Long Game Fatigue

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tyn0mite

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Do you ever get fatigued playing a game that is really long?

For instance, I'm working on my first playthrough of The Witcher 3 and I'm absolutely loving. I've put a lot of hours into it over the past week or two and am at a point where I feel like if I continue to push through I may become tired of it.

My answer to this has been to pick up Bastion and play through that for the first time to break it up a little, change the pace, and come back to The Witcher ready to get back at it.

Does anyone else break up long games this way? Do you have other methods? Or, do you just push through to the end?

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mems1224

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By the end of the Witcher I was definitely sick of it and just wanted it to end. It's a great game but it was a little too big for its own good.

For most open world or RPGs I think 25-40 hours is the sweet spot. Any more than that and usually it starts to drag.

I'm generally playing a bunch of different games at once to switch things up. It also takes me forever to beat anything. Like right now I'm playing Yakuza 0, Banner Saga, XCOM 2 as well as Smite and NBA 2K

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redyoshi

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I have too many games in my backlog that I took a break from only to never return, so now if I feel I'm close to finishing something, I'll just pull through. I always tell myself I'll just switch over to something else for a change of pace but then I just lose interest in returning.

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liquiddragon

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#4  Edited By liquiddragon

I definitely have to really spread the long ones 'cause they take endurance to get through. I'm usually juggling 2 games at a time but with long games, as much as I want to break up the pace with something else, I actually try to stick to just the one 'cause dropping off big games suck, especially after investing a ton of time into them.

Just beat FF15 after 60 hours so I'm looking at much shorter games for a while. Currently playing The Darkness and quite enjoying it.

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Justin258

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I've tried the whole "take a break for a week and play something short" thing, but then I find it really hard to go back to whatever I was playing and I wind up never really finishing it. It sucks because I love the idea of getting super invested into a game for the long haul, but there are so many of those that I want to play.

Right now, I'm trying to avoid long games because Breath of the Wild comes out really soon. I don't want to go from being knee deep in one open-world character-driven hundred hour game straight into another one.

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ll_Exile_ll

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Luckily, this isn't an issue I have. I can easily play a 100 hour game to completion over the course of a few weeks without getting fatigued.

Generally speaking, I tend to get very invested in things I really enjoy. Whether it be long games or multi-season TV shows, once something gets its hooks in me I find myself not really wanting to engage with any other entertainment until I finish the thing in question.

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Trilogy

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If it's a great game (like the Witcher 3) then I have no issues getting through it. That game was definitely NOT too long. The only long game fatigue I'll get is if I play too many of them back to back. I'll end up needing to change things up with something a bit more light and breezy. I love me some hefty RPGs though.

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palvand

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Absolutely.

The problem I usually have with these games is I get to the point where I just want to see the ending, and everything else is a burden. I had this problem with Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim, and Watch Dogs 2 (to name just a few). In the case of New Vegas and Skyrim, it got bad enough where I was just using console commands to teleport to the quest objective to skip everything. I just stopped playing Watch Dogs 2, it had a compelling story but the gameplay got stale. Which I think is the underlying problem, games with this much depth in story and large open worlds have a hard time keeping the gameplay fresh. Dozens of hours of gameplay with the same mechanics and objectives gets really boring really quickly.

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Teddie

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Yeah all the time. It took me over a year to finish Yakuza 5 because every playable character (5 of them) was like an entire game in itself.

I generally have a few games going at any given time. I just take things on a day-by-day basis and play what I feel like the most that day. If I wind up dropping something because of that, so be it.

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FacelessVixen

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I generally get bored playing the same thing after three or four days. So when I start up something, mainly RPGs, I play it for a few days, stop playing it for a while when I'm in the mood for a different genre, not get back to it for a few months, start a new save because I haven't played the game in a while, rinse, repeat. I haven't finished an RPG that's longer than 30 hours since Dragon's Dogma back in 2014.

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stinger061

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#11  Edited By stinger061

I used to have this problem a lot but I've managed to get past the issue by changing the way I approach my gaming hobby as a whole. I used to find myself feeling like long games were standing in the way of me moving on to the next game, I felt a strong desire to 'keep up' with the latest releases by playing as many games as possible. I've since accepted that was causing me not to enjoy a lot of games as I was simply trying to rush through them to get to the next one. I've now massively reduced the number of games I play and as a result find myself simply enjoying games for what they are no matter the length.

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militantfreudian

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Unless the moment-to-moment gameplay isn't compelling enough, this has rarely been an issue for me. I find that the easiest way to burn out on a lengthy games is to try to marathon it, so I almost always play them in short sessions: one quest or mission at a time.

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caska

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#13  Edited By caska

My problem is that when I like something I obsess about it and can't do anything else in the mean time.

My typical play through of any game is to immerse myself as much as possible in the game, so if it's the Witcher then I'll do as many sidequests as possible before moving on to the next story beat. In Mankind Divided I spent the first few hours once the world opened up combing every single inch of the bank and stealing anything that wasn't nailed down. This usually ends up with me getting burnt out around the 30-40hr mark and main lining the story towards the latter half of the game. My only kryptonite is fantasy games. Even shitty fantasy games like Two Worlds 2 or Risen 2 or something and I can sink any amount of hours into it without getting bored... I do not regret the 40hrs I put into Reckoning...

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steevl

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As I've gotten older, I've found that I have a harder time staying focused on lengthier games. Sometimes I'll try to break it up by playing a shorter game, but more often than not I don't feel like going back to the longer game afterwards.

Which is a shame, because I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of good stuff. One day I'll get back to Yakuza 2, last played...6 years ago? I think I was on chapter 7.

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deactivated-5b85a38d6c493

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I generally don't have a problem with playing lengthy games and focusing on playing just one game at a time.

I stopped playing Tales of Berseria about 27 hours in, and that was mostly because the game was still introducing new combat mechanics and constantly giving me tips. I just don't have the patience to play a game for 40 something hours for it to become involved enough to where it doesn't feel like I'm still in the tutorial stages.