"there would need to be a lot of variety in level design" -- have to consider that, in most games, theme, ideas of consistency, story, other aesthetic values greatly constrict variety.

well, what i meant was that there needs to be variety in the theme...

lets look at System Shock 2, for example. it has a strong theme: Spaceship overrun by meat/flesh. and that theme is consistent throughout, however, each deck (or map) has distinctive style, deck 1 is engineering for instance, has lots of pipes, smoke sparks and things like that. deck 5 is the rec deck, has crew quarters, galley, etc... and have they're own individual texture sets, even thought they all fit.

then you look at something like Doom/Doom2, Quake or Painkiller, and the variety is more pronounced: as long as it's evil/cool looking it's fine. but these games are not as story driven as a game like SS2 so that's not important. but even there, there is an underlying theme to them all (quake had four individual episodes with fairly consistent tex set each, plus the base maps, pk for the most part sticks to it's themes as well, except for the last chapter where it's sort of everywhere) yet still manage to pull of the variety. 

Painkiller took me considerably longer than 5 1/2 hours to complete. As a rough estimate, 1/2 hour per map average (some were a little shorter, but spending an hour in Docks mostly trying to reach the damn secrets balanced it out). So what's that, 10-12 hours?? That's just the recorded time, I spent a bit of time reloading and shit. So a good 12 hours I reckon.

Probably short as games go, but it certainly didn't feel that way. I rushed through the first maps too, not bothering to unlock Tarots or find secrets. It felt like a reasonably substantial game....well, a substantial collection of unrelated maps =). 

Max Payne 2 took 2 days
Currently IGI 2 is taking about 2 weeks. 

is shaping up to become a game I could play forever, GSC are saying it takes 40hrs to complete and thats without doing all the side quests and exploring. The latter are things I will be doing a lot of in this game :)

Cant wait for it.

As for PainKiller, sure I went through it quite fast, but Im still playing it now, unlocking cards, getting secrets etc. Some people seem to read "takes 6 hrs to complete" and think that after that they are not allowed the play the game any more :)

I must have clocked up well over 40hrs on painkiller since I completed it. 

baldur's gate 2 is taking forever!
(yes, i finally got this game -- in the bargain bin, no less!) 

Ultima 5 -- over a span of two and a half months; ouch. DaggerFall has to be a close second.

Baldur's Gate 1 and the Expansion pack took almost two weeks. Never completed or got deeply into Baldur's Gate2. My patience insn't what it used to be. It is difficult to sustain interest in RPG's. Hack something -- gain experience, hack something -- gain experience. Just Rogue with a nice story and scripted elements. 

Bought it when it came out, and probably put 4-5 hundred hours into my first guy, who was an uber-god by the time I retired him (and long after I had beaten the main quest). I have three different characters that I screw around with at this point, and am still regularly finding new stuff to do and places I've never seen before. There are still factions that I've never joined and whole series of quests that I've never done.

Gigantic and awesome game. 

4-5 hundred hours

Holy ballsac Batman!

That's, like, a fuck of a lot of time. I probably haven't spent that amount of time on all the games I've played aside from Quake put together.


Hmmmm actually, I've probably spent that amount of time on Quake. Yikes! 

I just want a game to fucking end already. Zelda: Wind Waker is such an example. Although I loved playing through the game (and am now playing Ocarina of Time), it did feel like it was dragging on a bit toward the end. Also, a lot of the game felt very repetetive and boring after a while, particularly the seafairing sections. I think if the game had taken me 5 hours less time to complete I wouldn't have thought I'd wasted my money - I may have enjoyed it more even.

Some games are, by their very nature, way more time consuming than others. This in itself doesn't make them any better than other games. If it did, the most shoot'em ups would be shit, and most Japanese RPGs would be mind blowingly fantastic. Not the fucking case, I assure you.

Basically, if a game is fun, I don't mind how long it is. Assuming I'm playing it for more than 5 hours (including replaying, multiplayer, map creation, whatever) then I don't feel cheated. It also depends on how much I pay for it I suppose. 

I just finished it last night actually after taking a long break away from it because of school. The seafaring had it's moments, but mostly I consider it an experiment that didn't pay off. Channel surfing during some of the sailing dulls the boredom, and the rumble pack will tell you when you're needed.

The levels were great though and the final battle looked amazing. I liked the game on the whole. Now I can either finish my q3 map or play the Ocarina of Time Master Quest. 

I just finished wind waker last night also. It seemed like i spent like 60 hours or something crazy on it, but that's probably not true. Still, it was too long and the length was entirely due to sailing time -- the amount of actual content was just fine (though i could have used one more dungeon.) 

I'm actually scared to play this in case i become addicted and end up putting in the same kind of time as you pjw did :). Although those are hours of pure gaming joy i imagine! 

The sailing and stuff was a bit tedious and I left the game for a long time because I had problems finding a couple of the last triforce shards or whatever...I did get around to finishing it eventually though and the end battle was indeed fantastic looking even if it was pretty dull from a gameplay pov. 

The longest it took me to beat a game was 2.5 to 3 weeks I think, it was the original Unreal. Another quite long (and frustratingly painful in the end) experience was Half-Life that took about 2 weeks from start to finnish. I finished Max Payne 2 in 10 or so hours. 

You should give it a try, if you're interested at all--it's a great game and cheap now. Keep in mind that you can complete the main quest and "finish" the game in much, much less time than I've spent on it. Also keep in mind that part of the explanation for all those hours is the active Morrowind mod community that keeps churning out new content, and the two expansion packs that Bethesda has released. If you decide to give it a shot, let me know and I'll throw you some "getting started" hints that will decrease any initial frustration.

There are a few things that I didn't really "get" when I first started playing the game, and I would have done things differently had I known. :) 

kept me entertained for a solid two months, then continued playing off and on for another couple of months. there's just so much to do. the hundreds of hours claimed is completly true! 

i'll drop you a note, if and when I pick the game up. I should have mentioned I even managed to get addicted to Arena, the prequel to the prequel to Morrowind :o ... it looked worse than doom but i spent an alarming amount of time wandering around, dropping into taverns, upgrading my armour..and so on, and on :) 

is it worth getting the game of the year edition? It throws in the 2 expansion packs but costs �22.50 on amazon uk, whereas the original version sells for around �7.50. 

If you're going to get addicted, you might as well do it right.

Serioiusly though, the journal improvements added by the first expansion alone are worth it. You can search/organize by specific quest, rather than having to search through several hundred pages of journal entries trying to figure out the location of that guy in Bumfuck, Egypt who wants the magical whotsit you managed to finally find. 

both packs together add quite a bit of new stuff, although the second expack is better i think, because it actually uses new terrain as well... 

I read SOF 2 has 70 levels. Are these mostly short bullshit levels or is the game big on playing time? 

only the last 15 levels (the last mission) or so are actually any good along with a few in the middle. Most levels suck.

As for length, most are short some are medium, overall the game's a standard time fare experience. 

Took me 42hrs to play through first time, damn amazing game. I highly recommend it. Just full of stuff to do and all the missions are good, rather than the boring "fetch quests" that most rpg/adventure games use to extend playing time. 

...but I've notched up something like 150 hours on Project Gotham 2, and still haven't completed the damn thing (12 cone challenges left). This is possibly more down to having the hand-eye coordination of an 80 year old rather than any particular quality of the game, though. 

I had originally tried Morrowind over a year ago and I didn�t have/use any expansions and mods. Even tho I consider myself a fan of the genre, I was very quickly overwhelmed by the _HUGE_ size of the game world and gave up.

A few days ago I had found a nice guide on starting Morrowind and picked up the game along with both expansions again. I had also installed the Atmospheric Sound Effects (+ updates), Visual Pack (+ update), LeFemma Armor and RheddHeads mods. All I can say is WOW. I can�t believe I had missed out on such an incredible game. The only thing that scares me is that I keep hearing that it took 6-8 months to complete the main quest of Morrowind, let alone both of the expansions. This game is going to eat my life.

For some nice Morrowind MODs, check out: http://home.bellsouth.net/p/s/community.dll?ep=87&subpageid=149175&ck=