I used to like open world games that would take 50+ hours to beat but I feel like as I get older these games can be intimidating to even start and I often get sidetracked with other games frequently only getting half to three quarters of the way through.
Vanquish took me about six hours to beat and I think that’s what I’m looking for these days. I like games that I can beat in one weekend. Eight hours I think is perfect for me.
It’s led me to playing some GB© and NES games because they often feel a bit more finite.
I don’t think I have a minimum. Little Misfortune and Bright Infinite Memory only took me about three hours to beat but I enjoyed the ride. If a game took under half an hour to beat, like some indie games, I might not be as invested or impacted enough to think about it much afterwards.
Edit: I’m not looking for a definitive answer. Just a ballpark.
It really depends on the type of game and how it presents itself.
Some games have a very long and complex story but others might have a shorter story told more indirectly, then there are also multi-ending games which might take longer than a regular story game since you have to replay them. Then there are sandbox games which don’t necessarily have a limit on how long they can be since it’s dependent on how much you want to put into them.
Ultimately in my opinion there’s not really a required amount of time for completion, the thing that I think is most important is whether the games are fun and enjoyable. In the case of story games they can be as long or short as needed depending on how they tell a story.
That’s something I have a hard time doing depending on the game. Sometimes you can get a wildly different experience like in Fallout NV and see your actions having consequences while you play but a lot of the games I have been playing only are linear up until the ending cut scene.
Yeah a lot of times the multi-ending ones don’t offer many unique experiences.
Though there was this one game I played that largely did, it was a Horror RPGmaker game called Red Haze, by far one of the more expansive multi-ending games (so much so that it’s actually not finished, there’s supposed to be 26, possibly 27 endings but only about 3/4 of them are there) the endings might be short or require a lot of steps, and some changes propagate into later playthroughs, some of the endings also require you to have done other endings for them to work.
It’s a very interesting concept but unfortunately not many games implement multi-ending in this way since it takes a lot more work to do.