Stop Bragging About Your Game's Length

This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee discusses the problem with trying to use the metric of game length as a PR selling point, as seen recently with Techland saying Dying Light 2 contains 500 (or 20) hours to complete.

Transcript
January being its usual void of significant gaming events, because all the publishers are too full of Christmas turkey to want to commit to releasing any big titles until mid-Quarter One, the upcoming Dying Light 2 was able to grab a few headlines by boasting that it will take five hundred hours to complete it, and the response was immediate. My first response was to conclude that Dying Light 2 is trying to kill me, specifically; no reviewer can play five hundred hours of game in the week we have before we all move on to the next temporary headline occupant. But they damn well know that. Clearly, this is yet another blatant attempt by the big-money industry to undermine legitimate criticism; either we die of malnutrition trying to beat it, or get an earful of apologists moaning that we didn't give it its fair shake, and real gamers know that it gets really good around Hour 112.

Okay, let's put Conspiracy Yahtzee back to bed and wake up Analyst Yahtzee, Killer7-style. "Five hundred" is a pretty vague number that smacks to me of someone needing a quote, and someone else getting caught on the spot. Instantly, the scenario unfolded in my head: Johnny Development got cornered at the water cooler by Sally Marketing and pressed for some selling point to start driving those social metrics, and that was the only thing that sprang to mind, so Sally Marketing hurried off to start pushing it before her brain could kick in and start thinking about it. Because five hundred hours is a lot; it's like five hundred lunch breaks, two thousand if you work in an Amazon warehouse.

You know Persona 4 Golden? You know how it's a pretty long game, like most JRPGs, full of story and lengthy dungeon grinds? I've played through Persona 4 Golden, like, three times, 'cos I felt guilty about not giving equal attention to all the waifus. With all that in mind, all my playthroughs combined have only clocked 160 hours in Persona 4 Golden, according to my Steam profile page. Five hundred hours?! That's like Persona 4 Golden nine times!

It feels like too much; even non-reviewers want to get through games in time to move on to the next dish on the buffet of the popular vogue. It especially seems like a lot for this kind of game. I've checked some other metrics on my Steam profile page, and most of the games that crack three figures on the "hours played" column are my comfort zone games that I tend to put on to idly kill time while listening to podcasts: so, dungeon-grindy Persona 4, Stardew Valley, FTL, and... er... Dark Souls, which I'm so familiar with now, it's more of a comfort zone for me than parts of the actual house in which I live.

The point is, these are my quiet-time games for zoning out with; five hundred hours of full-on AAA action sandbox feels like it would be very mentally exhausting. Maybe that's my age talking there, but I can't have been alone in expressing some misgivings, because Sally Marketing was quick to come back with some clarifications on the five hundred hour boast; they added that this was just for 100% completion. If you're hammering through the critical story path, 'cos you've got a deadline or need to rush out to buy Ritalin before the shops close, you can expect a much more easily-split-up-across-a-weekly-schedule twenty hours, and eighty hours if you just throw in the side-quests. Okay, fine. (beat) No, wait, not fine. How exactly are we defining "100% completion" here, if not just "main game and side-quests"? Like... getting all the achievements? Yeah, pretty sure there are a lot of games that will take hundreds of hours to achieve that; that's why the only people who try to do it are psychotics.

I guess we already know this is twenty hours of main story and 480 hours of other stuff, which is probably why the announcement was met with a sense of foreboding by some. I happen to know, from the E3 presentation I attended in 2019 - You remember E3; it was that thing from the before-times, when all us video game insider-types met up in person to complain about people like you - that Dying Light 2 will have binary choices throughout the campaign that open up some parts of the map and lock off others, so you can't see all of the game in one playthrough. If you have to play the game multiple times to get all the content, then there'll be an awful lot of repeating the fixed parts of the game to get to the new bits. But this was years ago, so who knows if that's still the case, or if they feature-creeped it out?

Besides that, the general assumption was that "other stuff" consisted of slogging across a map sprinkled copiously with copy-pasted side-mission dandruff, in the characteristic manner of what we tend to think of as "the Ubisoft-style sandbox": one part actual game to ten parts faffing about. I note the five hundred hour promise doesn't include the caveat that it might vary depending on your skill level, which supports the assumption that this is all busywork, box-ticking, and going to the icon on the map and standing on a thing.

But hell, we don't know that; I haven't played any Dying Light 2 at time of writing. For all I know, they could've stuffed the game up to the eyeballs with Witcher 3-style artfully crafted side-quests, all with unique plots and characters, that's all so bloody well-written that, by the end of it, my trousers will be more spunk than fabric. Kind of doubt it, though, mainly for the reason that Dying Light 2 is apparently the sort of game that boasts about its playtime length, and that's not the sort of thing a smart game boasts about.

Perhaps this gets us to the root of the negative reception to the five hundred hour announcement, because I think what rubbed people up the wrong way is that it's just not a classy boast for what we still generally pretend to be an artistic medium; it's like telling everyone how big your dick is. Yes, there are game databases online that list average playtime lengths, but that's not a marketing boast; that's a reference for people who want to know if they can fit it into their schedule. It's the difference between telling everyone your dick size and carefully measuring your dick to make sure the thing you're about to jam it in isn't going to inflict serious trauma. Or undergo any.

To reduce your game to some purely quantitative statement like hours of playtime as a selling point? Well... (sigh) It's really illustrating the point I made back in my video about open worlds, isn't it? When I compared AAA games to the old Hollywood epics that just keep ramping up the spectacle and the number of extras and the budget, because bigger was always better? It's like Dying Light 2 saw that and immediately set out to double down, in the exact opposite direction to the path that makes games less emotionally numbing to play and nightmarish to develop. "Our game is better, because it can kill the most time!" Is that seriously the limit of your ambition? Do you have no higher aspiration than to distract us plebs from the nightmare of our shared reality with greater efficiency? Talk about giving the game away... although I assume they're not giving the game away. Not yet, at any rate; give it a few years of Steam sales.

Anyway, can I have my review copy now?