What's the ideal amount of time it should take to beat a game?

[GhostCow]

I'm starting to notice more and more that I start to get burned out and eventually quit if games are too long. Most of my favorite games take about 20-30 hours to beat. I think 40 hours should be the maximum amount for most games. Making shorter games also cuts costs and allows for the devs to do more within the amount of time that you're playing.

[WhiteShark]

I'm not sure that this is a problem with the absolute number of hours. It seems likely to me that the real issue with games that exceed the ~40 hour mark is that they often simply do not have the content to justify it. In other words, you burn out because there's too much padding. I've sunk far more than 40 hours apiece into each MH game I've played and I never felt burned out. More into DCSS, though I did burn out somewhere in the hundreds of hours after having cleared with every class and every species.

Actually, saying that, I suddenly wonder if this is more of an issue with narrative-focused games. Maybe when the story is the main draw it's harder to keep the players attention for that long. On the other hand, some people "play" VNs that have more than a hundred hours of reading.

Are there any specific games you thought were quality but on which you burned out past the 40 hour mark?

[Ranselknulf]

My first impression is that 40 hours is a decent target for time to complete a game.

From what I've seen in the games I've played over the years, some games will take 40 hours to complete, but also have a shit load of content not required to complete.

Other games will take 40 hours to complete with minimal side content.

Most games nowadays try to extend the game play hours with artificial grinding and time sinks. Ie.. gayness. It's something whiteshark is alluding to above.

And to answer the question: "Are there any specific games you thought were quality but on which you burned out past the 40 hour mark?"

Half Life and FFVII are the obligatory low hanging fruit.

To preempt your spergness, Half-Life is an rpg because it has a role you play and a story.

[GhostCow]

Are there any specific games you thought were quality but on which you burned out past the 40 hour mark?

The main one that comes to mind is Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together. I've quit near the end multiple times because I just got burned out. Granted it doesn't rank that high on my top SRPGs list, but it's not total shit or anything. I know there have been others in the past but I can't think of many offhand. I kind of want to count WotR because as much as I hated the writing, the gameplay was decent. I tried with multiple classes and always quit either in chapter 4 or 5.

[WhiteShark]

The main one that comes to mind is Tactics Ogre: Let us Cling Together. I've quit near the end multiple times because I just got burned out. Granted it doesn't rank that high on my top SRPGs list, but it's not total shit or anything. I know there have been others in the past but I can't think of many offhand. I kind of want to count WotR because as much as I hated the writing, the gameplay was decent. I tried with multiple classes and always quit either in chapter 4 or 5.

It seems like the common element may be mechanics that aren't quite deep enough. Not bad necessarily, but simple enough that by 40 hours in you've already mastered it. That's pretty common. It's hard to make a truly complex system. Part of what makes a game fun is the learning process. You go up against new challenges and must adapt to handle them. If you reach a point where you have all the algorithms worked out and there's nothing more to learn, then that drive to continue dries up.

[wndrbr]

And to answer the question: "Are there any specific games you thought were quality but on which you burned out past the 40 hour mark?"

Half Life and FFVII are the obligatory low hanging fruit.

wtf half life is not 40 hours long.

[rusty_shackleford]

I used to lean towards longer games, but I think I prefer anthologies of 30-50 hour long games that tell a complete story. It's good to reset progress and introduce some new mechanics and fresh areas with a separate entry continuing the overall story.

[wndrbr]

There is no such thing as "perfect length for a videogame", it all depends on game's pacing.

I tried playing DAI years ago, burned out less than 10 hours in because the game was so poorly paced. Some people say it gets better once you leave Hinterlands, but that's just the epitome of bad pacing. Then there's Gothic 2, which is like 80 hours game that's consistently fun to play up until the very last chapter (though Irdorath was only 1-2 hours long, so whatever).

It'd be interesting to discuss the examples of badly or well paced RPGs, and the reasons they work/don't work.

[Watser]

It's difficult to put a number on videogames as a whole, as wndr said it's really a matter of pacing. If you can keep your game fresh and challenging to make you want to come back for more the game can continue for all I care. On the other, and far more frequent hand games are padded with low-effort content and trash mobs to artificially extend its playtime.

It's been said ad nauseum but it bears repeating: A tight experience where you are engaged from start to finish is always preferred. The "optimal game length" naturally follows from this.

[Ratcatcher]

I find that the more abstract, complex and simulation heavy the game is, the more I can invest in it before getting bored. AAA quality graphics, busy sceneries and spread out content kills my will to see a game finished. As does purely filler combat with no thought placed behind enemy composition and positioning.

I can spend 200+ hours easily on a specific CDDA run. I had to force myself to finish WotR. I think the only relatively recent title I enjoyed in spite of it being spread too thin is Outward. The lite-survival aspect (something more sp RPG should emphasize, imho) was enough to keep me invested for a long time.

[Lutte]

For me, it depends more on what causes the game to take so much time to finish, rather than length in itself.

I have 80+ hours on many challenging shmups, some of which I've managed to 1cc (the term for truly completing this kind of game), some of which I might never 1cc, like the second loop of Ketsui. If what causes the amount of time spent is a good challenge, it is very acceptable for me.

On the other hand, I really can't stomach doing 80 hours of repeated ubishit content or Squaresoft cutscenes.

To talk of RPG specifically, I have never seen a game in that genre justify being longer than 60 hours, other than Baldur's Gate 2, but even it was too long in the tooth to some extent and I have no desire to replay it or other IE games. Some of the things that slow down gameplay is how much you're waiting for your party to move around the maps, it's so fucking tedious.
These days if I hear about a game take that much just to finish a non-completionist run I'm out, unless you can convince me this is the game of the century that can defeat all the classics.

[rusty_shackleford]

I used to lean towards longer games, but I think I prefer anthologies of 30-50 hour long games that tell a complete story. It's good to reset progress and introduce some new mechanics and fresh areas with a separate entry continuing the overall story.

I should add that I was more referring to RPGs. Many fall apart as your character gets higher level and becomes ultra powerful, resetting the character's progress often becomes necessary.

The quest to becoming powerful is much more enjoyable than being powerful.

[Roguey]

8-12 for linear action-adventures, 20 for open world

30-50 for most RPGs

Fortunately most games already fit these parameters.

[Segata Sanshiro]

If you love a game, you can play it almost forever. Problem with long games it that well, they're long because most of the time they're artificially stretched out, so it's normal to drop them. You're not getting challenged anymore, nor introduced to new mechanics, the pace drops, the writing gets shitter, the level design starts to seem derivative and hurried. Not many developers know how to make long games anymore.

A normal dev that doesn't know how to masterfully stretch playtime (or how to achieve the perfect replayable experience) should always limit itself to 30-40 hour long games at most.

[Gastrick]

It'd say it depends on the type of game. For action games 12-15 hours is a good length. For RPGs, 40 hours is a good length, where unless it's a very engaging game, it gets more tiresome every 5 hours after that point. Persona 3 comes to mind for games that last longer than they should.

[Gregz]

I never want to finish my favorite games

[Lhynn]

Really depends on how long it takes for the players to master the mechanics and how engaging the mechanics and/or story is.

Game has to keep you entertained and keep tossing interesting things at you. If its filled even 10 hours will feel long, if its not 100 hours will feel short.

[gerey]

A game that takes 40 hours to complete, but keeps the experience fresh throughout, is going to be much more easy to finish that one of those open-world monstrosities that takes 200 hours to complete, but 90% of the content is just copypasted garbage that only exists so you can fill out a checklist and pretend like you're having fun.

But then again, it's obvious that padding out a game's length is a good marketing tactic - people want to feel like they've spent their money well when they pay $60 for a new game, so inflating the content via cheap copypaste is a good way to do so.

[Tweed]

A game can go on as long as it pleases so long as it doesn't wear out its welcome. Once things become nothing but repetitive tedium or padding out then its time to pull the plug.

[Luckmann]

There is no "ideal amount of time" for beating a game. Complaints that a game is "too long" are usually completely nonsensical. I remember having this discussion extensively when simps came out of the woodworks after Wrath of the Righteous was announced as being significantly shorter than Kingmaker.

If you like a genre or game style, the issue is virtually never that the game is "too long". It is that the core gameplay gets repetitive, or fails to challenge the player, or that content gets shallower or obviously unfinished as you approach the endgame, or.. or.. and so on and so forth.

There is no better example of this than the aforementioned Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous. If you fundamentally like the gameplay and the genre (I'm not going to sit here and pretend that either game is the best thing since baked bread, that is a discussion for another thread and another day, but let's assume that you do) then you will likely have no difficulty going straight from Kingmaker and start playing Wrath of the Righteous, and you will likely have gotten tired of Kingmaker by the time you start playing Wrath of the Righteous, even though the gameplay and the gameplay loop is essentially identical.

So why does Kingmaker wear out its welcome? Because the end of the game is literally unfinished, gets repetitive, the story is almost done with, and you have become fantastically overpowered at that point, and added difficulty doesn't create more engaging gameplay, but simply inflates pools or results in nuclear ping-pong. If you were able to emulate the addition of content and continued progression (whether we're talking characters/mechanics or storytelling/storyline) that occurs when changing from one game to another, there is absolutely no reason why you would not be able to just keep going for another 200 hours.

And I'm not saying that every game needs to be hundred of hours long, but all things being equal, longer is always better, objectively, as long as you can keep building the content in an engaging fashion, and there is fundamentally no reason why you can't do that, and many games have been able to do that for literally decades, long before the advent of the modern gaming market.

I used to lean towards longer games, but I think I prefer anthologies of 30-50 hour long games that tell a complete story. It's good to reset progress and introduce some new mechanics and fresh areas with a separate entry continuing the overall story.

I should add that I was more referring to RPGs. Many fall apart as your character gets higher level and becomes ultra powerful, resetting the character's progress often becomes necessary.

The quest to becoming powerful is much more enjoyable than being powerful.

I genuinely hate how in most games, modern games especially, the climb to power is just absolutely staggering and immediate; a couple of hours of real-life time, a couple of days or weeks narratively, if even. You could do a lot by simply focusing on horizontal growth rather than numbers inflation, for a much slower curve upward, which would alleviate the whole "boring power-fantasy" aspect significantly.

People think they want power-fantasies, so much so that it is endlessly parroted by normies in the Dipshits and Dogfuckers space, but in reality it is inimical to good design and genuine enjoyment of something, because it becomes divorced from anything sensible, and mechanically it becomes an inflating numbers game of rocket-tag or damage sponging with nary an in-between.

[GothGirlSupremacy]

It has been scientifically proven that after 14 hours my brain starts to ask when the fuck this slog ends. So for a normal game I like 8-14 hours. Maybe a bit more, but it better be good. Replayability matters more.

For RPGs I give more leeway, about 30-40 hours. Things that are like 70+ as if that's some sort of amazing feature just make me feel boredom halfway in and I shelf the game for years.

Multiplayer-centric games can be endless if they're fun.

[Ravenloft]

Can be up to 100+ hours in a decent open-world RPG, half this amount (without DLCs) for linear ones.

[viata]

The ideal amount is "the game finished before it got too repetitive/boring". It heavily depends on each game, however.

[Fargus]

Depends on a game?

RPG 50-100 hours. More is overkill.
Action 10-20 hours. 20-30 for ImmSim. 15-20h survival horror. Open world action 30-40h considering how repetitive it usually is.
RTS... no idea but i guess 25-40h for campaign. If we talk about something like Red Alert 2. I don't play much of rts these days.
Tacticool shit like Nu Xcom\Ja2 40-60h.
There are time sinks like Wartales, Battle Brothers, Rimworld, Stalker Anomaly, M&B and you name it. You can play them as much as you want before getting sick of it.

And there are a few games that i wished were actually longer like Bloodlines and Arcanum.

Can't say about any other genre because i don't care enough.

[Dead]

Stories tend to get tiresome after around 20-30 hours. I prefer games with interesting systems that can be used for different adventures. Custom maps in Warcraft 3 were nice. More CRPGs should do this. It shouldn't be difficult nowadays, given how prevalent DLCs are.

[Arbiter]

Custom maps in Warcraft 3 were nice. More CRPGs should do this. It shouldn't be difficult nowadays, given how prevalent DLCs are.

DLCs do not necessarily imply that a game engine supports modding, scripting or any other ways of customization. That's because DLCs, like patches, can modify game executables, while it is extremely difficult for modders to modify them without access to source code.

[Ol' Willy]

100+ hours for a single playthrough or high replayability.

If a game is shorter than 30 hours I usually don't even bother

[Trithne]

If it's a linear "follow the objective markers" game, preferably with the capability to turn said objective markers off, 12 hours is about the upper limit of my patience. After the 10 hour mark I usually feel like the story is overstaying its welcome and just adding shit for the sake of it, with games tending to pull a "You thought you were at the end, but we added a surprise extra mission worth of shit to do!". Like Prey '17 and "Wait, before we can finish you need to go from one end of the station to the other in slow-ass 0g and find 2 proverbial needles in haystacks".

For RPGs where the throughline is less linear and there's more flexibility in where you go and what you do when, once it starts getting to around 30 hours of play I'm over it. If your story and sidequests are taking longer than that you're just gasbagging. This is also affected by the type of game it is though - I'll be more patient with an isometric turn based game than a third person action rpg.

[J1M]

30 hours.

[Magic Undulator]

Depends entirely on which stage of life you’re in - for a game I haven’t played before, 15-20 hours, because otherwise it’ll stretch for months IRL. A bit longer in wintertime.
A long time ago Baldurs Gate and ToB was too short