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 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.
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.
As someone that trudged through Odyssey and has been really enjoying Valhalla despite its immense size, I welcome this change. Good Lord these games are huge.
I enjoy the scale of large games, but Odyssey and Valhalla was too much even for me. I’d like maybe half that (which would still be at least 50 hours I suspect).
There's a lot of "it depends" in regards to a game that is fully completed at 25-30 hours. If Ubisoft is going to charge $70 USD for the game, along with an additional Deluxe Edition that costs an extra $30, I'm probably not going to buy it on release unless the story is phenomenal, and it's replayable.
I'd be the first to agree that the more recent releases (especially Valhalla) have been too expansive. The only thing that kept my interest with Odyssey and Origins were the settings (I love ancient Greece and Egypt). I think a 50-60 hour game is adequate for a AAA game like Assassin's Creed.
The brand suffers because people care about it. If no one cared, the brand would just wither and die, forgotten, like so many others have. This seems obvious enough that I really have to wonder, did you ask this question because you're actually surprised, or because you want to portray some weird image of being above all this?
I think too many people have tricked themselves/each other into thinking long games are bad because they are long. No, it’s because 95% of the time (moreso today than in the past), a high hour-to-complete time signals a game with 10 hours or content stretched out to an absurd extreme, often in support of MTX/live service type features available ay launch.
An 80 hour game can be good if it has 80 hours of actual content. A 25 hour game can be bad if it’s still just 3-4 hours of real game stretched out to 25-30.
Finally! I haven't played an Assassin's Creed game for Years because they were too long, repetitive, and filled with boring timesinks. And I used to be a huge AC fanboy back in the day. Starting from 1, I played each release every year until Revelations + 3 burned me out. Took me years to recover enough to play AC 4 and Rogue. Never even touched Unity, barely tried Syndicate (and only because I got it for free), and all the new ultra-long ones starting with Origins I didn't even bother starting, except for Valhalla during a free play weekend on Steam. Valhalla annoyed me enough over that weekend that I just didn't bother buying.
I've been waiting for a "back to basics" game like Mirage for a while now, and the fact that it has callbacks to the gameplay and setting of AC 1 is a big plus for me. I'll wait for reviews, but it's the most interested I've been in an AC game for a long time.
I loved the setting of Origins but got burnt out doing all the tedious bits they sprinkled all over the maps that didn’t contribute to the story in ant way and was mostly the same over and over again.
And yes, I know I could skip stuff but I wanted to experience the full hame too… so… yeah.
I seem to have a differing opinion here but I love long games if it is actually full of good content.
I don't play games with micro transactions and find a lot of open world games to be full of time wasters. If that's all it is then sure cut that out.
But with games costing $70 I would feel like I wasted my money for only a 10+ hour experience like some comments are wanting. That can be done in a single day. Assassin Creed games really aren't meant to be replayed either.
Games with lots of replayabilty are such good value and keep me entertained for hundreds or even thousands of hours. Games like Civilization, Persona 5, Zelda, Elder Scrolls, GTA, Metal Gear, old school Final Fantasy, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Xcom, Command and Conquer, Colonization, etc.
Maybe it's more a sign of modern games being full of stuff that isn't fun? Boring extremely limited NPC's, lots of wandering with nothing to do but collect some useless thing. In that case I agree with all the other comments but instead of wishing for a shorter game I would wish for a better game that is fun to play for long periods of time.
I paid full price for Jedi Survivor, and minus a couple (somewhat big) bugs, I feel like I got my money’s worth after I finished the story. I think it took me around 60-ish hours to get to 99%
I'm currently on my second playthrough of the original Fallen Order and while I got the game for free I'd say it's worth full 60$. It's a great intriduction to the souls-like games for someone new to the genre
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