The "What are you playing?" topic.

[Husar]

I managed to overcome my gaming apathy enough to finish Assassin's Creed 2 with all achievements, in a total time of around 30 hours.

Only 30 hours?

Sounds rather short...

[seireikhaan]

Just finished Dark Messiah: Might and Magic.

The combat was quite fun, although I have the feeling that it would have been less satisfying if I'd gone the mage route. Story lacked any kind of depth, was seethrough from pretty much the get go, and the characters don't really develop. Even still, there were just so many immensely satisfying moments in combat that the game was overall fairly fun. Planting an arrow into the shoulder of an orc and pinning him to a wall, or booting a hapless goblin off a cliff, or plunging a sword for the finishing blow on a zombie... ah yes, good fun.

[frogbeastegg]

Only 30 hours?

Sounds rather short...

Short?

These days it's only RPGs, strategy games and a rare few others which reach 30 hours for single player. Many games are 20 or under, with some taking less than 10 hours. Assassin's Creed 1 could be completed in around 10 hours.

[Husar]

Short?

These days it's only RPGs, strategy games and a rare few others which reach 30 hours for single player. Many games are 20 or under, with some taking less than 10 hours. Assassin's Creed 1 could be completed in around 10 hours.

Well, most games these days are very short.
One of the reasons I'm not willing to pay 50 or 70 EUR for them.

But you said you got all the achievements as well and usually that takes a lot longer. So if not all the achievements are tied to the main quest it sounds like the actual game was 5 to 10 hours and then you spent 20-25 hours searching for the little bits, killing random people, scouring the environment etc. to get all the achievements.

GTA IV for example has an achievement to finish the main storyline in 30 hours. And another one to finish all quests. Basically that means you'd have to spend over 60 hours just to get these two, then some more to find all the doves etc. Especially when not using some guide. So yeah, 30 hours for all achievements is short to me, unless those achievements are pretty lame anyway.

[frogbeastegg]

But you said you got all the achievements as well and usually that takes a lot longer. So if not all the achievements are tied to the main quest it sounds like the actual game was 5 to 10 hours and then you spent 20-25 hours searching for the little bits, killing random people, scouring the environment etc. to get all the achievements.

Ah, I understand.

A lot of the achievements are tied to plot advancement or will be picked up by normal gameplay across the story, or come from completing specific collections or random little acts. It's not necessary to do more than one of each optional side-mission type, and the collectables are much more reasonable than Creed 1's hundreds of flags. It's a good setup IMO; there's very little tedious farming, repetition, or doing boring things just for the sake of it. I did use a guide to find all 100 feathers; there was no way I was going to repeat the mistake of trying to find them all by myself like I did with the flags in Creed 1.

I didn't do all of the optional mini missions like the races as after a few of each type I'd had enough.