Getting Into RPGs Is A Full-Time Job (2024)

If I wanted to play through the ten best first-person shooters ever made, I could do it in under ten weeks. For ease, let's go with TheGamer's list of the best single-player FPS campaigns, which includes:

10. BioShock Infinite (11.5 hours)

9. Half-Life: Alyx (12)

8. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (6)

7. Halo: Combat Evolved (10)

6. Wolfenstein: The New Colossus (11)

5. Doom Eternal (14.5)

4. BioShock (12)

3. Titanfall 2 (6)

2. Far Cry 3 (16)

1. Half-Life 2 (13)

First-Person Shooters Shoot For Short

This wouldn't be my personal list of the top 10 FPS campaigns (get Infinite and Modern Warfare out of there), but it is a helpful place to start thinking about the genre as a whole. The longest games on the list are Doom Eternal and Far Cry 3, which clock in at an estimated 14.5 and 16 hours to complete the main campaign (thanks HowLongToBeat.com). If you wanted to beat all ten games, you would be looking at 112 hours. That means that on average, you'd need to play 11.2 hours a week to keep up. That's manageable. And if you did it, voila, you've got a pretty good introduction to FPS design since the turn of the millennium.

Now, let's take the top ten from TheGamer's list of the best RPGs of all-time. That list includes:

10. Mass Effect 2 (24.5 hours)

9. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (29)

8. Undertale (7)

7. Chrono Trigger (23)

6. Stardew Valley (53)

5. Baldur's Gate 2 (45.5)

4. Dragon Age: Inquisition (47)

3. Divinity: Original Sin 2 (59)

2. Persona 4: Golden (68)

1. NieR: Automata (21)

RPGs Thrive In The Sprawl

The difference is clear right away. Barring Undertale, which is a major outlier in the genre, the shortest game on this list is still seven hours longer than the longest game on the other one. If you wanted to play all ten of these games, and get a similar survey of the genre, it would take you 377 hours. If, for some reason, you wanted to stick to a similar ten week schedule for this project, you would be looking at weekly 37.7 hour marathon sessions. You would be on the couch for a full day and a half each week, devoting nearly as much time to playing RPGs as you would tot a full-time job. And these estimates are assuming you aren't doing any side quests, either, a fair assumption for shooters that absolutely does not apply to RPGs, since that's where the best stuff tends to be.

This time requirement makes it much, much harder to get into RPGs. You could marathon id's '90s catalog in a few days, but if you wanted to play through all the games from BioWare's peak? You better hope you have a few weeks of vacation time saved. This may be part of the reason we often have such fond memories of the RPGs we played as children; for many of us, that was the last time we had the chance to max out the hour counter on a lengthy RPG.

Anecdotally, I reviewed Anger Foot earlier this year. It's a meaty shooter, and I wouldn't have wanted it to be much longer than the 12 hours I spent with it. But I started Baldur's Gate 3 nearly a year ago, have put north of 150 hours into it, and am still not done. It would take hundreds and hundreds of hours more to feel like I had seen everything the game had to offer. I know other fans of the game have finished it and dived back in for a second (and third and fourth) playthrough, but it's hard to imagine devoting that much to one game when there are so many other worthy RPGs to play out there.

This isn't to say that RPGs disrespect your time, and I don't mean this as a value judgment at all. RPGs thrive when they have time to breathe, time for side quests, time for exploration, and time to make you feel that you have really made the progress from low-level chump to high-level champion. But if you want to get the lay of the land in a genre, most genres are short hikes while RPGs feel more like the full Appalachian Trail.