Stop Bragging About Your Game's Length | Extra Punctuation 

As a wise owl once said, "I'd much rather play a 5-hour game worth going through twice, than a 10-hour game barely worth playing once"

I saw that tweet and immediately commented “This is how we market games now?” Yahtzee did a good job of breaking down that sentiment

"500 hours to complete all the achievements" Super Smash Bros. Melee has an achievement for playing 1,000,000 Vs. mode matches. One Million matches. does that make Melee a 50,000 hour game?

The size of the map and duration of a game should make sense with the story. ACIV had a massive map that was FUN because you were a pirate on your pirate ship with your pirate mates, and all the things you do while sailing are going along BEING a pirate. There has been a lot done in name of accuracy that just stops being fun, and filling the map with logos is just tiring at this point when the unlocks don't mean anything or aren't event he coolest looking gear (Valhalla comes to mind). Games should be FUN, entertaining or engaging, not secondary jobs we pay for in money and time wasted away.

"...for what we still generally pretend to be an artistic medium..." This really hit me. I couldn't speak to culture generally, but in my own personal little slice of culture, Yahtzee was for some half my entire life the first and loudest proponent of games as art. Who here remembers Yahtzee fondly pointing out that one day everyone over 40 will be dead, whereupon games can take their rightful place as true art? I do. And to see this compromise on what I have always perceived, rightly or wrongly, as Yahtzee's highest article of faith... it's depressing, not least because it's entirely called for given the state of the industry.

Yahtzee playing through P4G three times is an interesting mental image. Truly a man of culture with superior taste.

As a boring adult with small kids and responsibilities, this marketing actively deters me from buying a game. My free video gaming time is super precious and I'm going to invest it on self-contained, quality experiences. Not waste it away on some ridiculously large open world map full of glorified fetch quests.

I just visited How Long To Beat and even The Witcher 3 only takes 173 hours to 100%. I really want to be in the room with the marketing people of some of these companies

I think there's something to be said about *having enough depth* to play for 500, 1000, etc, hours, but that's not something you can completely quantify, nor is it the same thing as having so many tasks that it'll take you 500 hours to do them all.

Completely agree that this was likely just some marketing person looking for buzz words. Advertising a game's length never really made sense, even back when review outlets pretended it did. How long a game takes to finish does nothing to indicate the quality of that game. Any garbage can be padded out AssCreed style with copypasted side missions all over the map.

I had this exact feeling when they announced this. It's gotten to a point where I have given up on so many games early on or midway bc it's just a ton of store brand "content" and now I prefer to play small indie games. . I kind of miss the days of when the original came out that the size of the gaming business and the tech only allowed games to be so big. So they were forced to have some limitation. Ubisoft for instance could only have so much pointless side content. Now that we have gpus that can basically render an entire living reality and games are allowed to be 100gbs of data, it just feels like they throw everything against the wall hoping it sticks. Some devs still manage to make it work, the last 3 open world games I actually finished the story and most of the content were Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man, and Red Dead 2. The first 2 having an extremely fun and well crafted combat systems and the latter having even the smallest of details painstakingly crafted. But even then (except for RDR2 which its world and all the features is the point) I still wish the other games were smaller. I tried to replay them but I forgot how much tedium there is to do side stuff to get resources for upgrades. And that's not even getting into all the fake cutscenes they add now where you have to push forward to walk slowly so you can't even skip through the boring parts or each side activity requires a set up every time you do it. And while I loved Dying Light, it already suffered from a lot of lackluster side content. Now that the sequel has 500 hours of it I can't imagine even 80% is great. And for a series that having more resources and upgrades is essential to survival, I already feel bored by it.

Quite simple really. Just make a "500 hours played" achievement and the 100% completionists will have no choice. 1.1k likes? Wasn't that good of a joke, was it? Thanks anyhow;)

the biggest takeaway: yahtzee's played persona 4 three times all the way through

One of the best games I've ever played is Silent Hill 2, an experience that'll run you roughly 5 hours. The length is a fraction of so many other games, but it's stuck with me for years due to how well-crafted and impactful everything is. I wish that kind of thing was still valued, regardless of how much time you can squeeze out of a game.

Here's a great example of a game that has a perfect game length: The original Half-life, only about 5 hours long and no-one has ever said it was too short.

I feel that game length is one of those things that have a completely different significance for people depending on their age. For a student, a game with 500 hours of playtime sounds amazing, because they have lots of free time, but not a lot of money, so a single game with that much content would be definite selling point. However, for a working adult, especially someone with a family on top, would look at the same number and would avoid it like the plague, because if they had about three hours to play games per day on average, it would take them months to finish it, and by that point they would be just burned out on the game. For someone like that, shorter games, rogue-lites, or even multiplayer or mobile games where you can get your kicks in a short session would sound much more appealing. Using myself as an example, I work a pretty tiresome job in healthcare (so, extra-tiresome in the past two years), and while in the past I absolutely adored long-ass CRPGs and JRPGs, nowadays whenever I look at something like the new Pathfinder games, I would really like to play them, but I know that I will have to stop playing halfway because won't have the time, and when I do have time again, I would be lost without any idea where I was and what my goals were, and then get confused and not have any fun, so I'd avoid them and play something simpler, like Hades or Warframe.

5:27 is a crazy good point. I’ve become wary of games that seem made only to be checklists or time-sinks, because if you do actually 100% them…you’ve gained absolutely nothing of value.

Telling my your games is 500 hours worth of content is a good method of scaring me off your game instead of selling me on it. Geez I often doubt whether I should boot up a 40-50 hours since it's such a huge time investment. And most big games don't have the variety, depth or skill ceiling to be interesting for longer than 10-20 hours anyway..

"The only people who try to get all the achievements are psychotics." Shots fired by Yahtzee at the Completionist there.

I’d take a 10 hour masterpiece over 500 hours of watching numbers go up.

I would only justify a game with 500 hours if it's something like Final Fantasy XIV, Destiny, or another game whose content gets continually updated and you can play with friends. If it's a single-player game and takes that much time, I probably won't care much because it doesn't scratch my social or interest itches.

I find games that take less than 10 hours downright refreshing these days. It’s too bad they’re mostly indie games and not AAA titles. Gato Roboto, for example, is a nifty little Metroidvania that can be 100% completed in under three hours on your first play through. I guess that’s why I’ve been sticking to bite size games lately, like Hades and Fall Guys. I find myself losing interest in RPGs pretty quickly these days, despite loving them in the past.

The real reason it's 500 hours to 100% is because they use copy paste filler and intentionally made it a complete grind fest to sell time savers and claim "it's optional" and "player choice" knowing full we'll they intentionally made it a slog so you pay up in frustration to play the game the optimal way. Same as modern ubisoft games (by the by physical, mental and Saxuall abuse along with crunch is still going on) But I guess most still don't talk about about exploitative micro transactions. systems out of fear.

Just got back into ZP and absolutely loving this series

Personally I'd rather play a game with an expected 20ish hour time, that way even if its bad I won't have invested so much time into it I feel like I have to keep playing. And if it's good I can play it again later without having to worry about too much time sinking.

I am loving these extra punctuation videos! I've been yearning for this style of regular, direct discussion of the industry at this level of scope since the days of TotalBiscuit.

This discussion reminds me a bit of the XBox 360 game "Prototype". I had a lot of fun with it. I played it through multiple times, increasing the difficulty each time. I did a lot of "faffing about" each time, did side missions, killed time at random. Tried to keep one-upping my own high score for a single battle. And after all of this, I checked on my achievement progress. One of the achievements was to kill like...I forget the specifics now but it was like "kill 4 million zombies". And after four playthroughs, a lot of faffing about and side missions each time, I was still only about 12% of the way through. I couldn't believe people would be insane enough to grind out enough time to get it but I'm certain some did. It boggled my mind to think about the sort of time commitment you'd have to make, to do one singular thing to the repetitive exclusion of all else available in the game, to get that.

To be fair. It makes sense that it has 500 hours worth of content. It has, after all, been in development for about 37 years.

Assassin's creed odessey literally broke me. I just couldn't finish it because of the grind.

a couple years back I ended up doing a complete 180 on my opinions on the value of length in a game. I used to look at games that could be completed in 20 hours or less and going "PFFFT" and looking for those sweet 60-100 hour epics. now I am an adult with a full time job, a commute, and other life responsibilities. I value games that value my time, that get the good stuff in and out in under 15 hours and don't overstay their welcome. I often find that these 100+ hour epics rarely include novel gameplay mechanics. There's nothing particularly interesting about them. They're mostly all the same open-world sandbox stuff that just wastes your time. The games with interesting and unique ideas that are worth playing are often titles that are completed in under ten hours, or are roguelike-style (FTL, Hades, etc) where a single playthrough can be completed in under an hour and then repeated ad nauseum because the gameplay is just so engaging. The best, most interesting, and memorable games I've played in the past 5 years have generally all been relatively short games produced by non-AAA devs.

That photo, i don’t know if it’s a poster, or the box art, but it makes me miss judging by the cover.

4:10 laughed out loud at "more spunk than fabric" nice one.

This is why appreciate what Nier: Automata did with is HUD selection on narrative Arc and Mission after clearing the entire game once. At that point you had basically played the game twice (from diffent point on view but humor me here) and for the completionist its a godsend that they just said "look buddy, we open everything for you. You can finish eveything you missed, do it on any order you want and repeat it indefenetly without the need of a full reset. If you do decide to go for the chore of basically 100% the game, we will reward you with something special." Doing that 100% clear takes up to 50 hours and, personally, its damn worth it. But when you give me that "500 hours" of content to 100% something, it better be the fucking best 500 hours of solo experience of my life to do them, cause no one on their sane mind its going to burn more than 20 days of their life for the same bloody copy paste fetch quests which takes 100 hours, 200 hours of moving from point A to Point B while killing X amount of enemies, 100 hours of grindy crafting in betwen, 50 hours of tutorials and introduction of systems and 50 hours of actual plot.

This is what needed to be said. Length doesn't matter too much, but overall quality does. I don't really play long games (with the exception of Dark Souls which I'm just getting into), rather shorter campaign games that will be very replayable (like Metal Gear Rising, Half-Life 2, Ultrakill, Undertale, Titanfall 2, the individual Bungie Halo games, etc.) with exceptions being OneShot (a short game that isn't really replayable, but makes up for being insanely good story wise and still great gameplay wise), Hollow Knight (which took me 13 hours to complete my first playthrough, which says more on how I play games rather than the gameplay length), and Team Fortress 2 (my most played game [at 1500 hours] besides maybe Minecraft, which is a multiplayer game rather than a singleplayer so of course it's going to be focused on keeping my attention). So yeah, good video.

500 hours is fucking mental. That's about a month of non stop playing

Yahtzee sees 500 hours: In Jordan Meme Format - "And I took that personally"

One of the finest video game campaigns I've ever had the pleasure to play, that of Titanfall 2, clocks in at a grand total of... 6-7 hours. It was exactly as long as it needed to be. It told a full story, fully explored its gameplay concepts and level design without wearing them thin, and spent exactly none of its time wasting yours. I am in the middle of my 8th playthrough. On the precise opposite end of the spectrum, one of the longer games I've completed was Watch Dogs 2. I actually just sat thinking for several minutes trying to remember how long it was, because my memory of it is a haze of nonsense. Nearly the entire campaign, save for a small handfull of missions where the baddies actually show up, is basically total nonsense, random scenarios strung together with the thinnest overarching plot trying desperately to tie it all up. The characters have no character, the gameplay is repetitive, and nearly the entire campaign is padding, not to mention the insultingly lazy side missions. I played through it once, decided all the side content was too grindy and boring, and have not touched it or even considered playing it since. Length is not a very good indicator of quality, and many forget it is very much possible for it to be too long. I can only take so much before it stops being fun and becomes painful. If you're bragging about length, that indicates to me you have nothing of any actual value to show for and I should look elsewhere. Take notes, boys.

In my Steam library, there are nine games from the past 14 years that I have at least 500 hours into. In order: Fallout New Vegas, American Truck Simulator, Fallout 4, NBA 2K12, Super Mega Baseball 3, Skyrim, Rise of Nations, Stardew Valley, and My Time At Sandrock. See the patterns developing there? Three Bethesda RPGs (counting New Vegas), which lend themselves to challenges, modded playthroughs, and other variations on the "50 hours a pop done 10 times 10 different ways" theme. Four "session games" best for playing for an hour or two after work (2 sports games, a "game to play whilst listening to an audiobook", and an RTS that burns a quick hour.) And two craft-em-ups that have eaten an embarrassing number of my weekends.

Longest time I’ve put in a game was Fallout: New Vegas and a lot of that was because of how engaging I found the characters and writing were

Expect a slew of authors to market their novels by giving you the page count, doesn't matter if it's all size 32 font or not.

For Dying Light in particular, it was probably a sensible thing to boast about at the time, considering how "working-class consumer" the game is. It's the kind of game people with a launch day PS4 and a slightly-above-minimum-wage salary would buy, so the assurance that the game has a load of content is good for someone looking for their dollar's worth. As someone who loves the first game, I have confidence that at least a third of that 500 hours will be meaningfully unique, plus the gameplay of Dying Light is quite a bit more compelling to me than, say, the modern AC games so I personally will play it for more than it's worth.

I recently got back into Hitman with the most recent trilogy, and I think the way they do their games is pretty good when it comes to time. Each game is pretty short, with maybe an hour spent on each level if you play it carefully and don't just shoot your way to victory, while there are so many routes and challenges to complete that you COULD get a hundred hours out of them if you really wanted to. I think a game's core experience should be shorter and concise, while the side content and replayability should be how you get those extra hours out of the truly devoted. I enjoyed grinding Hitman 3 challenges out after a quick and enjoyable core experience a lot more than slogging through the dragged out campaign of Assassin's Creed Valhalla for sure.

That was one beef I had with the detractors for Metroid Dread. Comparatively, it's a short game, and that supposedly was enough to upset a few people because of its price tag. However, the game is so good, I played it over and over, basically learning to speedrun it because it's just that much fun, regardless of its total length. There's a much better chance of me getting 500 hours out of Dread in my lifetime than an open world faffing simulator like Dying Light 2.

One of the first games I bought was Baldur's Gate 2, which definitely boasted of its 400 hours of gameplay (though they also mentioned you wouldn't be able to see it all in one playthrough because of character requirements. A more reasonable figure for a single playthrough was 100 hours, they said).

I love how it sounds like publishers are almost afraid to give him review copys at this point.

Yessssssssssss keep me fed with content yahtzee

Great video thanks for sharing.

I appreciate Yahtzee making the Killer7 reference.

This would make a perfect accompanying piece to go the Josh Stife's "100 hours to get good" video

For curiosity I had a look up how long a game like destiny is, its main story is 11 ish hours, its +extras is 56 hours and its everything run is 519, but that's everything, ranking up to highest level, doing all the DLC, but what a game like Destiny has is the fact you are playing it together with friends, people can play a game for hundreds of hours, but in most cases it's either your comfort zone game as mentioned, or its something you do with people to socialize, what the team behind dying light two have forgotten is that no one playing on there own is gonna want to do that for 500 hours

I love long story modes, girthy world maps and a big backend of hidden lore

I'm pretty sure if 'how long to hit 100% completion' is the metric, then The Stanley Parable is the winner. That takes 43,829 hours to get all the achievements.

What I learned from this video: Yahtzee has played Persona 4 Remastered 3 times.

It's generally accepted that a full price AAA game has a certain amount of hours it needs to hit before it's considered a good value for it's cost. While your opinion on where the line is may very I'd say for a linear experience around 20 hours is good enough. At some point though this idea seems to have become warped so that instead of a minimum threshold it's that the longer the game the better, forgetting that diminishing returns is a thing.

THANK YOU!

though I do agree with most of this review, I think there's plenty of room in the market for this kind of "mind numbingly long" experience. Some people do enjoy this, and there are 1000s of game developers out there making shorter and tighter experiences. I think a lot of game criticism these days comes with the unintentional effect of homogenising the industry. The huge, big budget, AAA games with 500 hours of filler can coexist with the 3 hour indie with a meta storyline that's an allegory for depression. Take Dying Light 1 and Dead Island for example, the predecessors. Ireally liked the gameplay, and enjoyed just playing the game while having a tangible filler goal, even if I didn't complete it all, I never felt bad about it cus there was so much, but i also always felt like I had something I could come back to If I wanted, there was no harm done by the filler content. That isn't to say some people don't misuse that, like Shadow of War.

I was thinking a l lot of the same stuff you did. You're the man!

I like these. I wish more were produced more often. :)

Okay, I love Zero Punctuation, don't get me wrong. But I'm really liking this Extra Punctuation stuff, maybe even more.

Gonna be honest, I agree with yatzhee, I mean, i love dying light and am hyped for dying light 2 (and no doubt preparing for yarzhee to rip it a new one with funny jokes) but 500 HOURS?! That's 20 days!! Thats just gonna make completionists go insane!

This is what happens when you just take the phrase "it's too short" out of context - with AAA games at least, most people complained about short games because they were shelling out $60 on the damn things so wanted something worth the pretty high asking price.

I feel like after Final Fantasy VII became a massive hit in '97, suddenly game length bacame a hot talking point. From what I've seen, game length was rarely something mentioned or criticized in game reviews prior to that, but became amore frequent point in later ones. Then like anything else that becomes a talking point, such as how realisitic the graphics are, became a standard rather than an element of design for developers

Yahtzee using the beloved greedy saleman at 0:42 👌

Do game marketers just assume we’ll only buy 1 game ever in our lives? When we say “if you were on an island with only ten games,” you do realize that we’re not actually going to said island. I have a backlog I would like to return to.

Having played dying light 2, I'd say the concerns were both accurate and innaccurate. The open world is massive and filled with busy work like clearing outposts, climbing radio towers (not the fun parkour kinda climb, more the same timing puzzle copy pasted and then slightly shifted around), but the sidequests (that are telegraphed to the player) are actually of surprising quality, but perhaps my expectations were just low. Would I say its worth 100%? No, most of that is filler. But I think I can say in this case, I'm glad the 500 hours was just deceptive marketing. For once, the game is better off for it being a lie because i was done with the game around 25

My favourite game took me 8.5 hours, and my second favourite took well over a thousand. Length doesn't matter, quality does.

My heart did a little leap at the random Killer 7 mention. Good memories. Weird good memories.

Josh Strife Hayes has a good video about the "It gets good after 1000 hour" excuse

I'm reminded of RuneScape and how after a while it stops listing "hours played" and starts listing "days played"

This is besides the point, more of a rant about the howlongtobeat website 4:43 having played hollow knight myself, i'm very sure that getting the embrace the void achievement (and ending) will take most people more than the 16h apparently added for 100% (112%) completion of the godmaster dlc. i have 82 hours in the game and according to most people, that is pretty reasonable for getting 112%, but i haven't achieved the last ending. getting there apparently adds about 20 hours from where i'm at right now, just because of the difficulty to get there.* *it's an all-boss mode that takes "regular people" about 45-60 minutes to get through the first time. but every time you die, you have to start over, so you'll have to do about 30 mins of repetition before actually returning to the difficult part. And they add an improved version of the usual final boss at the end, which people tell you you'd need multiple hours of grinding in practice to defeat regularly so let's say you have 10 tries to get to that point, so >300mins (6 hours) then you have to take another 5 hours of practice to defeat this boss in isolation (you can't do that before reaching her the first time) then you'll probably still need 5+ tries to actually defeat her at then end of the all-boss run, just because she's that hard. now, as you take the full time to through, i'd say we need the 45-60 mins for every try, adding another 4+ hours. and that is after you've had to do the 4 quarter-of-the-bosses runs to get there, probably also taking 10-20 hours. how could they ever think this thing only take 16 hours? (and a total of 58)

I kinda wish these had chiller intro music. The heavy metal sound kinda clashes with this more chilled-out, thoughtful format versus ZP

YC:“Does it have a moment where the hero loudly shouts the villain’s name like in wrath of Khan?” YC: maybe… YC get out of my office Techland.” 😮

20-60 hours is a perfectly reasonable length for most games' playtime. Even RPGs are lucky to get more than 80-100 out of many players. I don't understand this obsession every game company is getting into where all of players' time must be devoted to them and only them until the servers die or the sequel comes along. I don't want to play Rooty Tooty Point 'n Shooty every damn day. I don't enjoy juggling or devoting myself to a single limited-time seasonal event that I have to be present for every day it's live. Stop making my free-time feel like work - especially since I'm not even being paid for it!

please god just give me a high quality 10-20 hour game with replayability and I'm happy

I'm often worried by games boasting about their length. Because even if the central gameplay loop is extremely engaging, it won't mean jack if there is no variety. Pacing is another element. How is the pace of the game from hour 2 to the 50th hour?

In the last ten years I have spent more than 80 hours on exactly one game. RimWorld. 3,781 hours, and counting.

I was a little miffed when a friend told me the estimated playtime for Elden Ring's critical path, but this has put it into perspective.

This was brilliant. Well said.

A lot of people have been demanding that the next Elder Scrolls game should have multiple provinces, as that's the only way to make the map bigger than Skyrim's. That's not true, as games like GTA 5 and Fallout 4 have been able to beat Skyrim's map despite only taking place in a single city and the surrounding countryside, but even if it was, it'd be a bad idea. If Bathesda doubled up on provinces, they'd have to spend more time getting everything in there and they'd have less time to spend on making the individual provinces stand out by adding interesting quests and lore detail into them. They also seem to forget that Morrowind is considered the best game in the series despite having the smallest map and that Daggerfall and Arena are considered not as good as the rest despite being much bigger than the others.

"I'm sure there are a lot of games that take hundreds of hours to get all the achievements. That's why the only people that try to do it are psychotics." It's not like we do it with _every_ game, there aren't enough hours in the day. I only go for 100% when I've played the game for a while, gotten an idea of what there is to do, looked through the achievements, and determined whether or not 100% is something I could feasibly accomplish, even if it takes months. I do this because I used to be insane enough to attempt it with every game, but then I had that realization that comes with having a bunch of achievements/trophies/whatever for a game on one console and not another, knowing I _have_ the achievements, but it not being recorded _everywhere,_ so I stopped caring as much. Then I spent like a hundred hours trying to 100% Saint's Row 4 (because I really liked that game), which included completing every mission in co-op. Tall order for someone with no friends who play the same games. After something like two years of random idiots and cheaters, I found that I still had a bit less than half the missions left, deduced that randomly dropping into the missions I needed was a roulettle game rigged against me, and finally gave up. And this was before the Steam version got fucked. Since then, I've sworn off 100%-ing any game that has even a single multiplayer-only achievement (assuming it's not something ridiculously simple, like "participate in 3 matches" or "put a hat on your custom character"), so when the rare game comes along where I actually _can_ get all of the achievements, I kind of feel like I _have_ to. ...This does sound a teency bit on the psychotic side, now that I read it back. Incidentally, 100%-ing Persona 4 Golden only took me 85.9 hours, so I don't know what the deal is with Dying Light 2.

According to HowLongToBeat, a "Completionist" run of Dying Light 2 would take approximately 96 hours. Just 404 hours less than advertised, no big deal.

When I was 8 I wished Pokemon Silver's campaign were fifty times lengthier. Of course it was silly to think that was feasible, and that the game wouldn’t run out of good ideas past the 20th hour mark. The idea that more is always better is juvenile.

A wise owl once said a 5 hour game worth playing twice is always better than a 10 hour game barely worth playing once.

It’s funny how you talk about the “before times”, as in before everyone was dying, and then show a still from the scene in Life of Brian that has the “I got better” line.

My first reaction was "That's way too long". The only game I have triple digit playtime in is tf2 and the main reason for that is because it's a game I play with my friends to catch up casually or pop in if I just want to shoot something. Most of my other playtimes rarely ever go over 30 hours. Id rather have a shot well crafted game that's packed with fun and interesting things to do than to grind for 100s of hours.

I've played a total of 12 hours of Undertale. Undertale has consumed probably 400 hours of time in my head, because those twelve hours were worth remembering

Now that I am older with countless super long games I've never beaten. I am sooo happy when a game is around 10hrs. They feel sooooo much better. No extra padding. They implement exactly what they had in mind then it's over. I used to love RPGs, but the genre has become something where the story doesn't even really start until 15+ hours in, and by the time you are at the 100hr mark you think wtf is even going on? This is boring. WRAP IT UP!

small crafted worlds/maps are always the most memorable, just think about it Theres a reasons why Shadow Moses, RE mansion and RC police department, Yakuza locations, Hitmans locations are so lasting in our memories

2:51 I feel attacked!

cannot wait to see what yahtzee says about BG3

I used to pay attention to gameplay length as one factor towards what game would get me maximum bang for minimum buck. But then I realized that it was that most deadly of things, a metric even the money and marketing people could understand. only their min/max equation read "how to get the most game for the least money" and that definitely ran counter to my interests as a gamer. It's a formula for crap, is what I am saying. It's a particular hazard for me because my favorite kind of game is the open world mega-game loaded with substantial quests like Skyrim, the Fallout series, and of course. the god-king of them all, Witcher 3. And those often have very high play lengths because they are so chock full of stuff. So it's hard for a semi-informed gamer like me to know what games have lots of legit content and which have merely padded out their play length with mind numbing filler. That's what Metacritic is for, I guess.

As Bilbo said, when asked about the video games he had played: "I've played half of you only half as much as I had liked, and half of you I played twice as much as you damn well deserve."

3:02 yes... yes we are...

When I see "This game will take 500 hours to complete!" I sit happy in the knowledge that this is why I don't complete games. I finish some, beat others, but rarely RARELY ever complete a game. I find that there is a sweetspot for games, go too long and I'll never want to replay it. Go too short and it better be the best couple hours in existence, and sometimes they are. But for big open world madness games, I find that if most of the content is shallow empty copy paste, I have no interest in doing it. There are rare exceptions where the side content is so good I seek it out. Witcher 3, Ghost of Tsushima, Dark Souls series etc... but it's few and far between.

That last line makes a lot of sense when you remember that he was desperately trying to get away from FNAF: Security Breach

So they don't try to kill Yahtzee, just Jirard The Competionist...

I agree, but 'journalist' need to also stop asking about game length. I've seen so many intereviews with the question "How many hours will this game be?" But glad to see you tackling this issue, you've always been right on the money

I found that, the time I started to not enjoy massively padded and ridiculously long games, is the same time I started to truly understand the concept of mortality and that life is only so long. And now I need to run to the store, cause this thankfully reminded me that I'm running low on Ritalin and need to be able to sit still for more than 10 min.

Honestly, with how my life changed these past few years (mostly in regards to the amount of time I have to play games... and the willingness to do so), seeing a 500h playtime is more daunting than something to look forward to. Well, as usual then - no pre-orders, I'll wait for reviews of both reviewers and players, and base my buying judgment on that.

I'm quite late to this but 0:54 'Hour 112.' As it happens, 112 is a common emergency number in many European countries. I think Yahtzee was giving us a hint :P