the lifting in my experience. I think the Steam/Twitch flavor of the month, which is often multiplayer shows that groups of online players tend to migrate together and Even after cracking 100 hours they aren't necessarily positive about the game itself. I have a coworker that gets let's say 700 hours playtime while being part of this herd and when I ask him what game he really enjoyed in the last year he often shrugs. Most likely Rocket League, which he plays when the other roamers aren't online.

My playtime for HD2 specifically is probably a 30/70 split between playing with my friend group and running randoms respectively, though I get your point about multiplayer games where the fun is dicking around with buddies. Lethal Company is a pretty good example of a cheap FOTM game that went wide and died off, not mechanically deep, complex or satisfying to play but it's great for a few weekend sessions with the gang.

I know people can get cranky when someone brings up "core gameplay loops" but if a game isn't at least enjoyable to interact with (in terms of controlling the character/player avatar in the gameworld) I'll drop it immediately. As the great Reggie Fils-Aimé once said, "If the game's not fun, why bother?". I would probably play HD2 from time to time even if the servers were shut down (don't think that's actually possible, thanks GAAS, so it goes) just because running around and shooting the guns feels good to me.

I also have a few coworkers who don't seem to understand, admitting they've played with a toy they don't like for hundreds of hours (or even better, bought into the ingame store) is telling on yourself. I genuinely think less of people who do that, they've shit up my hobby.

I'm firmly in the camp of core gameplay loops being very important. But I, like many others am not very consistent with what I like when I try to categorize stuff. I know that I don't care about story in (most) games but I like vignettes.

For example I think for whatever reason it's just fun to move and fight in Spider-Man but the open world POI stuff does nothing for me in general and many missions are just go somewhere and fight people. Whereas I also really liked The Witcher 3 which I don't think has a good core loop and fighting system. (Also not a good main story) but just being in that world and going to different small towns and solving their monster problem was great.

That's singleplayer. In multiplayer it is only gameplay. I could play Quake 3, Counter Strike and Rocket League for 10 years and still like it. But due to life reasons I don't want to play multiplayer anymore, except at Old school LAN parties with the people in the same room. Which I do once a year.

I would argue that this isn't about long or short games per se, but pacing. A lot of modern games are full of fluff that just pads out the length, but you could have a 100h game that doesn't feel like a slog because something interesting is always happening.

The Persona games come close to being engaging for 100+ hours, but they, too, are bloated.

Offhand I can't think of a single-player game in which the campaign takes the average player 100 hours to complete and which is consistently engaging throughout. Have you played any games meeting that description?

Persona 4 is the one which comes to mind. The story was good enough that I never really felt like the game was dragging. The dungeons are a slog, but they were a slog from the beginning (seriously, fuck the procedurally generated dungeons Atlus loves so much) so I didn't really notice them as a function of game length.

I can't think of "a single player game in which the campaign takes the average player 100 hours to complete" at all...

It seems cost-prohibitive for AAA games especially.

RDR2 and AC Valhalla have to be close if you do most side content, and they’re AAA(A).

I found one: https://howlongtobeat.com/game/36059

Never played it though so can't comment.

It's not uncommon for RPGs. Persona games are that long, several Trails games are that long, etc. For other genres you're right though.

Persona 5 supposedly takes 100 hours for the main story and 140 hours for a completionist playthrough.

Can confirm, the base game took me ~100 hours and it was good, I replayed the entirety of it come Royal (which took around 130 hours) and it was even better. It was a slog at some points, I won't pretend Persona games aren't bloated either but as long as it's not 200+ floors of fucking Tartarus I'm good.

Off-hand I can also think of Monster Hunter World, which strictly speaking is not a single player game but I played it like one and the base campaign took me like 70 hours without Iceborne (I too enjoyed it throughout), and Divinity Original Sin II which was probably not 100 hours (can't see the numbers for my first playthrough only) but still felt really fucking long. All of these games do usually involve grinding at some point however so maybe that's not "pure" campaign playthrough time.

Yeah that's basically true but I don't know a 100h game that I would think qualifies. I played Baldur's Gate 3 and The Witcher 3 and thought they were fantastic but they had lots of problems, IMO. The best longest game I have played is God of War: Ragnarok and I don't even understand how they pulled off a relatively long game without the typical soulless Point of Interest splattering that you get from Ubisoft, et. al.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 took me about that long and I felt like it was pretty consistent throughout.

I put 500 hours into TF2 (though I haven't played in years now o7)

Not 100 hours, but IMO older Final Fantasy games tend to be pretty good about this. For example, I clocked about 60 hours to play FF7 back in the day and I was really engaged the whole time. I do think that the longer a game gets, the harder it is to pull off great pacing. Or at least that's my take on why longer games which don't drag are so rare.

Factorio, Minecraft come to my mind as >100h games. But it is an utterly different game type and only small part of people is so invested.

You can plausibly do a first run to the Ender Dragon and End Cities in 20-50 hours, but yeah, 100+ for a typical player isn't unreasonable, and multiplayer worlds will often have different and more ambitious targets that are much more time-consuming. And modpacks can be far longer-term investments: even outside of nutty variants like GregTech New Horizons (estimated minimum time: 4k hours) or SevTech: Ages (500ish hours), Regrowth and Blightfall were probably 200+hour games that were pretty engaging throughout the process.

Rimworld is probably only 20-50 hours for a map before you're just watching a killbox fill up, but there's a lot of reasons to run multiple maps.

FFXIV is probably around 300 hours to get the MSQ to the end of Endwalker, and that's skipping a lot of side content that has its own (or related) story. There's definitely some rough spots (and it's something like 70 hours of voiced cutscenes even before the last expansion), but it's pretty engaging for the overwhelming majority of it.

I don't mind longer games so long as things stay fresh, but looking at steam I rarely spend more than about 30 hours playing a game. I guess I either lose interest or finish the games by then.

Hob is a somewhat underappreciated game that's about 20 hours long. Would recommend.

Hob

I've tried Hob in the past and the performance killed it for me. I may put it on a list when I maybe get the Steam Deck 2. ;-)

I don't remember performance issues, but I usually play games on minimal settings unless they are really old.

Yes.

I can handle about one 100+ hour game a year (if that), but it better be pretty damn good considering the time investment. I feel similarly about other forms of media (essays vs books, movies vs television shows). The shorter, the better. There's almost a power-law function/Sturgeon's Law/Pareto principle at play within the piece of media itself.

100%. I'd rather replay a short-ish game many times than get bored half-way through a long one. My most-played is still CoD Modern Warfare 2: about ten/fifteen hours of pretty good gunplay and exciting story, nicely divided up into forty minute missions. I miss levels, and level select screens.

If you like that length, have you played Doom 2016? It's neither too short, nor too long, and it's the first time for years that I honestly had so much fun that I had to sit down and play until I was finished.

Do you have some recent AAA recommendations?

I played Doom 2016 but I'm not a huge fan. I'm sure it's fine but I'm not into singleplayer first person shooters. Even in the days of Max Payne 2 I was more a third person kind of guy than a Half-Life 2 person. So it's nothing specific about Doom. I just like third person games more.

My AAA recommendations is God of War: Ragnarok. It's not short, but it felt great and the optional side quests didn't feel like dumb filler. I think that game did almost everything right, including having people talk constantly which I know is an issue for a lot of people. I was always engaged, I even did a lot of the raven collectibles, because they were fun with the axe throwing arc.

What's hard to communicate is that I don't absolutely philosophically hate long games, if they are very well made but the majority of long games aren't. So it's easier to say I like short games because they are presumably cutting for quality.

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