If I wanted to play through the top ten FPS games of all time, I could do it in less than ten weeks. For simplicity, we’ll take TheGamer’s list of the best single-player FPS campaigns, which includes:
10. BioShock Infinite (11.5 hours)
9. Half-Life: Alyx (12)
8. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (6)
7. Halo: Combat Evolved (10)
6. Wolfenstein: The New Colossus (11)
5. Eternal fate (14.5)
4. BioShock (12)
3. Titanfall 2 (6)
2. Far Cry 3 (16)
1. Half-Life 2 (13)
First person shooters shoot at close range
This would not be my personal list of the top 10 FPS campaigns (get Infinite and Modern Warfare from there), but it’s a helpful starting point for thinking about the genre as a whole. The longest games on the list are Doom Eternal and Far Cry 3, which are estimated to take 14.5 and 16 hours to play through the main campaign, respectively (thanks HowLongToBeat.com). If you wanted to play through all ten games, it would take you 112 hours. That means you’d need to play an average of 11.2 hours a week to keep up. It’s doable. And once you’ve done that, voilà, you’ve got a pretty good introduction to FPS design since the turn of the millennium.
Now let’s take the top ten from TheGamer’s list of the best RPGs of all time. This list includes:
10. Mass Effect 2 (24.5 hours)
9. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (29)
8. Undertale- (7)
7. Chrono Trigger (23)
6. Stardew Valley (53)
5. Baldur’s Gate 2 (45.5)
4. Dragon Age: Inquisition (47)
3. Divinity: Original Sin 2 (59)
2. Persona 4: Golden (68)
1. NieR:Automata (21)
RPGs thrive in the Sprawl
The difference is immediately clear. Aside from Undertale, which is a major outlier in the genre, the shortest game on this list still takes seven hours longer to complete than the longest game on the other. If you wanted to play all ten of these games and get a similar overview of the genre, it would take you 377 hours. If for some reason you wanted to stick to a similar ten-week schedule for this project, you’d have to put up with marathon weekly sessions of 37.7 hours. You’d be sitting on the couch for a day and a half every week, devoting almost as much time to playing RPGs as you would to a full-time job. And those estimates assume you don’t do any side quests, a fair assumption for shooters that absolutely doesn’t hold true for RPGs, since that’s usually where the best stuff is found.
Related
Josh Sawyer of Obsidian is right when he talks about modern RPG romance
Players expect certain types of romance systems in role-playing games, and games need to go beyond that.
This time commitment makes it much, much harder to get into RPGs. You could play through id’s ’90s catalog in a couple of days, but if you want to play through all the games from BioWare’s heyday? Then you better hope you have a few weeks of vacation saved up. This may be one of the reasons we often have such fond memories of the RPGs we played as kids. For many of us, that was the last time we had the chance to fully max out the hour meter on a long RPG.
I reviewed Anger Foot earlier this year. It’s a meaty shooter, and I wouldn’t have wanted it to last much longer than the 12 hours I spent with it. But I started Baldur’s Gate 3 nearly a year ago, put in more than 150 hours, and I’m still not finished. It would take hundreds and hundreds of hours more to feel like I’ve seen everything the game has to offer. I know other fans of the game have finished it and dived back in for a second (and third and fourth) playthrough, but it’s hard to imagine investing that much time into a game when there are so many other worthwhile RPGs to play.
I’m not saying that RPGs don’t respect your time, and I don’t mean that as a value judgement either. RPGs thrive when they have time to breathe, time for side quests, time to explore, and time to make you feel like you’ve really progressed from little slob to big champion. But if you want to find your way around a genre, most genres are short hikes, while RPGs feel more like the complete Appalachian Trail.
Next
Star Wars Outlaws Expert Quests Are the Cure for Open-World RPG Fatigue
Star Wars Outlaws deviates from Ubisoft’s standard formula in many ways, but the expert missions are its biggest asset.
