Bloodborne, The Witcher 3, and Batman Arkham Knight are just three games that have come out in the past few months, just to name a few. If you play those games to full completion, you are looking at over 300 hours of content from just those three games. Not to mention the fact that I rushed to complete Dragon Age: Inquisition before The Witcher 3 came out and it still took me 75 hours. What I am saying is that games are overwhelming these days and this Fall is as in your face as ever.
Let’s examine the Fall lineup with just brand new big AAA games, excluding remakes and remastered. We start in August with Madden NFL 16 and PS4 exclusive Until Dawn, which has a billion different endings, give or take a few. To kick off September we have Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Mad Max, which is a ton of content. If you can beat those in 10 days, you have Super Mario Maker that comes out on the 11th, which promises tons of content to start and tons more to follow. Then, if you are into sports games you have both NBA Live 16 and NBA 2K16, FIFA 16, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 coming out. Overwhelmed yet? We are just getting started.
October sees the revival of the music/rhythm genre with Rock Band 4 and Guitar Hero: Live. It also sees promising shooter Rainbow Six: Siege and the adorable Yoshi’s Wooly World make its way to the U.S. And late in the month we see Halo 5: Guardians and the yearly Assassin’s Creed game in Syndicate. November is packed with the likes Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 kicking it off November 6th, after the Need For Speed reboot on the 3rd. Then, November 10th, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Fallout 4 both release. On the 17th, both The Crew and Star Wars Battlefront release. And to close the year in December we have Just Cause 3, Hitman (reboot) which will constantly bring new content, and Xenoblade Chronicles X, which is massive.
Basically, the reason for listing the biggest Fall lineup in recent memory is to illustrate that current generation gaming is overwhelming. Every game nowadays is trying to pack the most content onto their disc and promising loads more after release to get a purchase. I am fine with content but it is hard to be a gamer with a job now. I have to have a job to afford these games, but with a job there is no way I can play all of these games in a timely manner and that is why I am overwhelmed. By the time I finally beat The Witcher 3 to a satisfying level, which will be over 150 hours of gameplay, MGSV will arrive. That leaves me no time for Batman. By the time I am closing in on the conclusion of MGSV (the way I play games) Fallout 4 (my most anticipated game) will be releasing. It goes on and on throughout the year.
While some of my friends will have the pleasure of playing most of these games to conclusion, I will be out of the loop because there is no way I can complete Fallout 4, which supposedly contains 400+hours of content, in a week or two like they can. I did not complete Inqusition, which I had since its release, until right before The Witcher some 7 months later, because I like to take my time with games. Let’s combine all of this tragedy with the free monthly PS Plus games, a hearty backlog, my obsession with episodic Telltale games and I’m basically looking at another job. Because as a game journalist and a self-proclaimed gamer, I feel it is my duty to be a completionist in the gaming world, by completing as many games as possible while doing as much in those games as possible.
I am also a big sports game fan which consumes a lot of time as fellow sports game fans will tell you. So, tell me, am I being melodramatic with my issue of too many games, not enough time? I understand I can continually play them, but as a completionist, I know that I will never complete every game I own, whether it’s a physical or digital copy. And I don’t know that I’m okay with that.