Time: A Boss No Gamer Can Beat

Gamers have been a lucky folk for the past handful of years. We’re witnessing proof that many developers, both indie and AAA, have mastered the art of game design. And even if it isn’t total mastery, there are dozens of developers making excellent and unique video games. Even if you’re the type of person who wants to only play games widely considered “9/10” or “10/10” by the online community, you’ll still have a list of roughly twenty games just from the last two or three years. And if you don’t like spending too much money on games, one cannot deny the absolute value of Game Pass. Many times I’ve been excited for an indie game, just to find out I can play it on Game Pass.

While there are plenty of issues mostly stemming from corporate greed and shady business practices, I do believe at the end of the day, gamers are eating good right now. Really good.

But there’s one incredibly simple problem that emerges from trying to play all of these great games. Time. There isn’t enough time to play all of these landmark titles. Even worse, a consumers time isn’t valued by many AAA developers. Most modern games (even the beloved 10/10’s I mentioned prior) suffer from bloat and padding. The Last of Us Part II is one of my favorite games ever made, but it suffers from some pacing issues that make themselves blatantly obvious in the last third of the game. Without saying too much, there’s an enemy faction that takes the main spotlight for a handful of hours. But they felt so shoehorned in, that the game could’ve used either another hour to explain why they’re even there, or, just cut them out entirely. The most famous and obvious example of padding is Square Enix’s current Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy. Let’s be honest, how do you turn a 35-40 hour story into three full AAA games all about 50-60 hours each? Padding! That’s the only way.

But it’s also a bit of a chicken and the egg situation here. Countless times I see comments on Twitter and Reddit threads saying something akin to “It’s only 20 hours? I’ll wait until a sale.” And so the developers heard these people and decided to put low effort side content into most of their games. Stellar Blade is a great example of a game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. I played through the main story in about 18 hours and had a fun time with the gameplay and music. But after doing a little more than a handful of sidequests, I realized they were pretty boring and typical. In fact, it’s probably my most controversial opinion, but I almost always skip sidequests in every modern game I play. I just never feel like I’m missing out.

“Oh this person is sick and I need to collect stuff for a medicine?”

“Oh you lost an item and you need my help finding it?”

Been there done that.

But then sometimes we get the insanely rare type of game like Red Dead Redemption 2, which not only justifies most of its 50-60 hour story, but also had a wide assortment of fun side quests. And gamers will point to RDR2 for years and say “if they can do it for $60 why can’t you?” which is an understandable viewpoint. But games like RDR2 are a once or twice a generation game. They aren’t the standard.

Maybe you could argue there’s a tiny bit of masochism in being a diehard gamer. If you’re a music enthusiast, you can listen to 3-4 albums a day since most of them are around 50 minutes give or take. If you’re a cinephile, watching a movie every night after a hard days work is pretty easy. But one standard AAA game lasts between 30-40 hours. These things gobble up our time with great ease. Even books unless you’re reading gigantic tomes like The Conte of Monte Cristo are pretty brief compared to games. I haven’t even mentioned the enormously popular live service games like Fortnite and Destiny 2 which are huge time eaters. Good luck trying to balance those with single player games.

So what’s our only option?

Being extremely deliberate. Personally, I make a list of games I’d like to play over the next few months, and I always go online to find a general consensus on how long the main story takes to beat. Then I play through the games accordingly. It also helps that a lot of indie games don’t overstay their welcome. My current game of the year, Animal Well, only takes a few hours to beat, and another few hours to get every trophy/achievement. And yes, I know there’s a lot more to the game than just that.

Time is an issue that plagues most popular video games today and lingers on a gamers mind. All we can do is plan wisely.