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?
Pokemon Silver. Beat the Elite 4 and surprise now you get to go back to Kanto.
Blew my tiny mind…
As an older gamer I want the opposite: shorter games. I don’t have the time to sink.
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.
Hollow Knight.
Surely this is the end of the map… Ok but now Suuuuuurely this is the end of the map… OK NOW SUUUURELY…
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.
Dragon Age: Origins. The base game was easily 80+ hours of interesting story and game play. Each DLC added 20-40 hrs a piece. I used to play it a ton.
I don’t recommend giving money to EA, though. They have properly shit all over the sequels.
I just finished The Veilguard at 68 hours. I loved it, but haven’t played Origins. I bought it, but refunded after I saw how buggy and unsupported it is on new hardware these days. Maybe they’ll have a remaster some day, since everyone seemed to love it.
What problems did you have with it? Still runs surprisingly well for me. Haven’t tried Veilguard yet, but plan to as soon as I have some time. Felt that none of the sequels where able to match Origins yet, though.
Well, it crashed on launch, for one. I saw there’s a ‘4GB’ fix, but that doesn’t let me launch from steam, and I wanted to stream to the steam deck, where I do almost all my gaming these days.
I really loved Veilguard, but I’ve definitely seen people who played Origins complain about it. I thought the characters, story, and combat were fantastic though.
Well, people love to complain. I didn’t feel Inquisition was as good as Origins, but I still had fun with it, and I assume the same is gonna be true for Veilguard.
Anyways, that’s curios. I think the Dragon Age Games are some of the few I own on Origin. I’d be kinda surprised if EA made the effort to patch the games on their own client, though.
Might try running it tomorrow, out of curiosity.
I just started Inquisition. I’m looking forward to learning more about the characters that appear in the Veilguard.
It probably wouldn’t be too resource intensive to run it on an XP virtual machine. You’ll want a version that runs on its own, though (no game store launcher, drm, etc)
You are 100% correct.
Elden Ring. Even after finishing the final boss there was so many areas I’ve not been to. And all those areas are unique - some with unique enemy types. It’s the game that dares to hide a secret area behind a secret area.
from the people who brought us illusory double walls of the Great Hollow and Ash Lake, go figure
It Takes Two. I thought the game would be over about four times, but then it kept adding even more mechanics and got HARD. I thought it would be super casual, did not expect that much length and depth to it (ignoring the cheesy story 😅)
It was a really fun game. It took months to finish it, in small chunks, trying to fit in time here and there with my kid. I’m glad we finished though.
This. There’s just so much game in that game.
Going back a ways here with Castlevania: Symphony of The Night. It seems like a fairly fleshed out game as it is when you get to the “final” boss but then you read a guide and find out “ending A” is only half of the game
Upside down castle
Same
Okami. Every time I finished an area, I thought I was nearing the end of the game. And every time, I was presented with a new, even larger area.
There’s like three different points in the game that look like the end before revealing more. It’s a chunky game. If it was paced slightly better and the dialogue trimmed (by a lot) it would be perfect. But it’s close enough
So pleased about the sequel coming! Loved that game.
Even if you notice that your brush techniques an inventory screens don’t look complete, it really does feel like the end. Then when they do look complete and you’re sure you’ve finally finished it, there’s one more region and some upgrades.
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.
Too bad villain Hoyt Volker, to have the motivation to continue it through was weak sauce compared to Vaas
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
Ending B was absolutely just padding.
There’s maybe a few segments where it’s interesting to see 9S’s perspective, but so many other scenes that weren’t bot-specific.
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.
The Talos Principle was such a great game! I think I’ll play it again before buying part 2
My wife and I each 100%'d Talos 2 and it was abundantly amazing. It had been years since either of us completed 1 but the way the story is structured you hear about the events of the first game in detail pretty regularly. I’m trying to be vague for spoilers. And of course I’m not trying to talk out of replaying 1, but just know you don’t have to, understand 2, and in my opinion it might be a touch tedious to do them back to back.
Both fantastic games tho that started a lot of good conversations between us.
There’s a remaster coming out early next year! I’m planning on doing the same when that comes out
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.
Yakuza games a completionists dream/nightmare