During what I still consider the golden age of gaming, which is 1997-2004, most single player games were aiming for 30-35 hours. That has been my sweet spot ever since but it doesn't mean a game can't be satisfying with less than that.
I personally don't find anything shorter than 10 hours enough of an experience. 25-30 sounds very reasonable.
I don't personally mind 300 hour games but the way AC and most other games present them is exhausting. I don't want my map full of shit to do. I want to get the core experience, which should be the main story and after that sprinkle of stuff to do here and there which is all optional and there if enjoyed the world enough to keep going.
Why Ubi and others haven't figured this out, I have no idea. It's the best of both worlds.
Yeah, would much prefer depth of content to breadth. I love exploring and finding things as much as the next completioninst, but if it is just filler, the world feels hollow. Last handful of AC games have been massive maps with very little uniqueness outside the main story. Also hate auto generated fetch quests and mobile game stores they shove in.
Ghostwire Tokyo felt like a pretty good length for an open world game. There were a bunch of relatively short side quests, and the usual collectibles but the whole thing was 100% complete in under 30 hours. Thier rougelike DLC add-on might push it over that, but it's basically a whole separate game.
Same, and I didn't even finish Inquisition. Bioware didn't need open world filler injected in its narrative based games and worlds, and those forced elements are what killed them off for a while. Then there was the disaster that was Anthem, which also had big, shallow open world and a craptacular mission design that forced you to a full stop to grind dumb boring shit (at which point I quit) before continuing the not terrible, but barely adequate campaign that I would've probably managed to finish if not for that grind gate.
When BioWare announced they had made each planet on Andromeda bigger than the largest area in Inquisition, my stomach sank, because Inquisition had already been pushing it with the bloat.
I watched a review by this YouTuber who hated Andromeda but decided to give it another shot on a whim, only this time to just do the main and loyalty missions, and he said it was like night and day and the game actually was good and the story felt better and like there were actual stakes. All that more for the sake of more hurt the game more than a lot of folks realize.
Honestly, good. I don’t think every game needs to be this massive, sprawling open world that takes a hundred hours or more to complete. There is plenty of room for a more focused experience. And that’s coming from someone who is a big fan of open world games in general.
As fun as the Witcher is, the world may have been too big. Not every location had a quest, not every quest was necessary… some side quests were kinda bad. And it had a lot of collection bloat. The first zone wasn’t too bad. Small and focused, with collection stuff. It’s pretty nice. But trying to 100% everything after that is a nightmare.
Skyrim is a weird one, the main game is not the main story, but rather all the side stuff. It had collection bloat, but in the form of dungeons and quests. It didn’t really do the whole “legendary gear is in this obscure chest on the top of this random mountain that you have to visit on the 3rd Tuesday at 5am” thing. So while Skyrim is pretty big, it doesn’t feel like nightmarish, collection bloat that’s overwhelming.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was able to take both these approaches and make it work. It has a tone of secrets and things to collect. But it was done in a way that It didn’t feel mandatory. You feel satisfied doing the main story, but also by just going around and doing the side content like in Skyrim. But like Skyrim, sometimes people just want to stop the msq at certain places and just chill in the game doing random whatevers. However, like Witcher all the random collections and side content does feel overwhelmingly impossible to complete in its scope. I found a few YouTube channels dedicated to secrets and obscure side content in this game and its insane how much there is. And a lot of it is missable after certain points in the story. There is no way to 100% this game without a guide. With Witcher and Skyrim its at least possible without a guide.
25-30 is perfect to me. I’m currently playing Mass Effect, and I’m at about 30 hours and on the last mission. Just long enough to get in the world but not so long that it wears out its welcome.
Yeah, a lot of the time games like that are mostly spent running between locations. I just played through RDR2 again and as much as I love the game, most of the ~80 hours of content it has is traveling between missions on horse. I think 25 hours of pure content is just fine unless that 25 hours also includes uneventful traveling.
I want a dark souls anime in an older style animation (think berserk) and directed by Lynch. I want to walk out of every episode feeling confused, exhausted, and vaguely depressed.
They still haven’t? I bought the game on Mac years ago. I had the latest MBP at the time, the last intel machine before they announced the M class chips, and the game just couldn’t run. I contacted squeenix and they refused to refund me. Basically said it was wine’s fault my computer wasn’t supported despite advertising Mac on their website.
I ended up playing through the game in PlayStation, but I had assumed they would have got it working on the m class chips by now.
The community-made XIV on Mac launcher/compatibility layer has better performance than the official client, and works on Intel Macs with AMD GPUs and all Apple Silicon Macs! I play it on a recent MacBook Air and it's extremely smooth:
I just hope it doesn’t mean more of SE prioritising growing the playerbase over retaining vets. I’m pretty new myself, but the homegenisation of jobs (especially healers, dear god) is clearly not good for the long-term health of the game.
I would disagree; if the jobs weren’t homogenized, then the game would be very difficult to balance. That causes metas to spring up, which causes everyone to jump from the underpowered jobs to the overpowered jobs, and then they react very badly when a balancing patch is released, and the meta changes due to nerfs to popular jobs/buffs to unpopular jobs.
Beyond a certain point, you have to take a risk and say screw balance; otherwise you just make everything the same, and render jobs little more than cosmetic differences.
How are they going to structure this? Castlevania felt easier since there was so little story baked-in. But Miyazaki specifically made Dark Souls games hard to parse because he was trying to recreate the effect of reading english fantasy novels when he wasn't fully fluent in english.
The story in Fromsoft games are specifically sparse, spread out and require interpretation to grasp more than the bare surface. Most of the NPCs that give you meaningful dialogue are somewhat hidden. If they play is straight like a normal show, it might not feel like Dark Souls. If they make it obtuse, it'll be hard for viewers to parse in a 6-12 hour series compared to the dozens of hours players get to think on it.
They could make it like a prequel to one of the games so there’s a slightly more concrete story. Using non linear storytelling could make it feel confusing but that might be annoying. Season 1 of The Witcher I didn’t full understand until my second viewing.
That would be cool. There's a vast amount of time between when the Lords rose up and defeated the dragons and the decline we see in DS1. We don't even see the rise of the Dark Sign and start of undead plague, but the end of it when the world has mostly dealt with it and is slowly falling apart. The rise of the Dark Sign, fall of Artorias in Oolacile could all be really cool.
Their track record isn’t that bad, is it? Castlevania and Edgerunners were pretty good adaptations. Dragon Age was all right. And Arcane was amazing, though Netflix wasn’t involved in that one early on. So there’s reason to be at least cautiously optimistic, IMO.
Dark Souls is kind of a lonely game, I wonder if they'll recruit some ally npc characters like the Solaire, Siegmeyer and that funny little guy named Patches. Or will they go the Samurai Jack style and revel in the loneliness of the journey.
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