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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 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.

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.

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.