‘The Witcher 3’ And The Game’s Length As A Climb
How Long Is the Witcher : Everyone has been asking me this week if I’m going to play The Witcher 3. Sure, I’ll do that.
The game is receiving rave reviews, including a few perfect scores, and CD Projekt Red is following in the footsteps of Blizzard, Valve, and Rockstar, who believe that if they take their time developing something, it will be absolutely wonderful when it is ultimately published.
Yet, with games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, there’s a bit of a “failure to launch” issue.
Not in the sense that it won’t work right away due to launch bugs, but more because the motivation to begin such a massive game can be difficult to build up to.
This is a problem that sets gaming apart from other forms of entertainment.
It’s as if Mad Max: Fury Road, for example, was getting all of its fantastic accolades (it still has a mind-boggling 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but instead of being two hours long like most movies, it was twelve.
Is it still something I’d like to see? Absolutely. However, rather than going to the movies for dinner and a show on a Saturday night, figuring out how to watch a twelve-hour film would necessitate planning and work.
Do you devote an entire day to it, stocking up on food and beverages and attempting to finish it all in one sitting?
Do you do it over the course of a weekend, splitting it up into four-hour chunks each night?
Or do you aim to do two hours a day for the better part of the week?
Is it even possible for you to have twelve free hours in a week, or will it take a month?
According to some sources, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is 70 hours lengthy.
A “fast run” is a 25-minute time limit, and I’ve heard that some people have gone as long as 100 hours to beat it.
And if players truly want to locate it, there could be 200 hours of gaming in there, according to CD Projekt Red.
This isn’t to say that extended games shouldn’t exist, especially if they’re of good quality.
But, even if a wonderful game is 40, 70, or 200 hours long, I want to confront the reality of the obstacle that even a great game poses.
Right now, the hype surrounding The Witcher 3 is eerily similar to that around the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition last year, which was the mostly-agreed-upon Game of the Year.
But I found talking about it amusing because I’d write articles complaining about features of the game after forty hours of play, and players would respond with, “You can’t say anything about it until you’ve played at least eighty.”
Dragon Age: Inquisition was never completed by me. I despise being one of the 90% of people that start a game and then abandon it, and this is rarely the case with me.
However, every time it has been, duration has played a role.
There is, thankfully, an antidote to this. The length isn’t the only aspect that influences the outcome.
I could have easily poured 100 hours into Dragon Age and relished every minute of it if it had captivated me as Skyrim did.
According to everything I’ve heard about The Witcher 3, the game could very well be active enough to maintain that level of excitement throughout.
While this is not a plea to exclude long games from the market, I believe that as the average age of a player rises, the attractiveness of these 60-80-200 hour epics will begin to wane, regardless of their quality.
Some games will simply be physically impossible for adult gamers with full-time jobs and families to play, no matter how much they want to.
Devoting a month or more to the completion of a single game can be reason enough to avoid it entirely, much as a 12-hour movie may cause many people to avoid going to the cinema on the weekend, even if it’s something they want to watch.
Everyone appears to despise these kind of conversations, and given the “hours of playing equals value” measure that many people use to justify their game purchases, longer is nearly always considered as unquestionably better.
I don’t necessarily adhere to that concept, but from a purely statistical standpoint, I can see the attractiveness of paying $60 for 70 hours of The Witcher over 7 hours of The Order.
Nonetheless, length is a two-edged sword. I have a feeling The Witcher 3 will be well worth the time and effort, and I want to give it my all.
However, it will necessitate extensive planning and a significant portion of the summer.
You may find me on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Get your hands on a copy of The Last Exodus and its sequel, The Exiled Earthborn, as well as my Forbes book, Fanboy Wars.
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