Hidden Costs of Long Playtimes in Modern Gaming | Asmongold Reacts 

I just wanted to give an example of good achievements like these In Starcraft2 each campaign mission has 3 challenges for each different difficulty except for the hardest one. Each challenge requires you to go at the mission in a different kind of way, or complete it in a "speedrunny" way that encourages planning instead of just running it through. Or encourages using units and strats you'd never use otherwise. They're varied and fun, which makes the whole experience enjoyable and engaging What's cooler is that in most missions you can complete all 3 on one run even on the hardest difficulty, it's not just there to waste your time

Titanfall 1's original regeneration system was nearly perfect. Every generation required different feats with different weapons and the only way to get to regen 10 was to master every titan and every weapon.

True! This is why i always loved to do achievement runs in WoW Raids

Or those that just push you to discover all the secrets, like bloodborne, with all the secret bosses and weapons and “spells”

Elden Ring!!!

Incrementals tend to tie achievements with boosts and content unlocks. This forces the player to do actions they otherwise wouldn't do in order to progress the game. Incrementals are more or less designed to waste time so idc that much but I am wondering whether more mainstream games will start to do something similar.

The last game that I played and felt achievements were actually cool challenges to complete was Halo 3. Halo 3 is so old at this point lol.

The only games i care about achievments anymore are the paradox games

it has always been like that. I don't know what sort of past your brain is fantasizing now...There as always been games with good achievements and games with bad ones. Remember when they started to put online achievements in solo games ? Yeah, those are the ones i hate.

Speaking the truth man. I've noticed this as well, Those aren't achievements, that's just Milestones if anything. NOT Achievements

might have to pull the ps2 out of the closet and play some ratchet and clank

The best thing for me was playing the game again as an Fps. Or in Size matters you could play the whole game with rotating weapons if you earned enough skill points

@@ext93Emulators! It's still a blast to this day.

​@ext93 The new one about rifts and 2 dimensions is honestly really good. Rivet and Kit's characters didn't take anything away from Ratchet and Clank and that was such a refreshing thing to see

Those games are insanely replayable

Oh so you never "dived" for treasure in Witcher 3 in that 150+ hours? The map full of icons? Pressing "E" to collect garbage in houses only to sell them for copper you dont need?.

@@Chronuz I’m clueless as to how you played that game so awfully

@@Chronuz I don’t buy the whole “customer is always right” mentality here, especially considering some of the things you specifically complained about. Some players genuinely don’t know how to play certain games, and they project that frustration onto the quality of the game. Same thing happened with Elden Ring; players who didn’t have the patience to understand the game and its mechanics ultimately had a bad time. The fact that you “hit like a wet noodle” the entire time speaks major volumes about how little you understood W3’s mechanics.

@@Chronuz The difference between W3 and ER is that ER’s focus is in fact on combat versatility while W3 is narrative, quests and characters. But just like ER, W3 is a hard game to understand for some players. If you as a souls player took the same mentality you approached ER with and applied it to Witcher, it’s likely you wouldn’t be complaining about half the things you have already. I won’t pretend like W3’s combat isn’t clunky, but most renowned RPG’s are not known for having particularly well-rounded combat. Games like Fallout 4 and Dragon’s Dogma for instance have great combat, but awful storytelling and quests. ER, despite having some great if confusing lore, isn’t a narrative masterpiece, and rather it is a backseat, esoteric approach to storytelling and nigh impossible to know without doing internet homework. Elden Ring’s combat balancing, whether in regards to PVP or bosses, is glaringly bad and easy to abuse. If you understood W3’s mechanics you’d also find it relatively easy to abuse and sidestep any tedium. Upgraded Quen, dodge spam along with decoctions like echidna or blizzard can turn most battles into a breeze. Even using whirl with the right adrenaline boosting perks and stamina potions is a blast in combat. If you knew what potions to pop and general adrenaline/stamina management “long cooldowns” ultimately become a non issue. Knowing boss and enemy weaknesses are an important part of W3’s combat just like ER (not always in the form of an “oil”, but also certain attacks and sign combinations.) W3 has great mechanics, but only if you understand their depth and applications, same thing with people who hate on Elden Ring.

What makes elden ring and skyrim different is that 95% of the game is completely optional and the only thing making you explore those dungeons is your own desire to explore. That is how an open world game should be done. It takes just a couple of hours to beat those main stories but over 100 hours to explore for elden ring and over 300 for skyrim.

I remember that Seinfeld episode where George bought the Frogger arcade cabinet because his #1 high score position was still on it. "George decide he wants to buy the Frogger game from his old hangout after he sees that he still has the high score. He has to figure out a way to get to his place without erasing the game's memory." 😄

@@Ancientreapers yeah he plays frogger with the machine itself lmao

@@PeterDanielBerg Such a classic scene 🤣

we still have point systems in most games we just dont get to see our "score"

When you think about it, video game Ladder leaderboards are literally just the "high score" system but monetized. The extent of which gaming has fallen never fails to sadden me.

The hermit crab achievement...

There's a fine line and they nailed it. But some of them are pretty convoluted. When you get to the point where it's like "Get a 720 no scope mid air after falling at least 20ft from at least 300m away while landing in water to survive the fall damage while doing a handstand one one hand while connected via dial up internet and on the phone with your best friends mom"

The best part of DA:I was the descent dlc. Which was linear.

Its like linear games have a bad rep or something. Id much prefer more studios embracing linear gaming experience. Cause really, people actually like those if you look closely. They are more digestible, dont run into the issue of "empty open world". Its much easier to fill 30-60 hours with quality content than 150+ hours and it shows in modern gaming.

@@TheSorrowfulAngel oh I agree, I don't mind linear gaming at all, would be nice if game dev and companies realize there's nothing wrong with games that aren't open worlds.

@@Ni-boo Yeah. I also believe that shorter games are better for revenue in the long-term. People don't mind paying up for a good game that's "just" 30-60 hours if it actually has some quality. And with such a game being less costly to produce(and significantly less debugging work), as well as those games just taking up less time, people will play more different games period. That's good for the whole industry. It's like every second game tries to create an mmo-like experience. I play two MMOs actively and that's already almost too much. Respecting the time of your playerbase is not just a good decision for quality, but also financially imo.

@@TheSorrowfulAngel Linear games got a bad rep when CoD started pumping out corridor shooters year after year and every developer piggybacked off the popularity and started pumping out mindless shooting galleries connected by corridors with big kaboom booms. More people started to view Bethesda games as refreshing(and they were, I don't think anything to this day can beat Skyrim, other than Fallout NV), so peopel started developing open worlds in order to stay relevant, and things haven't changed much since.

Classic game, just hella outdated now

GTASA one of my favorite games ever. so many hours in that game

lol noob

even just fucking around in free roam is very fun.

yakuza with way too many side quest but i still had to do them all. they were fun and mostly rewarding in 0

Facts. Best metroid for me due to the reasons mentioned

MGS 2 is one of the greatest games ever made!

the extended joy I got out of collecting all dogtags in MGS2 was insane. i will never forget

That's only the first Portal that is that short. Portal 2 was at least double that. Point still stands for Portal 1 though

the cake is a lie

@@KugelfangTV I think there was a cake in portal 2, it was just got smashed or something.

I think you meant Portal 1. Very short, but super fun, and I replay it about once a year or so. Portal 2 is also great. A little more story, and probably 2-3 times the length. Both classics.

I hate games that nerf your character that you built for over a year because they decided it was too easy. If it was too easy, it wouldn't have taken a year to be good. They could have just made new content that was harder, so you have to build a little at a time, but they want new players to be able to play the endgame, so they scale everyone down. I don't get what some of these developers are thinking. Maybe I'm just too old to be playing video games 😔

I have far more time for gaming now than when I was a kid. Back then, I had rules, chores, homework, social obligations, and a strict schedule. Now I'm free to do what I want for as long as I want.

But games back in the day were well made and had great replayability. So you didn’t mind beating the game because it might have a bunch of different endings (Cronotrigger) or it might have New Game +. Nowadays the game seems like it doesn’t want you to beat it at all.

Yup and i still go back to play eternal every once in a while when I'm bored because the gameplay is so good.

I liked Tunic and was mesmerised for hours until I got to a new area and got into a fight, realised that the combat sucks and dropped it instantly. Never gone from love it to hate it so quickly before.

God please erase my memories of Crosscode so i can play it again!

Crosscode is nuts

Kingmaker is fun as well.

@@samhall5096 I actually haven't played kingmaker but I heard it was really good, and it was more "open world" esc

Kingmaker is similar

God its glorious indeed. And can be as long and short as you want

SoTN was so good. The only metroidvania comparable to it these days is probably Hollow Knight imo.

Nah fam. Castlevania 2: Simons Quest is peak

​@@Opus9ine Bloodstained comes to mind

Asmongold: Repetitive mechanics are good if they are not required. *promotes game where you fight a cartoon vampire by storing up hearts found inside candlesticks*

Honestly i play WoW pretty casually and M+ is the best content for me. You dont really need BiS gear for just doing fun runs and by the end of the season i even got the rating high enough for the mount. A friend group to have to run keys with is of course a damn good thing to have in that case

I used to do something similar with the first Portal. The first play through took me about 5 or 6 hours. Then afterwards my roommate and I kept finding new ways to get through the levels faster and get better at aiming on controllers and we eventually used it as a measurement of time for filling space between stuff we had to do.

Exactly. I've replayed the original Resident Evil trilogy at least 8 or 9 times apiece but that doesn't mean each playthrough was longer than 3ish hours.

I'd say an hour a dollar is reasonable. I've bought twenty dollar games that were shorter and didn't feel ripped off.

@@TacTicMint too cheap tbh. I gladly spend 40-50 dollars on a game like last of us or uncharted 3 which you can play in 12 hours. I'd rather be blown away by extreme good storytelling instead of mindless grind in that hours.

@@ArseneGray I think Valheim, Limbo and the original Darkest Dungeon were around $20. Some of those cheaper indie games give you enough content for your money. I agree with you on the grind and those indie ones don't tend to have much.

82 hours in hogwarts for every achievement is pretty quick

@@TacTicMint roguelikes like darkest dungeon always have replayability thats how rogues are designed cant really compare those to games like limbo. or story games, RPGs and Rogues are just designed for replayability from either using different builds or from going a different route

Ocean Hunter was fun as hell at the arcade. Me and my brother wasted a ton of coins to reach the ending. WORTH IT. I would give a leg to see a remaster of it.

The Street Fighter 2 machine (don't remember which version) at my local arcade has the difficulty cranked all the way up, it's absurd.

Things being unlocked through a new run rather than new game plus is repetitive.

@@nujevad28 Are you referring to RE? Well, you can play every difficulty through a new game plus. The times that you don't play a new game plus is for S+s, which is merely an achievement, they give you no new content (save for a few times). Plus, I found it fun to replay, so it didn't feel repetitive, it felt great.

@@nujevad28 new game + or infinite ammo weapons ruin all fun from every RE game.

Now it's aged even more well😂

6v6 my beloved…

Only caveat would be that most people probably felt compelled to go through every cave anyway in 'fear' of missing something (like Patches or Alexander). The criticism is still understandable, imo every area could have done with 2-3 less caves per area. Says someone that would still go through each and everyone on a fresh playthrough.

I like elden ring but the duplicate trash mini bosses and caves that might have well been the same added nothing to the game. Their previous games were better.

Beating every side boss in ER felt like just another AAA game experience. They repeated so many bosses so many times. I remember I was amazed when I first fought a dragon on swamp in the first area, it felt great. But then I fought reskin of that dragon like 7 times during the game and it felt awful. I did some catacombs but after I saw how much content is just recycled boring shit with random rewards you may not even want for your build.. I just focused on main locations and skiped fillers. DS3 was peak Soulsgame for me and Sekiro straight up the best Fromsoft game. Elden Ring tried something new with open world only to deliver good stuff mostly where they were strong in previous games - massive areas full of small secrets (legacy dungeons). Fuck open world if it means running around bloated areas with constantly unbalanced challenge where you are constantly overleveled because you wanted to see everything the game has to offer. I prefer linear experience of souls games where every fight felt meaningful.

this was me with witcher 3 "excuse me witcher" NOPE! i'm done with y'all. i'm just gonna finish this

Imo then they aren't even filler. If they are a part of the gameplay loop or over arching lore, it's just part of the game, not filler. Monster hunter is a good example. No one considers having to kill certain creatures to get a horn for this armor piece filler, even if you have to do it five times. Mainly because it's part of the gameplay loop. I say no one but I'm sure there are people who do call it filler, I've never felt that way. You could say grindy but I don't think grindy = filler. It's when you have things that don't service the overall theme or story of the game shoved in for no reason that most people become aware of it.

​@@devinkipp4344 it is the activities that just waste your time or are basically copy pasta with slightly different textures. even a main story objective can be a filler because it isn't reasonable to do a 30 minutes activity you did multiple times before just to get a few short story lines that often don't even tell new information. for example the just cause series is suffering under that. you have so many enemy bases to slaugter though and you don't get anything except starting the same activity over again 50 meters to the side until you killed everything on the map. only then you are allowed to fight the end boss even if the last 20+ hours of gameplay where basically wasted into 1 or 2 perks you don't actually need for the end fight.

@Dovos agreed

Yet this still doesn’t excuse the bad game design which the “filler” has. They could’ve spent more time to flesh them out but they couldn’t. Elden ring is nowhere near the best game and it’s not even the best fromsoft game in terms of overall quality

​@@jaswanthvardireddy2243 yes Elden Ring isn'T the best game. it is nowhere near "perfect". but even with it's inperfections it is still over 90% archiving what it promised and that is 80% more than what other new AAA games deliver nowadays at launch. the amount of new "big" games that come out without major performance problems and at least one bug every minute of playtime is WAY too high. it is sadly more common that a game with a sub 10 dev team with 100+ hours of play time is more stable and content rich than a game made by 300+ "devs" teams (probably 50+ of them are group managers that only do "meetings").

Mount & Blade Warband is the greatest sandbox game I've ever touched next to Minecraft which I also used to love to play but kinda grown out of it. I'm not sure if I enjoy infinite time sinks anymore, but I may give Starsector a try

I really like starsector but my brain is simply to smooth to do anything more meaningful than running black market goods. And that's OK I wouldn't ask it to be simplified.

@@mastershake1071 Pro tip: hover your mouse over the Black Market tab on a colony's market and you will see the suspicion level on the colony after you put the BM goods in your inventory. Ships with concealed cargo storage (like the Pirate-mod Mule or Buffalo) decrease your chances of having a patrol detect your smuggling and you can get away with more cargo. The way you balance it is by buying some BM goods and then buying the same goods from the regular market. This way you decrease the relations drop.

2 likes for the realest comment is crazy

I feel like 100+ hours outside the rpg realm, is super uncommon. Most open world fps games will sit around 25-40 hours depending on how much content you complete.

Oh Skyrim, i spent 800+ hours in vanilla, and still play with mods, a good game can have the 20 hours main history and the content for addicts, and it is fine

Good Taste The new Fake God of Wars are overrated shit for normies

Depends on what you're looking for, no? I'm someone who plays games for stories, so a game like God of War is an extremely enjoyable experience for me because it delivers on its story. Same reason why I enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn for instance, while the gameplay is mediocre imo.

I used to love Metal Slug when I was a kid, playing it in the arcade. My stepdad used to take me there, and I'd use all the money I'd saved from chores and bdays to play for hours. I only found out later that he was meeting his dealers at the arcade and getting high while I played. Sometimes he'd pop up and "borrow" some money from me to "get quarters". As an example of how long we'd be there, I could sometimes beat whole games. Two that I can remember beating are The Simpsons and X-Men. I loved X-men. Anyway, I haven't played Metal Slug in almost thirty years. I wonder if they have it for PS4?

​@@middlesiderrider the ps2 anthology collection is available on ps4

Coming from someone who played League for way too many years out of their life, you have to just come to terms with the fact that League is actually fucking cringe and makes you a cringe person for playing it. It was easy for me to quit when I realized League was the only game I ever played where I was not only ashamed to admit to other people that I played it, but I was ashamed to admit to even my own self that I played it.

I was exactly thinking about that game as well. It was just the right amount of time. I finished it in something over 17 hours and I couldn't stop playing it. Yeah I finished it in two days, but I was glued to my chair and was enjoying myself not even thinking about time. And at the end I could happily say that it was a great game and it was worth every € spent on it. The last time I said that was probably ME and DA trilogies. Not the Inquisition that tbh, since it was littered with pointless side quests (story was good tho), but other games were pure gold and I played through all of them multiple times.

the point is that 5000 pvp pet battles isn't really an achievement, and is just a stupidly high number for no reason. don't defend garbage.

​@@davidpowers9178Agreed, which is why I think that many games add a lot of fluff to pad out even the optional parts of a game. They only have 10-15 hours of meaningful story and gameplay, but they want to charge full price so they have to stretch that out to 30+ hours.

I've played it a few years ago, it was one of the best rpg I've played in my life. If you're not afraid of ugly games, you should try the thief serie, those games are also very good.

Agree, i only feel like booting up baldurs gate if I know I have multiple hours