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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d much rather have a focused game than one full of collectathon bloat with more for the sake of more.
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.
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.
25-30 hours is still insanely long. 10 hours is my sweet spot for a focused single player game.
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.