What game surprised you with their length?
What game surprised you with their length?
We know that certain games are big, like BG3 or Persona 5. But recently games like FF7 rebirth and Indiana Jones just kept going on and on past "Act 3". Also Rise of the Golden Idol seemed a little short to me
Are developers getting more efficient with generating content?
The Last of Us II. I went in expecting the same act structure as the first and was surprised. If you've played it then you know what I'm talking about. Despite mainly taking place over just a few days it really feels so drawn out and a relentless struggle, which felt so perfect for the world of the game.
Castlevania Symphony of the Night... At least when you defeat Shaft properly
An ENTIRE NEW CASTLE!?
Hollow Knight.
Surely this is the end of the map..... Ok but now Suuuuuurely this is the end of the map.... OK NOW SUUUURELY.....
The Talos Principle. After a short bit in the game, you go to a hub area that goes to other areas like the one you just came from. Eventually, you find out that there is another hub area above this which leads to other hub areas. I didn't remember if there is another layer on top of that, but either way, once I hit that second hub layer, I remember realizing that the entire game was multiple times larger than I had thought, and I had no way to know if it would expand again when I made it to the next area.
Nier Automata actually kinda pissed me off the first time I played it. Thought I was finished with the game and was confused by the ending, turns out that was just ending A. Gotta play again for B, and then C, and can't forget D and E for the full picture.
Had to take a break from the game but I went back for the rest of the endings and they're worth it. Also they cut out a lot of the side quests and grinding after ending A. Getting that first ending is actually like 50% or 60% finished. But yeah, at first I was getting flashbacks to the PS2 games that tell you the true ending can only be seen by playing again on the newly unlocked 'Very Hard' difficulty
Yakuza games a completionists dream/nightmare
Untitled Goose Game, but the other way. Got to the end of what I assumed was the first world, but it turned out that was the entire game.
Still a good game, but if I'd known I would have waited for a sale or something.
Fallout 4. The amount of world exploration and itty bitty stuffs almost makes me lost myself in exploration, even though the story can be really short depending how you progress the content. On my first playthrough, I clocked at ~90hrs of play time and only just passed the 1/4 of story progression just because I sucked in sidequest and exploration.
Never thought I enjoyed the base building and assisting settlements aspects, Bethesda did great job on Visual storytelling speaking as Interplay/Obsidian Fallout fan.
Another case is STALKER Anomaly mod which can gives you theoritical endless playtime as long as you creative to build your own CYOA Stalker story. Though I don't recommend Anomaly if you're looking for the STALKER lore (as they're fan project) and should be treated as post-vanilla playthrough.
As an older gamer I want the opposite: shorter games. I don't have the time to sink.
Nethack.
The first few dozen times I played it, it felt like it took forever to get anywhere. The most recent time I played, it felt quick and easy to get to the bottom. (I got stuck on something, though, and haven't been able to continue past the valley of the dead.)
Celeste. I was not expecting the core and farewell
I remember grinding my way through Pokemon Conquest, having a decent time but also kinda wanting it to reach its conclusion. I get to the end of the main campaign, scroll the credits, and then it tells me on next boot that there's now some more content to play.
"Oh cool, a postgame," I thought.
No. There was not a postgame. There were something like eighteen new campaigns to play.
To a certain kind of person this must've felt like Christmas morning. I put the game in a drawer and didn't turn it on again out of sheer intimidation.
Final Fantasy 12
I had just come off of FFX while running through all the FF games that I could. With FF12, I got to a point where I had a solid amount of freedom and did a bunch of side quests and stuff. Then the next portion of the story takes you to this mountain, and I thought, ah cool, this looks like "new base" material. They lay out new information about the plot and then the next stop is to assault an air ship.
Kick ass, I think. This is probably roughly the story equivalent of the assault on Bevelle from FFX, you go in, fight your way through, a cinematic happens and the thrust of the story changes, new info drops, motivations change and are renewed just like in FFX.
Nope. You get to the boss on that ship, it's some dude you have little to no investment in fighting. You kick his ass, he transforms, easy fight, and the game just ends.
I sat in actual open mouthed disbelief. There was no way the game ended there, at what I felt was dramatically and game time wise to be the obvious mid point. And yet, there the credits rolled.
I was so disappointed.
Maybe not the length of the main campaign, but good luck 100%ing Cartherine, holy shit. Nevermind Full Body. There's like 8 endings combined + insane challenges and 64-stage game within the game. +100 hours easy, if not more.
Considering how simple its premise is, Another Crab’s Treasure seems pretty basic, like its story doesn’t have much left, at several points. People online gave some takes that four boss fights from the end, they thought each one would be the final boss.
Far Cry 3 also did this well. You finish the skill tree, do the last few missions where the increased power slides the difficulty down…and then it turns out you unlock a whole other island to make use of your full ability tree in every encounter.
Miitopia. I wasn't expecting more worlds from such a simple game. I really enjoyed it though.
No matter how much I've played it, I don't think I've ever got past half of the campaign of Sacred.
Now playing Elden Ring and even if I'm just starting out I'm constantly surprised by the amount of stuff in the world, most of which I only discovered the second or third time I visited the area it's in.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
I knew it was a jrpg from the beginning, but the way the stories unfolded and piled up had me confused. There was a new question every chapter and it just bwcqme bigge and bigger. Awesome game
Biggest surprise for length was Dragon Quest VII, the PSX version. Started playing it close to release, dropped it several times and finally finished it years later.
I'd played multiple games in the series before and I think the longest one topped out at 40 hours, so I really was not expecting a 100+ hour marathon like that was (although the very, very long prologue should probably have served as a warning).
I remember being surprised by Lufia 2 rise of the sinistrals. It was my first RPG other than a Zelda type game as a kid.
Xenogears. 80-hour game, and that’s without grinding for everything. And, it probably would have been close to twice as long if they’d been funded enough to complete it. As it was released, the second disc began with a 2-hour cutscene with a save point in the middle, which essentially summed up most of the second half of the story. Amazing game. Like playing through an entire mecha manga.
I never expected A Girl Who Chants Love At the Bound of This World: YUNO on the PC98 to take me like 80 hours to complete without a guide.
Duck Detective. Charming game, but quite short.
DDLC. It was a free dl, and I never played anything like it, so I figured I'd see what everyone was on about. It was surprisingly short!
Lufia: Rise of the Sinistrals. JRPG for the SNES published by Quintet. VERY large game for the era, there are a LOT of towns with dungeons to go through. Gets a little grindy mid-way through, it also manages to fit such a large quest with such a large game map on the cartridge by having relatively little variety in visuals. There's one town tileset, there's one dungeon tileset that gets palette swapped, there's one cave tileset that gets palette swapped, there's a relatively small number of music tracks you'll be hearing a lot.
The North American release of its sequel had a very late game dungeon that was corrupted, and technically possible to move through but you'd have to have played the PAL version to know what you're doing. One of the few broken games I'm aware of to get a Nintendo seal of quality. Lufia II is actually a prequel, you play out the full adventure of the legendary heroes you play in the cold open of Lufia. There's a cool detail between the two games, in the first, when the legendary heroes were legendary, the dialog is spoken very formal and pompous. In the second game, when we've been with them this whole time and they're just people, the same dialog plays out the same way but it's much more casual. "Come forth and show thyself!" becomes "Come out and show yourself." Probably my favorite detail of the whole series.
I've avoided this thread for a bit because I assumed there'd be a bunch of dick jokes. I was pleasantly surprised with a bunch of thoughtful and awesome comments. Fucking love the nerdiness of this community.
To answer the question - there's a number of them, but i think the first one for me was Fable: The Lost Chapters. It added a ton of new content on top of the base game, plus there were a good amount of extra side quests, challenges, puzzles, collectibles, etc, that I got so much beautiful and memorable gameplay from it.
It does feel like games nowadays are made to appeal to the masses and/or pump out a lot of games as quickly as possible in order to generate as much money as possible. Fortunately indie game studios and devs still exist for people that are looking for a little more substance. Shout out to the Indie Stone for Project Zomboid and their continued efforts to add more awesome features to their game!!
I love persona 5 but always quit after 40 hrs of playing it. It's so damn long lol
Drakenguard 3, Nier.
Beyond The Edge of Owlsgarde. No spoilers, but despite playing it for plenty of hours (don't have an exact count), I felt it was short. Pretty cool enough of a modern point and click adventure game, though.
The only time I was really caught off guard by a game like that was Darksiders II. I went into the final area expecting a gauntlet of challenges, beat the first big boss enemy in there... And final cutscene and credits. That guy was the final boss. Made me literally put down the controller and say "That was it?" I've always known long games were going to be long going in to them.