Recently, the official Twitter handle of Dying Light 2 tweeted some information about the completion time of the upcoming sequel, prompting a series of interesting responses from fans.
In its initial tweet, the account claimed that it would take at least 500 hours to fully complete the game, adding that this is the approximate time needed to walk from Warsaw, Poland to Madrid, Spain.
The account went on to clarify that this was about 100% completion and not about the main story mode, which would reportedly take considerably less time.
There was also a later tweet that clarified that any regular player wanting to just get the core experience and the story can do so in under 100 hours.
But by then, the damage was done. The post caused a flood of discussion and arguments online about the topic of game length.
Some see this huge number (500 hours is a little over 20 days) as not being reflective of the quality of the side content, but it’s quantity.
The logic here is that the modern gaming industry loves to add pointless busywork into their games to artificially pad them out. Collecting feathers in Assassin’s Creed 2 was an early example of this but we’ve gone much further into the Dark Side of collect-a-thons since then.
The following tweets summarize this perspective well:
Of course, the alternate viewpoint also exists.
This perspective is that long games are a good thing, actually and that the people whining about it should either improve their reading comprehension or stop being upset.
The topic of video game length is one that has come up more and more in the modern gaming industry.
With many games and companies fighting to monopolize our attention and to occupy our play hours, there have been many attempts at artificially lengthening games.
From deliberately slow animations to collect-a-thon gameplay to vast empty spaces to eat up travel time, it seems that the games industry will do anything to lengthen games. Anything, that is, except design more thoughtful content players can meaningfully engage with.
After all, it is cheaper to simply copy paste the same assets or mission structure and change a few words than it is to come up with something new.
Time will tell whether these 500 hours of Dying Light 2 will add anything meaningful to the overall game or whether it really will be us doing parkour in a zombie-infested land looking for socks of feathers or coins or something.
Either way, 500 hours is a LOT of hours.
What do you think dear reader? Is a 500 hour game too long? Or is it just the right amount of lengthy?
Emmen Gaming 