Poll - did you want your games to last longer?

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How long do you want your $60 game play for?

  • Thousands of hours, I am still playing "your favorite game here" even today.

  • Hundreds of hours so I get my moneys worth.

  • A little less than a Hundred hours more or less.

  • Much less than a Hundred hours. More than that is just grinding.

  • A few weekends maybe. I have other games I want to get to as well.


Results are only viewable after voting.
I remember games in the 80s that often would last 300 hours or more like Ninja Gaiden or Super Mario Bros.

However some people claim they now want LESS time with their games? Somehow I find that hard to believe especially at $60 a game where games in the 80s were $20.

I mean if you are play a mobile game I can understand that. But that is just another example of why I think mobile games were not much help for traditional PC games.
 
I think 20-50 hours for a normal playthrough is the standard. 100 hours or more for completionists.

The only games where I spent more than a hundred hours are Witcher 3, Horizon Zero Dawn (2 playthroughs), Age of Empires 2 DE, Assassin's Creed Origins, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Skyrim and Rise of the Tomb Raider (2 playthroughs).
 
It really depends on the game and how that time is spent.

AC became too long for me, too much level gating forcing extra levels of grind.

Detroit, A Plague Tale, Hellblade Senua, Tomb Raider were long enough for the gameplay/stories they offered.

TW3 was amazing, so the length was added bonus, especially with the expansions.

Cyperpunk's story, for me, is too short and the side content is too samey and too obvious (not enough based on exploration and discovery. Having the gigs and other things clearly marked on the map could have been better integrated in my opinion, more surprising. But that's how most open world works, which is always dissappointing for me.

TW3 kind of did that too, but with questions marks, both game would benefit from not showing those unless you come across them, but that's just me.
 
I mean if you are play a mobile game I can understand that. But that is just another example of why I think mobile games were not much help for traditional PC games.
I politely disagree (and i voted much less than 100 hours). And just for reference,my 1st computer was a ZX Spectrum... @SteelDragon2050 post basically summarized why 8-bit era games were that long (even if you had something that didn't relied on K7):
A lot of those hours were because if you had to stop, died, etc., you had to start over. saving wasn't a thing for quite some time. Some games had passwords, though not all were useful. Zombies ate my neighbors had passwords, but you lost all your weapons and items.
In PC I can only think about Rogue in the 80s and Daggerfall in the 90s-but Daggerfall "content" was <<100hours-.
 
Depends on the game, I like several games for wildly different reasons and again I've spent countless of hours either replaying them or playing them endlessly whilst modded, but there's no specific length requirements when it comes to myself enjoying them or not.

If time is the only factor in this equation I voted less then a hundred hours for a regular playthrough because longer games, especially story driven games either suffer from unneeded padding (which is usually of lower quality) or an ungodly amount of grinding (I'm referring to mid noughties classic MMO style grind) which is not exactly fun for me.

What I'm getting at is that it's not a black or white answer - there's no right answer for this - there are many factors that contribute to the length of time that I spent engaging with said games.

Peace out.
 
Well, I would say the majority of games during the 80s and 90s were not that long. Usually, you can complete most of these games in a couple of hours.

From where I stand it‘s a more recent trend that a lot of players seem to think that games needs to be 40-100 hours or longer. During the 80s no one complained about stuff like that. Besides, at least the bigger releases on PC, Genesis, SNES were pretty expensive, at least in Europe. In general, games are still more affordable compared to the old days. Plus, you never have to wait long for a sale these days.

For me personally, a game should be as long as it needs to be to deliver the story. If it‘s only 10-20 hours long… so be it.
 
Like others, I don't necessarily need a game to have hundreds of hours of material, especially if some of those hours are merely empty. If a game has an interesting story, though, engaging side quests, and a fair number of alternative paths, offering good incentives for replay, I'm usually contented.
 
I suppose you could look at it in terms of how much reward do you get from other types of entertainment at that price. Um.. so for example a pint in a pub costs me say £4.50, so £60 is about 13 pints...

So a couple of evenings is about right :beer:
 
It really really depends on the genre. And are we talking the main quest only or the game as a whole?

For an action game (e.g. Uncharted, the last of us) something between 15 to 35 hours, for an RPG, where you spend most of the time talking, in menu (and unluckily looting), less than 40 hours for the main quest may be a problem, in particular if it's presenting the player with many characters (NPCs). Regarding side content, it really depends on its quality. I prefer 10 perfect hours than 100 boring hours (think pretty much every Ubisoft game in the last 6 years), but certainly 100 perfect hours would be the ideal situation. I'd say the Witcher 3 was very close to my idea of perfect length (except for the question marks, those were almost useless). I'd also cite cyberpunk (as a bad example) because it both had a ridiculously short main quest and too much boring side content. It wasn't that bad per se, but the way it was presented (phone call -> kill everybody -> read documents/message) ruined it IMHO. And the cars, my god the cars...

The only right answer is: the perfect amount of time is exactly how much that specific game needs, not even one second more or less.
 
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I voted for "one hundred hours", but it's hard to say.

What are we talking about? Main story? Platinum? Replayability? And for what kind of game, exactly? It would be unfair to compare, so to speak, FIFA and CP2077: they are completely different experiences.

And again: taking CP2077 as an example, I spent about 120 hours of gameplay in my first playthrough - completing every mission, purchasing every vehicle and bla bla bla. Does this mean that CP2077 is a 120 hours long game? In my personal opinion, no. In such a game it's for the main storyline to represent the fulcrum of the experience and it's on the main storyline - perhaps including some secondary mission among the important ones - that the duration should be measured. As for the CP2077, I would have preferred it to last a bit longer, without necessarily touching RDR2 levels.

Of course, the idea that games like RE: Village have been praised so much in the same timeline in which the duration of CP2077 was criticized... well, it always leaves me confused. The criteria of some, apparently, change according to convenience. ò_O '
 
This is a tricky one and I think for me has more to do with replayability and how enjoyable gameplay is in general than how long a game's campaign is.

Thinking about it, most of my favourite games probably have 20-50 hour campaigns; regarding Cyberpunk specifically, I've replayed it about 12 times and each time hour count is about 90-100, so I think the length was fine, but concede there's easily room for another act in there.

I do have Monster Hunter profiles consisting of thousands of hours, but at the same time find other games bloated and overlong (I thought games like Witcher 3 and AC Valhalla dragged a bit, for example).

So yeah, it's difficult to say, depends on a lot of factors.
 
If the game is good, it doesn’t matter if it is shorter.

With RPGs I’d rather see a game that is decidedly a bit shorter and where I can see a maximum of 1/3 or 1/4 of the overall meaningful content.

And that is because I’d rather stop playing while I’m still having fun rather than when I get bored mid-game after slogging through 100+ hours of more or less samey content.

A good measure length for a game is around 40-60 hours, but if the game is really good, it doesn’t matter if it is 20 hours because it is likely to be replayed.
 
I prefer strategy games and expect nothing less than practically infinite replayability.

With puzzle games (which I also enjoy), I think about 50 hours is reasonable — but then I want a level creator that gives infinite possibilities for creativity.
 
Depends, what kinda game it is. Generaly play RPGs so i prefer a long game or a game with loads of replayability, also little else too cut into my playtime so i can spend alot of time playing. For a single playtrough in a open worldish RPG 100-200h sounds about right if i wanna do everything and explore and so on(single playtrough). For games with high replayability (choices/outcomes or diffrent playstyles and great combat) 100h+ total sounds about right(untill the enxt round of playtroughs).

Action adventure on rails game with a great story? 20-100h. Car racing game id be happy with 10+ story hours total and i would probably still enjoy it. Open world Rpg with endless mods? 2000h easily.

It really depends on the game.
 
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