site banner

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.

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

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?

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.

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.