When Techland made the announcement of how long it would take to complete the sequel to 2015’s zombie parkour epic, Dying Light, it is easy to see why such a figure could be interpreted as a good thing. As games get more and more expensive, value for money is essential. Games with £60 price tags need to deliver enough content to keep people entertained for hours, so 500 hours seems like an absolute bargain, right?
Sure, the quantity may be greater but chances are that quality is going to take a hit, and costs are sure to arise in other areas.
Having an overabundance of the content may seem like a great investment, but more often than not you will find that a lot of the “content” is just half baked characters and mountains of fetch quests (yes I’m looking at you Preston Garvey, I do not want to help another settlement). There certainly will be some fantastic content but with everything else trying to grab your attention, the good bits get buried and the overall experience and the hard work of the developers feels diminished.
Huge games like The Witcher 3 and Horizon Zero Dawn may provide a diverse range of content and experiences; with everything there is to do, it is unlikely that you will ever complete them fully. There is too much to do! And as more huge games continue to get released like Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West, that pile of games waiting to be played is just going to get bigger and more imposing.
Speaking of games waiting to be playing, investing 500+ hours in just one seems like a poor investment in time, especially when you don’t have much to give anyway (adulthood can be cruel). So many interesting and unique games are coming out all the time, but that will slip past you if you are preoccupied with just one game.
Sometimes there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and sadly video games are no different
And while you might be getting a good price for the amount of content, memory costs seem to only be getting higher. Games like the more recent instalments of the Call of Duty franchise are getting ridiculously big that, even if you had time to play other things, you wouldn’t have the storage to play them! This doesn’t take into account the developers, whose workload increase just like the size of the games causing high levels of stress and crunch culture.
Sometimes there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and sadly video games are no different. Dying Light 2 looks to be a solid sequel that I’m sure fans of the original are dying to get their hands on, but I have nowhere near that amount of time to spare.
