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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 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.

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