The sign that something is good is when I want it to be longer. Who tf has time to get burned out in some 100 hour game they have to force themselves to finished. I think my hard cap for any game these days is 25 hours
It’d be nice if RPGs were shorter, especially when there’s multiple paths/endings. I rarely feel like replaying an 80/100/120+ hour game to see all the other stuff I missed (glaring at you Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous).
Just look at Tyranny - it’s snappy enough to play again to try a new run with a different character and different path.
I rarely feel like replaying an 80/100/120+ hour game to see all the other stuff I missed (glaring at you Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous).
Now that they’ve fleshed it out a bit more, I keep meaning to go back and do the Aeon -> Devil path until I remember just how long that game is. Worse still with Devil since most of it plays out as various negotiations in the command room, so you spend ages burning time in crusade management waiting for your various schemes to spin up.
Just thinking about all the time that would be spent applying buffs puts me off the whole experience lol
I keep a save with all the mythic path choices unlocked just before the point where you have to commit to one. It cuts off like 20 hours of the sloggiest part of the game (and low level Pathfinder is a slog, despite my love for the system) so I can go back and try different paths. You can respec your actual class, so if you can get started right at Mythic 3, that’s a big jump.
Yea i love short games
Hides Map games in steam library
Me trying to finish an anbennar game to 1821 and then get hit by 2 fps each time i try to mass build
I count map games as short because I can pause at anytime and come back basically anytime and keep playing. I don’t lose the story or anything
Anybody like Firewatch? The company that made it, Campo Santo is now out of business, but it had such a great ambiance. I think you can finish it in something like four hours.
Oh yeah Firewatch was super chill . The game kept me guessing for a bit which direction it was gonna take.
I recall the ending was very badly received by
because they lack baby’s first media literacyNever played it, just vaguely remember Gamers disliking the ending, what was it about?
The game spends a lot of time and writing investing in the relationship between the player character and Delilah, a woman staffing another firewatch tower. At the end they both have to evacuate due to a growing wildfire, and never actually meet. Delilah is wracked by guilt over past actions, the player character is only staffing a tower because he’s running from his responsibilities (wife with early onset dementia). Their trauma bonding over the radio was never going to develop into something more because they couldn’t keep running from their lives
Haven’t played it, but I’m assuming climate change.
No, more about how you can’t run away from your trauma forever and you eventually need to return and face it
Oh no. Was it woke?
One of my favourite games. The fact the premise completely misleads you the whole way through basically running off your imagination was quite unique
I just finished Stray the other day. It was short and sweet. Loved every minute of that game. Think it ended up being about 6 hours or so.
Great game. There’s an achievement for beating it in, I think 45 minutes? I can’t even get up to that one guy’s house without getting lost. And after, when you go to that tower? I die so many times. Love the game even though I’ll never get that achievement. I just like playing as a cat and wasting time. Little Kitty Big City is also good for this. Totally different mood though.
Just looked it up, 2 hours.
I can see it being possible. The hardest part will be the jail break section I think or going and finding all the notebooks towards the end of the second or third chapter.
Games like that i just enjoy walking around looking at how fuken pretty they are. Had a lot of fun just finding out all the cat related antics I could get up to
But Snort_Owl, if I don’t have a 200 hour long game, how will I distract myself from the horrors?
Stare back at the horrors. Make them fear you
Okay how’s this
I called the horrors. They fear you now.
to be young again
My fave 2 game lengths are sub 10h . Or basically an infinite game.
Lemme explain. A sub 10h game is simple, something like Dispatch you can play through in less or at most 10h.
An infinite game is something with no classical story arc in which you play self contained runs or campaigns. So something like Dwarf Fortress, Total War or Crusader Kings.
Now I do play classical games that are longer than 10h but it usually needs to be in a gerne or setting I really enjoy.
Yeah infinite games are good cos i get to dictate how long i want to play them for. Like every now and then i log into gran turismo 7 and grind a few races but just cos i felt like doing some chill racing
I like a game that knows its place when it comes to length. If you’re gonna be story driven then either keep it snappy like a short story or do a rich RPG style lengthy story but know which is suitable for your game.
What I don’t like is games that are maximalist about story and try to content-stretch to make the game feel much grander than it really is. Two different examples of fairly recent games that hit the spot nicely are Easy Delivery Co., that tells the story mostly through ambience and gameplay mechanics and Dredge, that has more story but a lot ot the story sits in optional messages in bottles that you can read as logs in a journal to piece together the mystery while the “core” story exists in dialog that is mostly quite short - you want more story, go digging. You don’t, then don’t read.
If your game features a ton of lorebuilding, especially at the start through walls of text before I’ve even had the chance to get a feel for the controls and the gameplay then I’m probably skipping right over it. I’m not going to invest 30 minutes reading B-tier writing at the start of a game only to find out an hour in that it’s really not my cup of tea and I’m putting it in the Did Not Complete pile. I think the opening part of the original FF7 really nails it - so much is established through the start FMV, it throws you in and teaches you the combat system, and it starts breadcrumbing you with the story from there. I’m not opposed to story-rich games by any means but sometimes a game doesn’t need to explain much of itself, let alone anything at all. A loredump is not necessary just to play a round of poker, y’know?
Same goes for any sort of game mechanic. Stretching it out to squeeze an extra 10 or 20 hours out of repetitive gameplay isn’t respectful of the player’s time - let them do side quests if they want but performing the same complex jump in a platformer except this time in a jungle environment and next time in a haunted forest environment and later in a desert environment is insulting.
This is actually why i dislike the persona games so much outside of the first because the story is interspersed through hours upon hours of dull grind where i either follow a guide and play the game optimally for the reward of short dialogue snippets or miss it entirely by playing the game without a guide and gain nothing from that experience other than wasting about the same amount of time for less dialogue snippets.
At this rate a compilation of all cutscenes and dialogue is a better way of experiencing the game which is usually where i draw the line for game too long is if its more fun to watch it than play it.
I tried to play fallout 3 again and got so bored. Like theres cool content if you go find it but i dont want to find it because it doesnt pace it well or lead me there its hidden between vast wasteland of raiders, super mutants and copy paste buildings that i cant enter to travel to some random spot on the map to find out its just another raider base with 50 enemies i vats explode heads using the combat shotgun and loot. ITS BORING. THE WHOLE GAME IS BORING. Like one of the major sidequests is basically just a tutorial
Oh and to add i actually hate ff7 for the same reason. Disc 1 is sublime and disc 2 i cant even bring myself to finish. Basically the game after the sector collapse is just unplayable for me
I love a game of any length, as long as its length fits its context. Games that pad out the play time with grinding or busy work lose me so fast.
I think it all comes down to pacing. A lot of games start off grand then go downhill towards the mid game that means theres nothing to keep me going. Actually a perfect example of this is cyberpunk 2077 which starts off amazing with the Jackie arc and basically peaks at the end of it then afterwards is just… shit. Blah blah talk to x go over there and talk to y and talk to someone else then blah blah back and forth cutscene talk cutscene talk cough a bit and moan at Johnny basically for the entire game till the point of no return where it suddenly gets fun again.
Its actually why i hate FF7 because the first disc sets up everything so well and when i get to disc 2 and the game “opens up” its fucking BORING. All the tension gone and now its follow xX_sephirppgpfie_Xx boring ass shit ass shit grinding mini game shit
Paradox games push both buttons at once for me. I want it to be longer, I want more time period, more events, more government options, but the replayability means I also have like 200 hours in it
If the game is >25 hours I likely forgot character names, game controls, and any of my emotional investment.
Unless it’s Baulders Gate. That was perfect.
The Mass Effect games feel like they’re way longer than they need to be. The truth is, you only have like 5 things to do in each one once you kick the training wheels and begin the game in earnest, but if you do that you will get your allies killed. So if you want the good endings and outcomes, you gotta put the work in. It’s never not fun, but you choose to take the time. One of these days I’m gonna bum rush the whole trilogy and not care who dies. I wonder who’ll be left at the end. I didn’t even survive to the post credits scene of the third game this time (still counts as a win). So why should my friends, if we save the galaxy? But I’m a compromise so I’m gonna do it right the first time.
Currently playing Hogwarts Legacy. That game doesn’t even pretend to respect your time. That game laughs at your time.
Currently playing Hogwarts Legacy. That game doesn’t even pretend to respect your time. That game laughs at your time.
This is amusing. People who give transphobic Joanne money deserve to have their time wasted.
I tried it for free and i quit in about 30 minutes jk rowling naming and writing is so ass it piss me off
I mean, it kind of is… except the game was given away recently, so a lot of new players didn’t give J.K. Rowling anything. It’s also been on deep discount, so they didn’t give her much.
Wonder if you can see past your blinding rage to appreciate that there’s a trans character in the game, and you meet her pretty early (she runs The Three Broomsticks, a butterbeer/tavern place you meet a classmate at after an encounter). It’s said to be a “fuck you” from the developers to J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans stance.
I refused to buy the game at launch/full price because of the anti-trans stuff, but I heard nothing but good things about the game and picked it up for a deep discount. Found out about the trans character afterward.
So, knowing all that now, do you still hate the game and everyone who plays it?
So, knowing all that now, do you still hate the game and everyone who plays it?
Yes.
To expand a little:
Your comment has no information I didn’t already know.
Oh goody, the game was free on Epic, so JKR doesn’t directly get money from those copies. She still got paid by Epic, and I guarantee she’s going to look at number of players who picked up the game, even on a deep discount, even for free, and take that number of players as validation of her shitty beliefs. We know she does this with money (she’s said so) and I see no reason she wouldn’t feel the same about number of players.
I knew about the trans character, of course I fucking did, that’s all anyone would talk about when this shit-ass game came out. From what I heard from trans people at the time, Sirona Ryan wasn’t really done very well, didn’t make much sense in context, and just overall was a weird vibe. Not to mention, her name is Sir(ona) Ryan, which seemed to some people at the time to be a subtle way to misgender her (Sir Ryan is very much a man’s name).
Now the name thing is a stretch, granted. Or, at least, it would be if we were talking about anything other than Harry Potter, where names like “Cho Chang” and “Kingsley Shacklebolt” are the norm. I won’t die on the hill that the trans character’s name was specifically chosen to misgender her, but I do think it’s on the likely side of possible.
And none of this is getting into the incredibly antisemitic plot beats! Or the fact that our teenage protagonist kills, like, full on murders, hundreds of goblins. And the player is given the option to gleefully use the forbidden curses on enemies. And despite the shitty morals and mass-goblin-murder, the game is apparently boring as shit!
So yes, this shitty game is irredeemable. Play it if you want, I don’t give a shit, but if you come into a pro-trans space like this one and say we need to “see past [our] blinding rage” and give it a shot, well, don’t be surprised if you get responses telling you to fuck off with that shit.
Well, at least you’re honest.
Me, I’m a bit torn. I liked the Harry Potter universe up until I heard JK Rowling was a TERF. I don’t like that at all. Oh and she also randomly decided Dumbledore was gay for some reason. It felt shallow. Like who cares if he is, his sexuality never came up and doesn’t matter. It’s not representation, it’s tokenism. My wife and I boycotted the game when it came out, but I kinda always wanted to pick up a used copy so JKR wouldn’t get any money from me. Buying it at a deep discount, maybe she did, but it wouldn’t have been much. And, other than being third-person, it’s exactly the kind of game I like to play. (And also other than the fact that the woman who wrote the books the fictional universe is based on is such a huge pile of shit.)
It might be easier if you never liked the franchise before. But, I did. The books and movies captured my imagination. If you want a game where you can freely explore the Hogwarts castle, pick a House, and go do wizarding stuff, and you also play anything from Assassin’s Creed to Skyrim, this game is pretty much the game you want to play. Yes, it sucks that the person who made the world is hot garbage, but she didn’t write it. It’s basically fan fiction set 100 years before her stuff.
You can take the moral high ground with LGBTQ+ safe spaces if you’re in the community (judging by your pronouns tag). I’m not in it per se, I’m merely a lifelong ally. Though, I am a bit ace (outside my marriage anyway, I mean I don’t feel attraction to others). Still, the + isn’t one of the five letters named… whatever, it’s splitting hairs. I’m just saying, same team — except, assuming you are trans (I try to assume in good faith), you have a lot more people who want to kill you or at least challenge your basic rights than I do. So, I can respect that. But I’m also not making my gaming choices up to a committee. I wait until games are on sale and I buy them cheap. I try to buy games from publishers and/or developers that are not shit, but I’m not above spending money with one if the game is fun (e.g. Mass Effect being published by EA).
I also used to like the world of Harry Potter. I’ve read those fucking books so many times, you wouldn’t believe. I still have the first movie basically memorized, and can quote from it at length. I dressed up in a silly little costume and waited at midnight for the release of book 7. These books (and movies) were a massive part of my childhood.
Maybe it’s fucked how easily I’ve been able to drop them, given how important they used to be to me. But truly, the world of Harry Potter is actually shit the more you look into it. The world-building is bad, the magic system doesn’t actually make any sense, the final conflict of the series is so, so unsatisfying I actually disliked it the very first time I read it (although I didn’t understand then why I found it so deeply unsatisfying).
I also have paid for games that I absolutely should have pirated for moral reasons. I’m thinking specifically of Sekiro, which is an Activision game.
So yeah, I don’t care about you and the games you buy. You do you, it doesn’t matter to me. What I care about is you coming into this space and saying that those of us who don’t want to play this shit-ass game for moral reasons are blinded by rage. That if we only knew the whole story that you’ve so kindly laid out for us, we’d see it from your point of view and realize this game is actually worth playing. It isn’t, for me and quite a few other people, and furthermore, my highly justified rage towards JKR isn’t blinding, and I find it a bit insulting that you think it is.
Honestly I didn’t like the books or movies past Goblet of Fire.
Oh and, I forgot to mention it before, but I had a different take on the “Sirona Ryan” name. While yours makes sense, seeing it as “Sir Ryan,” I saw it as a reversal. Like maybe “Ryan Sirona” was their birth name, and rather than change it entirely, they just flipped it. That tracks with HP lore (Lord Voldemort being an anagram) and the weird naming as you mentioned. Also, Ryan isn’t just a male given name, it’s an Irish surname. Like Jack Ryan, the fictional character in the Tom Clancy books, or Nicky Ryan, the late producer who worked with Enya for most of her career.
But regarding something you’ve said twice now. “Those of us.” I’m only speaking to an individual. Or are there a group of you using the account. I thought I was speaking to an individual. And, to be fair, you did kinda come in heavy, so the “blinded by rage” thing wasn’t entirely inaccurate or out of line.
I don’t think hating JKR is unjustified. Hate her all you want. I’m just saying, I found a way to play in the Wizarding World without the worst part of it (JKR). I’m sorry you can’t enjoy it. At least there’s no shortage of great games out there.
But regarding something you’ve said twice now. “Those of us.” I’m only speaking to an individual. Or are there a group of you using the account. I thought I was speaking to an individual. And, to be fair, you did kinda come in heavy, so the “blinded by rage” thing wasn’t entirely inaccurate or out of line.
First, yes, I’m an individual, so sure,strictly speaking I can’t speak for anyone other than myself. In practice, I know for a fact that my feelings and beliefs surrounding this shit-ass game are fairly common, especially among my fellow trans people. So the phrase “those of us” here means the fairly sizable group of people in the world who think this shitty game isn’t worth playing, even on a deep discount, even for free. I’m obviously not the only person who feels this way.
Second, I “came in heavy” because the comment I responded to was so shit! It implied, hold on, no, outright stated that anyone who doesn’t want to play the game for moral reasons is uninformed. We just don’t know the whole story, we’ve kept ourselves in the dark about the facts on the ground because we’re so mad at JKR we no longer know nor care what is true. And that implication is so, so much shittier than me being a little rude to you. You’re saying that if I get visibly mad about the oppression I experience, then anything I say about that oppression can and should be disregarded, because I’m emotionally compromised, or, as you put it, “blinded by rage”.
Two of my favourite games I played in 2025 were Industria (3 hours) and Metal Garden (90 minutes). I felt like both were very well executed with clear vision, they did all the shit they wanted to do with the gameplay / world they had and then that was it.
Just finished it and it’s like a good TV show. The pacing was great and even if the gameplay portion was a bit mid, they did a good job of adding character moments into it that felt natural in the cutscenes.
I actually enjoy interactive story games as long as the story is good since I feel that added layer of agency (even if an illusion) can add to the impact.
I also don’t really care about how long a game is, I care about how long a game feels. A 100+ hour game that always feels fresh is fun. Witcher 3 or Baldurs Gate 3 both felt like they weren’t dragging on for me and I was kept engaged by his pacing. Dispatch is 8 hours and I probably could have been engaged for another 8 if they kept the story pacing they had, but they kept it at that length because they didn’t.
Yeah. Might ruffle some feathers here when I say I loved CrossCode but it is not a game I’m gonna feel like diving to for a while and I played it 3 years ago. 30ish hours isn’t too long but the MMO-style chaff, even if only a part of it is actually essential, made it feel longer than it needed it to be, combined with the long puzzle dungeons (which were for the most part very well-designed and satisfying don’t get me wrong).
