Oh god that’s a special case like Michael Jordan is a special case of basketball players. What MGS Phantom Pain did is ten orders of magnitude outside the norm. Crazy Japanese videogame auteur bullshit.
Haha yes, that’s probably true. I just played it 2 days ago though, so it was my most recent “what IS this crap” experience with a game that deserves to be played.
(Although, I might need som Valium to keep playing it if those zombie-gas mask-people keep showing up, cause SHIT that almost killed me).
(Yes - this is the first time I’m playing any kind of MGS game).
In 5 minutes?
https://i.imgur.com/okp66FD.gif
Most games haven’t even got past the logo splashes after that time!
It entirely depends on the type, size and reputation of a game for me. Strategy games take some time to spin up and understand, open world games can be very hard to peg depending on what you do and how you play, multiplayer games take a degree of mastery to appreciate their design properly, character/story driven games can just have slow starts etc.
If a game is short though, I’ll usually persevere unless I’m really not enjoying it. If a game is widely praised then I’ll spend a lot longer with it, even if it never quite clicks. That’s a big problem for me. I’ve played too many game for far too long hoping my opinion would eventually flip and, truthfully, the only game that I recall doing that is Transistor, and yet it’s hardly a favourite of mine.
I’ve been getting better over the last few years though, Breath of the Wild notwithstanding. Hero Generations and TumbleSeed I ditched uncharacteristically quick once I’d zeroed in on what it was about them that was driving me mad. I wish those ‘Yeah, no. Fuck it. I’m done.’ camel back-breaking straws would come quicker sometimes.
Yikes, this thread smells like douchebag ratastic , the jaded corner of the web. If you buy a game, show your money and the creators a bit more respect than 5 min or consider A new hobby?
I never buy a game unless I know it’s something I want and can set aside time to play. Example, I really would like divine divinity 2 but I know I don’t have the time…
I bought a green man gaming loot box, that is the only time I ne’er bothered to try some of the stuff.
That’s perhaps the douchbagiest replay in the thread, you win! Who are you to decide what people should do with their time? When I buy a product, I don’t owe the creator anything - much less my time.
Yep, but there are plenty who will defend their right to give games 5 minutes and that’s it as their “right”. Heck, 25% of my own neg reviews for my games are 0.3 hours or less (which is 5-15 minutes roughly). IMHO, it’s jaded and a tad bit disrespectful, and I felt that way even before I was a dev myself. I give games at least 30-60 minutes, maybe more depending on the type of game.
Good games take a bit to learn and grab you, much like good movies do. I could have quit The Godfather after 5 minutes saying “eh, it’s just a bunch of people at a wedding party and a little whispering in a dark room”, but i’m glad I didn’t!
To further explain my above statement, if people want to participate in some type of review / scoring system I think they should play enough to have an informed opinion about the game. I’m sure there are games bad enough for technical or other reasons that a player could decide in 15 minutes - but think the majority of games need to be played longer. If not for potentially hurting a games sales because I left a review on a game I didn’t have an informed opinion on. Beholder is the game I’ve played the least and left a negative review at 2.4 hours.
Above, I was defending that that the player is under no obligation to meet any time threshold with a game before deciding to put it down for whatever reason - not that they should review such a game.
Back when I did MMO reviews for PC Gamer, my benchmark was 22 hours. That is basically the first season of a TV show. Even if the game got better after those 22 hours, I still graded it down. You can’t tell someone to suck it up for the first season of a show because the second got better.
For a single-player game, that benchmark was four hours. It took Spartacus 4 episodes to get going, so I would give a 15-20 hour game that long to capture my interest.
If it’s got “Star Trek” in the name, you sure can. It’s practically required!
Or in the case of Blackadder, just skip the first season! Hurray for standalone seasons!
I don’t think most big budget (non-MMO) games actually offer 15-20 hours of singleplayer gameplay these days, though?
When I pay $0.99 for a game, I’m not going to give it more than $0.99 of my time. When I pay $60 for a game, it gets a few hours, usually. The race to the bottom in game prices has effects on how players value them as products.
This was in the early 2000s, when games were longer. That said, it usually takes me around 15-20 hours to finish a game. Each of the Uncharteds I was in the middle of that range.
Ubisoft laughs at a mere 15-20 hours of content*.
*Content not guaranteed to be engaging.
I’d say my patience with a game is inversely proportional to the time it’s been since I’ve bought it (i.e. time spent in “the backlog”) and directly proportional to its purchase price, but in a much smaller measure.
This deserves an equation.
That said, my backlog has been called a baby backlog by a friend, it’s like 12 games or so. How about you guys with 200 games in the backlog?
Hm, let’s see … I’ve got over 1100 games on my Steam account, about 300 on my Xbox, maybe 250 on GOG, and then a bunch of handhelds, iOS and previous gen games. Wait, what was the question?
My shortest record was Myst: Masterpiece Edition because it CTD’d within those first five minutes.
I played Mask of the Betrayer for a couple hours, but the game is ugly, the engine is clunky, and learning high-level D&D is a PITA.
Usually I complete any game I start, however.
I usually give a game 45 min to an hour to prove itself, but starting the XBL game pass made me even less tolerant. I think Ultra Coin Squad (or something like that) didn’t even make it to 20 seconds of play because I hated the jumping mechanics that much. Bard’s Gold didn’t last much longer for basically the same reasons.
My record was Styx master of thieves ( I think that was is name). I wanted to change keyboard bindings and it wouldn’t let me being a key while it’s was bound to another action. It’s a small thing but still annoying so I got a refund.
Yeah, I had the same thing happen with PS+. I usually give each game I buy at least one hour, or at least I try, before writing it off. But there were just so many PS+ games I’d accumulated that I wanted to at least try, so a lot of them didn’t even get a full minute from me. For some of them, this was it: “Ugh. Pixel Art. How fast can I uninstall this?”