“After 100 hours, it really gets fun,” you often read that. But then games are exactly one thing: just not good – at least that’s how MeinMMO demon Cortyn sees it, and he’s had enough of bad games.
No matter how much you love a game – eventually the air just runs out, even if only for a while. Especially players of MMORPGs long for something new and ask friends and acquaintances: “Can you recommend a good game?”
Very often, you get a response like: “Sure, check out this game. But it takes about 50 hours before it’s really good.”
Different indications are often made depending on the game. Some games are said to need to be played between 20 and 200 hours before they “really get fun”.
Now comes the simple, actually obvious, yet so bitter truth: If you have to play “your game” for 50 hours before it’s really good, then it is a bad game for 50 hours.
A time investment beyond good and evil
I can completely understand that some are raising their eyebrows and thinking: “50 hours is nothing. I’ve surely played 5,000 hours in my MMORPG, that’s not a long time.”
And you are right. 50 hours is not a long time if you have played 5,000 and had fun for most of that time. Then the 50 hours hardly matter.
Depending on your free time, 50 hours can represent a very long period. If someone only has about 2 hours available to play every evening, they need about a month to accumulate those 50 hours.
Now just imagine having to invest your limited free time in an activity that gives you no joy for an entire month every evening. Just to hope afterward that the game will, as promised, really get much better and finally be fun.
Really picture it. You work all day, come home, want to do something enjoyable, and your outlook is to play a game that provides no fun or very little fun – for 25 days.
That’s not a pleasant thought. For someone with plenty of free time, it’s already quite an investment, but for people with significantly less gaming time, it’s a nearly insurmountable obstacle.
The risk that a game will not even be considered is incredibly high. Because no one wants to waste their free time on something that doesn’t bring joy.
Where does the problem come from?
Especially MMORPGs struggle with this issue that a game is “only good after X hours.” While older MMORPGs might score immediately and convince right at release, these games often age poorly. What was a solid intro 5 or 10 years ago is now terribly outdated. But even more problems contribute to this:
Parasitic systems: Although parasitic systems in games are negative in the long run, they can at least temporarily increase the enjoyment of the game. In most cases, this is only relevant in the endgame – during the leveling phase, you see relatively little of them.
Dead content: Based on this, the “path to the endgame” is often painfully neglected by many developers. After all, the loyal, active players have already gone through this content – and they are starving for new additions and the resolution of the most pressing issues in the endgame. Of course, developers focus their resources on retaining active players and providing them with “more to do”. The path to the endgame quickly becomes “dead content” that doesn’t really receive any overhaul.
Ultimately, one should ask the question with every affected game: Why does the game only become good after X hours? What happens after this magical number of hours that suddenly makes it a much better game? And – if that really is the case – couldn’t the game simply put that fun right at the beginning?
The beginning is important. Whether it’s a series, a movie, a book, or a video game. The start has to captivate you. You have to have fun, be excited, and want to know what happens next. Later, you can forgive calmer passages or even somewhat “monotonous” gameplay. But first, the game must convince.
There are games where I do consider this to be the case to a certain extent. Especially competitive games with a strong PvP aspect, like Dead by Daylight, Overwatch or even MOBAs like SMITE simply require some time. You first need to acquire enough knowledge to compete against other players. Here, an adaptation period of a few hours to learn the basics is acceptable.
The difference here, however, lies primarily in the fact that these games provide you with all the tools from the very beginning to have fun. It’s merely the knowledge gap of the other players that you primarily need to catch up to. Therefore, these games are not primarily the focus here.
Can you free yourself from this?
I’m not free from this issue and perspective either. I also believe that World of Warcraft is really a great game after the leveling phase. That it only “really starts” at level 60, with raids and endgame dungeons being among the best in this genre. Just like I think you can really enjoy Dead by Daylight only after about 100 hours when you’ve at least seen and understood all killers and perks.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I find that really terrible to say, quite soberly.
I’m fully aware that the prospect of having to understand over two dozen killers looks terribly daunting. If you don’t have an experienced teammate on Discord consistently explaining what’s happening in the match against this killer, you’re going to be completely lost. The flood of information is really annoying and distracts from the actual game.
Having to wade through 200 pages of manuals (or guides) just to finally have fun doesn’t sound very enticing either.
One problem here is also the self-perception of the players. Those who have been playing a game for many months or years know many systems, understand how they are interconnected, and probably don’t find it all that wild anymore. It’s hard to mentally put yourself back into the role of a “clueless noob” who has to learn everything and doesn’t know yet how great the game can be later on.
This also discourages me from finally giving Final Fantasy XIV a chance. Several friends have told me that the game “really gets good after the main story of the base game and the first expansion,” which in reverse really only means: Until then, it’s not that great.
How can the problem be solved?
In principle, this is difficult as the clear answer to this would probably be: development time. But that costs money and time. Time that could be spent on new content to keep current players satisfied.
Some games offer various options to skip the “boring” or “annoying” parts – like character boosts. However, this brings with it entirely different problems, such as the feeling of being “lost” in the game world, not being able to follow the story, or becoming spontaneously overloaded with skills and systems.
Some games try to fix this retroactively. World of Warcraft, for example, introduced a new starting area with Shadowlands and brought in a feature called “Chromie Time,” where players can choose their leveling content. While this was a good step, I think it’s not enough.
In the specific case of World of Warcraft, this does not disguise the fact that many classes feel “incomplete” for dozens of hours, and battles are trivial in every way. Because the missing character abilities at low levels are compensated by the fact that enemies have so few hit points that they fall with one or two attacks anyway.
This then leads to a completely different problem, namely that games like WoW suddenly become way too complex for newcomers. The requirements and the learning curve are just poorly distributed.
For long stretches, the gameplay is boring and underwhelming, before suddenly being overloaded with systems and becoming hard to decipher.
I believe developers need to rethink the entry into their games – especially in the case of MMORPGs. It should no longer be focused on what the simplest mechanics and gameplay are, but what is most fun.
At least the first hours need to be made more engaging. If a game still isn’t fun after more than 30 minutes, you lose many players – probably forever. And that’s only because the entry into a game obviously has such a low status.
Or what do you think? Do you want to struggle through dozens of hours of “bad” gameplay to get to the good part?
