Xenogears. 80-hour game, and that’s without grinding for everything. And, it probably would have been close to twice as long if they’d been funded enough to complete it. As it was released, the second disc began with a 2-hour cutscene with a save point in the middle, which essentially summed up most of the second half of the story. Amazing game. Like playing through an entire mecha manga.

I love persona 5 but always quit after 40 hrs of playing it. It’s so damn long lol

As an older gamer I want the opposite: shorter games. I don’t have the time to sink.

I’ve avoided this thread for a bit because I assumed there’d be a bunch of dick jokes. I was pleasantly surprised with a bunch of thoughtful and awesome comments. Fucking love the nerdiness of this community.

To answer the question - there’s a number of them, but i think the first one for me was Fable: The Lost Chapters. It added a ton of new content on top of the base game, plus there were a good amount of extra side quests, challenges, puzzles, collectibles, etc, that I got so much beautiful and memorable gameplay from it.

It does feel like games nowadays are made to appeal to the masses and/or pump out a lot of games as quickly as possible in order to generate as much money as possible. Fortunately indie game studios and devs still exist for people that are looking for a little more substance. Shout out to the Indie Stone for Project Zomboid and their continued efforts to add more awesome features to their game!!

Ghosts of Tsushima.

I remember grinding my way through Pokemon Conquest, having a decent time but also kinda wanting it to reach its conclusion. I get to the end of the main campaign, scroll the credits, and then it tells me on next boot that there’s now some more content to play.

“Oh cool, a postgame,” I thought.

No. There was not a postgame. There were something like eighteen new campaigns to play.

To a certain kind of person this must’ve felt like Christmas morning. I put the game in a drawer and didn’t turn it on again out of sheer intimidation.

Pokemon Silver. Beat the Elite 4 and surprise now you get to go back to Kanto.

Considering how simple its premise is, Another Crab’s Treasure seems pretty basic, like its story doesn’t have much left, at several points. People online gave some takes that four boss fights from the end, they thought each one would be the final boss.

Far Cry 3 also did this well. You finish the skill tree, do the last few missions where the increased power slides the difficulty down…and then it turns out you unlock a whole other island to make use of your full ability tree in every encounter.

Deuteros. This is pre 1995, I believe.

Played the game for over a day, got to conquer the entire system, thought I was done but then I found out that that was only 10-20% of the game

Untitled Goose Game, but the other way. Got to the end of what I assumed was the first world, but it turned out that was the entire game.

Still a good game, but if I’d known I would have waited for a sale or something.

DDLC. It was a free dl, and I never played anything like it, so I figured I’d see what everyone was on about. It was surprisingly short!

New factorio dlc felt comically long, and yet I’m having to force myself not to make a new save.

Dragon’s Dogma 2. IYKYK

Going back a ways here with Castlevania: Symphony of The Night. It seems like a fairly fleshed out game as it is when you get to the “final” boss but then you read a guide and find out “ending A” is only half of the game

Final Fantasy 12

I had just come off of FFX while running through all the FF games that I could. With FF12, I got to a point where I had a solid amount of freedom and did a bunch of side quests and stuff. Then the next portion of the story takes you to this mountain, and I thought, ah cool, this looks like “new base” material. They lay out new information about the plot and then the next stop is to assault an air ship.

Kick ass, I think. This is probably roughly the story equivalent of the assault on Bevelle from FFX, you go in, fight your way through, a cinematic happens and the thrust of the story changes, new info drops, motivations change and are renewed just like in FFX.

Nope. You get to the boss on that ship, it’s some dude you have little to no investment in fighting. You kick his ass, he transforms, easy fight, and the game just ends.

I sat in actual open mouthed disbelief. There was no way the game ended there, at what I felt was dramatically and game time wise to be the obvious mid point. And yet, there the credits rolled.

I was so disappointed.