Best time for gaming/Too many games

I've bought a lot of games over the years and there are a fair few that I know I haven't given time too.

That's an issue for me, but I have been playing the games I've bought recently and its gotten me to thinking about the games I've missed (bought and not played or even just not purchased) and how far back this run of games actually goes.

I think I've come to the conclusion that for about the last two years we've been living through one of the best times for gaming there has ever been. Going back to when Witcher 3 Wild Hunt launched in May 2015, we've been on pretty much a constant run of months where there has either been at least one or more big AAA titles that have impressed or on the odd month when that hasn't happened there's been a critically acclaimed Indie title and probably a Remaster of a huge game as well.

Interested to know what people think about this, is it actually good, do people even agree, is it likely to come to an end any time soon?

As an aside a little month on month games release chart I knocked up to prove to myself this was not just in my head, obviously its not everything, nor would I expect everyone to agree that all the games I list to be of interest to them...

I got most for the dates from Wikipedia (adjusting those I knew had been released later over here)...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_in_video_gaming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_in_video_gaming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_in_video_gaming

This gen just keeps throwing games at me, I've realistically spent very little compared to previous gens but I've ended up with a lot more content. It's a combination of Games with Gold, sales, 360 BC, freebies, EA Access and soon Game Pass will be adding to the list too - pretty happy gamer TBH!

I never finish games anymore, like genuinely it's very rare I do. Last game I completed was Abzu and that's really only like 3 hours. I've invested many hours into certain games like dark souls 3, but still gotta complete some areas untill I'm at the final boss, plus the dlc. Problem is I keep buying more games. I have a long list of games I need to finish. I kind of get bored easily. And it's not to say that a game is bad or boring, but I change my mind and want to play something different. Witcher 3 is a fantastic game, but after a good few storylines/missions I get the urge to play something less dialogue heavy.

I think it is all too easy to fall into the trap of allowing the purchasing and collecting of games of starting to become the hobby and then it takes precedent over the actually playing of the games you already own. In the past this has got to the point for me where it is almost like the idea of playing the games and talking about them gives me the enjoyment but the actuality of playing never seems to live up to the initial promise. It's pretty weird really.

I'm not actually sure if it is the fact so many games are released that you are able to buy when you earn your own money or that nowadays our attention span just seems to be so much shorter? I suppose I'm the same as many others who can think back to being a kid and having the one title that would suffice until the next birthday or whatever and having to play it to death. Maybe as kids we are more easily pleased and occupied and allow ourselves to become more engrossed and swept away. I know I've often been guilty of multi tasking whilst gaming like checking social media updates and the like. All too often I used to find myself just going through the motions with a particular game just wanting to move onto the next better and greater thing. It always amazes me how you see AAA titles such as Resident Evil 7 in the pre-owned sections of GAME within two days of its release...yep, I know narrative driven games are generally quite short now but it's almost like people just want to rip through a game and tick it off the list asap.

Then there is the onslaught of quality indie games that demand your attention too. It truly is a wonderful era of gaming shenanigans.

Easily the best time, this first quarter of 2017 has been stacked with the likes of Resi 7, Horizon and BotW tomorrow!

I get about 6-8 hours of gameplay time a week so its almost impossible for to get through everything especially when you have games like BotW lasting at least 40 hours, thats probably all i'll play this month

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I have got plenty of time for gaming though, I should be able to at least complete all the highly rated SP experiences out there and be able to play multiplayer games.

But it just doesn't seem to be happening, I keep thinking to myself that of course I'll get time to go back and play Dishonored or Titanfall 2...but then I never got time to go back and play Doom or Uncharted 4 or further back MGSV and Batman Arkham Knight.

The problem I have is that I think I have time to play these games, but because of the run of new amazing games stretching back so far the pile just ends up getting bigger no matter what I seem to play.

I honestly think I need a 3-4 month stretch where there are no new games I want to play released...but I just can't see it happening.

Have you considered finishing a game before starting a new one?

I used to buy new releases on launch day all the time and they ended up sitting on the shelf gathering dust. I'm now being more thrifty with my gaming spend and mostly waiting to pick up new releases when they hit the £25-£30 mark (Nintendo Switch and BotW is the exception though)

I've found the bought/played/completed thread really useful for tracking what I'm actually acquiring over time as it is easy to forget, especially around sale times. My list this year is pretty big already, however the vast majority of acquisitions have been monthly PS+/Xbox Live games, bundles or games from the code giveaway thread. I've been pretty strapped for cash for at least 6 months so many of the recent big games have simply been out of the question, an experience which has absolutely changed my purchasing habits. For example, I would have probably bought For Honor, played it for about 4 hours then stopped because I was getting consistently hosed online, the same thing that happened with Street Fighter V. I'm still curious about Titanfall 2's story but I equally bounced off the first game after level 30 or so when I felt i'd had my fill of what it had to offer, so I can absolutely wait for it to get even cheaper to play through the 6 hour-ish story once and be done with it.

As I get older I have come to realise I have a much lower tolerance of games that don't respect my time; open world survival/crafting sandboxes where hours of effort can be erased in a moment make me recoil in horror, a hangover from my last ever minecraft game where I spent several hours on a rainy sunday scrabbling around in the dirt trying to get resources to finish my cool lava volcano glass staircase when one mis-click broke it and buried my efforts in lava forever. I've somehow ended up with all 3 souls games and Bloodborne so I intend to give those more of a fair shot in the future because I love their bleakly entropic/Lovecraftian aesthetic and decentralised narratives, but I have little patience for roguelikes or other games in that ilk; Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon have no appeal whatsoever but I'm prepared to stick with Crypt of the Necrodancer and Nuclear Throne.

As for the backlog problem I think its a matter of balance; playing some smaller/shorter games in between the big action RPGs to thin out the numbers and cleanse the pallet somewhat. After banging through Mass Effect I took a break by going through Octodad, Gone Home and Pony Island as they can be finished in one or two sittings, are good and help reduce the numbers.

I've also had a hard steam cull - not just hiding but actively removing games from steam that I am absolutely sure I will never want to play. That definitely helps.

The last few months have been brilliant. The games coming out are not just good, but there's a lot of Japanese developed stuff, and they feel quite different from the Western AAA games that have dominated since last gen. At times, it feels like the PS2 days again.

I'm in the odd position of being relieved that the switch has only three games I'll be interested in purchasing this year, since my time and finances just couldn't handle anything more! Not a switch thread, but I'm hoping the portable format will allow me to squeeze in a few extra sessions...

I haven't even engaged in this current generation, as I'm still working through games I've missed on previous consoles.

The amount of time I get to play games - anywhere from a couple of hours a week to perhaps six as a maximum - isn't really compatible with the amount of time gaming as a hobby demands (if you want to play everything that interests you). Unlike, say, films which you can blitz through or watch several in a week, I can go for months just trying to get through one game, purely because I don't have the time to do it any faster.

I've got games on PC, PS2, Gamecube, 360, GBA and Playstation that I own and want to get through, and I'm talking about 60-70 games here. That's several years' worth of gaming for me. The only console I've skipped completely is the PS3, and I've no regrets about that, but it's going to be a long, long time before I even look at the PS4/Switch.

Feels like a hobby where you can never really see everything that's out there, at least for someone like me who has fairly wide-ranging tastes in games.

My buying habits have changed in the last gen. I realised that I only have a limited time so there is no point wasting money on loads of games I will never play. I therefore try to play a game to completion before moving onto the next. I also try not to buy games simply because they appear to be a bargain, there are always bargains about and most of the time when I buy something because I think it won't get any lower in price, it does.

On the PS4 my backlog of purchased games is just Doom and the three Dead Rising games (I'm not including the PSN+ free stuff).
On the PC my backlog is about 10 games (that is mainly down to being able to pick games up for just a few quid, but even that I've stopped doing now).

Still aiming for my gaming nirvana of playing one game and no backlog so I have the freedom to just buy what I want to play next.

I'm in total agreement, the regularity with which high quality games are released seems to be going up all the time. We rarely seem to go a month without a major release on at least one platform and it's definitely hard to keep up with them, particularly if you own several systems.

I always used to try and keep up with buying most major releases, not necessarily at launch but relatively soon after and I ended up building up a huge backlog of them because I often hadn't completed earlier ones. Many of them are still incomplete and I'm talking games going back to the 360/PS3 gen in some cases.

I managed to play most of the big releases I wanted in 2015, picking up Fallout 4, MGS V and Battlefront at release but whilst I played them ll a fair amount I didn't complete either Fallout IV or MGS V and haven't gone back to either since early 2016. I tried to catch up a bit more in 2016 and mostly only bought older games or Indie games that were cheap, with the sole exception of Uncharted 4 (And I only bought that because I had Tesco vouchers to cover the cost). I didn't buy a single game on release and as such have yet to pick up games such as Rise of the Tomb Raider, Mafia 3 (Yes I know its supposed to be gooseberry fool but I still want to play it, loved the first two) and Dishonoured 2, all of which I really wanted to play in 2016. This year I'm making an exception for the launch of the Switch, I was always going to buy and play Zelda at launch whether on Wii U or Switch and I'm picking up other games because it's a new system. I'll probably pick up a few more Switch games on release but don't expect to do that on other systems really.

The problem is of course that by the time I'm done with Zelda the next big releases will be upon us, I still really want to play Horizon: Zero Dawn and I've not finished Uncharted 4. When the heck will I get round to the other games I mentioned before, or the other ones in my backlog? Could take a while!

We're definitely spoiled for choice and I'm trying to be more selective and only focus on the games I really want to play but it's definitely difficult to keep up with the amount of great games being released nowadays.

Others have mentioned games keeping your attention and I definitely find that to be an issue, I frequently start games but unless a game really grabs me I struggle to stick with it and I will rarely persist with a game that I don't immediately like.

I also don't think the size of them helps, so many games going down the big open world route and when it's done well it can be a great thing but it also means a game takes a lot longer. MGS4 could be completed in <20 hours, whilst Twilight Princess could be done in <30 hours. Breath of the Wild and MGS V on the other hand could easily take 50-60 hours without seeing and doing everything.

It's one of the main reasons along with finances that I only own 1 of the current gen consoles. Was only discussing this last night with a mate of mine while playing Rocket League who bought a PS4 a few months ago. He was telling me about Horizon Zero Dawn and how its the best looking game he's seen but was lamenting that he simply hasn't enough time to game. He's taken day off today to actually get to play it which is pretty telling.

I was telling him that Horizon reviewed well (he wouldn't be too much up on that side) and that yeah, it looks and sounds amazing, I even said he should go and play it now, I didn't mind I could get in some overwatch/Wind Waker HD but he said X1 is still his main console, so much so that bizarrely he doesn't bother downloading PSN free games cos he's just swamped at the moment. The conversation ended after we moved on to Rainbow 6 Siege but he's now looking to get a Wii U. :fp:

The over riding point is that I'm fully employed, I just bought a house before christmas, My commute is 90mins each side of work and I go to bed at 11. I'd add in that I'm a dad but honestly it doesn't impede my gaming time. When all is said and done, I game a fair bit yes but I've barely made a dent in my game collection, it doesnt help that I'm very sporadic gaming wise, I jump from game to game constantly, sometimes I stare at my X1 Pins and don't know where to start. So when PS4 gets proper gems like The Last Guardian, The Last of Us and Horizon Zero dawn as well as others it doesn't irk me THAT much that I can't play them because I have more than enough on my plate as it were.

The only caveat is that I've bought a Wii U (at a knock down price) for Zelda, a franchise that I simply can't seem to live without.

I definitely buy too many games as I find that I'd rather start a new one than continue with one that I'm already playing, unless the latter really catches my attention. A big chunk of my gaming time happens when I'm on the train or at work so the Switch should help me get through more games as I can play it outside and continue on the TV when I'm home. While I did play a lot of 3DS games on the way to work and at work, I did often want to play a PC or console game just so that I could make use of the extra power and screen size when I was at home and this helped split my attention. I found that, when it came to going back to a different format, I'd be tempted to just start a whole new game :lol:

I have bought too many games. I have, uhh... "quite a lot" that I have not played. Yep, I have been silly.

I'm trying to change that. I have cut back a bit this year (partly out of choice and partly out of necessity) and I have avoided grabbing a Switch because I know that'll just open up another avenue for buying stuff. I am gonna try and move back to being a single format gamer i.e. just play on my PS4 and be happy with that. I took a similar approach during the original Xbox years and that was fine.

But, hey, lets take another look in the summer and see if I've stuck to that plan.

I would suggest I’m in the minority on this subject. I never moved on from the GC era as none of the consoles from the generation after particularly interested me. This led to my gaming time vastly decreasing and when I did put some time in it was mostly competing on older games for records etc or multiplayer with friends. I built myself a PC and for a few years I did pick up some purchases on that which I really enjoyed but I’ve not been able to dedicate much time to that for the past couple of years either. I’m now relatively settled in life at the moment and have been picking up some GC titles over the past year or so which I’m excited to play. I have an office room in my new house which I need to buy a TV for and once I’ve got that I’ll be all set.

The Switch has managed to excite me and in time I will be looking to pick one up – but as I’ve said in other threads – I’m estimating a Christmas 2018 purchase once it has a nice selection of games and a few price cuts. That will also allow me a lot of time to play and finish the majority of the GC collection I’ve built.

While there certainly seems to be loads of fantastic games in recent years I find myself in the awkward position of being physically unable to play the vast majority of them due to the degenerative nature of my disability.

I have pretty much accepted this fact but there are times when I get a little frustrated when I see an awesome looking new game that I know I can't play. It also really annoys me when people whinge about framerate dropping slightly below 60fps, so strawberry floating what, at least they get to play the damn thing.

Best time for gaming/Too many games

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