An Assassin’s Creed game used to take you 30 hours now it’s more like 100 and I always bail before the end. Even if I didn’t have small children, I’d be a 10 to 20-hour kind of player, and I find the continual expansion of playtimes in modern games to be pretty exhausting. “I almost never replay a game, either – I know a lot of people who’ve gone through a huge RPG like Skyrim three or four times, but I’ve never been able to see the point. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve always played games until I’ve either finished the story or gotten bored, and then moved on,” says the Guardian’s games editor Keza MacDonald. Other players are just fundamentally not willing or capable of playing a single game for such a long time. Ask players what games (or series) they’ve spent the most time on, and the answers range from endless multiplayer sci-fi shooter Destiny to the 16-year-old multiplayer RPG World of Warcraft to Fifa.Ī virtual getaway … World of Warcraft. Nowadays, games such as Minecraft and Fortnite completely lack definitive endings and are more like social platforms than games a huge percentage of fans will be spending thousands of hours in those virtual getaways. In your teens and 20s, when you have few responsibilities, absolutely burying yourself in a sprawling adventure is a genuine treat, like getting lost in a vast fantasy novel. The thing is, as my Civilization experience taught me, there are many players who do value spending many hundreds of hours with a game, immersing themselves in the world and its community for months or even years. But by then the 500-hour figure had stuck. “Note: It’s about 100% completion rate,” the company explained, giving an estimate of 80-100 hours for most players to finish the main story and all the side-quests. Techland immediately clarified its original post. “Easily the most toxic and damaging way to market and set expectations for video games,” tweeted Luke Plunkett of games site Kotaku. Other commentators saw it as a symbol of unhealthy games industry practices, in which developers burn themselves out through years of crunch to deliver gigantic games, setting impossibly high targets – only for the game to fall short, requiring months of bug-chasing. To fully complete Dying Light 2 Stay Human, you'll need at least 500 hours-almost as long as it would take to walk from Warsaw to Madrid! #DyingLight2 #stayhuman /Sk3KFpRJoA- Dying Light January 8, 2022įor players with demanding jobs, families and other interests, the prospect of having to put aside 500 hours to finish a game about slaughtering zombies seemed too exhausting to contemplate. Writer Andy Kelly summed up it up by tweeting: “How not to market a game to anyone over 30 years old.” Many respondents were critical, complaining that there wasn’t a chance they’d be able to find enough time for such a challenge. The message immediately provoked a storm of controversy. On Saturday evening, video game publisher Techland proudly tweeted that if players hoped to fully complete its forthcoming apocalyptic adventure Dying Light 2, they would need around 500 hours – “almost as long as it would take you to walk from Warsaw to Madrid”. I was supposed to be writing 25 pages a month. At the end, I handed in my extremely thorough two-page review: the only thing I had submitted for the entire issue. During that period I ate, slept and drank Civilization II. But I got so hooked, playing it was all I did for three weeks. I was supposed to be reviewing it for the video game magazine Edge, where I was a fledgling staff writer. I n the winter of 1996, I almost lost my job because of the acclaimed management sim Civilization II.