Every time this goes on sale, I’m debating on whether to buy it or not. Like you, I’ve never played one of the Ace Combat games before, but some arcade style gameplay could be fun.
The absolute best value I ever got for a video game was for my old Atari 2600. I got a Solaris cartridge at a flea market for just a few bucks. It was cheap enough that I bought it despite never having heard of the game before.
The graphics capabilities of an Atari are laughable by today’s standards, but in terms of overall fun and hours played, nothing has ever beaten Solaris.
I already have enough zillion-hour games to grind, I don't need every game to be that. As much as I love JRPGs I have a hard time setting aside time to finish one these days since I have too much else I also want to play.
If you are in a pub and have one pint an hour, you would generally consider that to be a good use of time. This means one hour is worth approximately the cost of your usual pint at your local pub. For me this is about £3.50.
I then divide the price of the game by this number to get the number of hours the game has to provide to make it worth it. So for example Risk of Rain 2 cost me about £21 and I have played about 280 hours, meaning that I have exceeded my pint limit of about 6 hours by nearly 274 hours. Solidly worth it!
Occasionally a game will not reach its pint limit, but will be worth it nonetheless, e.g. The Return of the Obra Dinn, but generally I find the metric exceptionally accurate to my feeling of worth for a game.
The final advantage is that this scales with the cost of living (and usually thus wages) in your area.
I think about 10% of the games I bought since 2016 have not yet reached the pint limit, which is generally pretty good going.
I helped co-found a guild back when WOW was new - I was the guild webmaster. The guild never really got that big or active, but here it is 20 years later and I still occasionally get credit card offers in the mail for “The Blackrazor Brotherhood.”
Some of my favorite gaming memories are from my time in a guild called The Sylvan Guard on an EverQuest server around 1998 or so. It was a small guild but the last time I saw a question similar to this posted, on Reddit a few years ago, I checked in and so did a former guild-mate I hadn’t spoken with in decades.
Larger and/or gamey games 1€/h. Here I put games such as the Tomb Raiders, cRPGs etc.
Narrative experiences 5€/h. Stray Gods and other high quality intense experiences. Often short and with limited replayability. Like seeing a movie a second time.
I recently discovered Snowrunner and have been having a ton of fun playing on the switch! I’ve also rolled down the same hill multiple times 🥲 though I’m learning to tame the mud
It is! Last night I discovered the fleetstar had awd in the garage 🥴 I’ve built two bridges, fixed two rockslides, and pulled the truck to the farm in the time since!
Been playing Mario Wonder that last 2 days, but I gotta put it down and finish The Legend of Zelda: The Monish Cap. I was on the last dungeon. Great game, I don’t know why I waited so long to play it.
I guess Diablo 2 but I didn’t have the possibility to buy it back in the day. Buying games wasn’t as straightforward as buying a CD of music where I lived.
My Ghost Recon team in my second playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 got past level 8, and they may as well have ascended to godhood then and there. There are several achievements for killing some boss or another before they get to do some kind of attack, but this team just bursts them down before they get the chance to take a second turn. I'm in Act 3 now and just checking out a few remaining plot threads that I missed in my first playthrough.
I'm also trying to finish a run of 30XX. It's good, and the level generation is slightly less repetitive than its predecessor, but it's mostly just more of the same. New bosses and such, and the game is still good, but I was hoping for more of an iterative improvement over the first game.
Price per unit time suggests that the only value of a game is in how much time it consumes.
The value calculus is going to be different for everyone but for me, I tend to look for:
A game which is a game first and foremost rather than an entertainment experience. That is to say: something that demands decision making of me in which I can either increase or decrease the payoffs of those decisions. Games which focus heavily on cinematic scenes, heavy QTEs, or long dialogs disinterest me.
I am often willing to take a punt on a game that tries to do something creative and interesting.
I tend to not like games that demand a high degree of memorization and/or dexterity.
Games which perform well. A recent example of a regretful purchase I made was with Shin Megami Tensei V. I adore the series but the framerate on the Switch really brought my experience down to a level where I just didn't want to play anymore.
The weights of these things will change from game to game and other elements may enter or exit the equation from time to time, of course.
I definitely agree that you shouldn’t (just) measure a game’s value by playtime. I prefer a shorter game that’s an interesting and exciting experience all the way through over one that is longer, but feels drawn out.
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