Checking the achievements for the inferior remaster that shit is not that bad. Unless they fucked with some numbers in the remaster then anyone claiming those times is actually retarded. I played enough of the original release and expansion growing up as a retarded kid to have a good idea of what that would take and I would definitely put a more realistic estimate around the 600-hour mark. There's enough trophy concurrency happening there to drag that time down. Unless you get fucked on hardcore. That bit could eat up a lot of time if RUD, which is minimal in D2 unless the remaster fucked shit up, kept catching you late or if the certain problem sections held you up for long. I know as a kid hardcore was something I never finished. I moved on to WoW. I still got my old hard copy. I should just go back and do the hardcore. Not giving money to Blizzard for the remaster though, not after that and Reforged. The other challenging part would be the unique grind. I don't think my barbarian ever got a decent belt two decades back.
For MHWo I took more than 300 hours getting half the crowns in World and I actively hunt those. Just due to RNG factors. No way in hell anyone is 300 houring MHWo trophies without supernatural luck or just cheating. You will genuinely spend more than 300 hours in load screens even with an SSD on that shit. Unless for some reason that time doesn't include anything for the expansion and it was written based on ideal estimations. Event quests can cut down a few crowns for free, but that's a minority. I'd need to go through the list again, but I think it's only 5 or 6 crowns and most of them will be small golds.
Trophy guide time estimations for long games always fascinate me. They're always way over or way under estimated.
This part isn't towards you specifically, but TLoU Part II is Naughty Dog's Shrek The Third - it single-handedly made everyone question their outlook on what came before out of sheer embarrassment. And like Shrek The Third, it deserves to be as shunned as Jim is in his own thread.
I generally liked Uncharted as a junk food game to play to kill a weekend with a powerr fantasy, but I never found them to be master pieces. Hollywood movie slop tier entertainment. Perfect for a teenaged male trying to deal with aggression issues along with things like God of War remasters and GoWIII when I wanted good games. The gameplay was something that as a teen made me think I was just doing something wrong and as an adult I realize is just shit.
I remember dropping TLoU and never bought a PS4 so obviously never played TLoU2. I just couldn't care about the protagonists of TLoU. Joel felt cynical for the sake of it rather than for any particular reason for the sake of a narrative, and otherwise suffered from Whiny Dad Character Syndrome like seemingly every other male character of the era. Ellie reminded me of every teen girl I had to tip toe around at school so they didn't fly off the handle due to the culture of the time encouraging teen girls to flip out at everything without consequences due to certain feminist movements of the time, as well as came off as suffering from Strong Bitch Character Syndrome. It landed right at a time when I was going through some shit related to handling grief, self identity, and realizing I needed to figure out my adult life as I was just about to cross the legal threshold of "boy" into "man". I wanted escapism and power fantasy as well as games that had deeper mechanical systems and an actual demand of skill master.
I actually remember that around that time I dropped TLoU I started to pick up some of my first jobs playtesting indie games for a few hundred bucks, and by the time my life settled down enough to give it another try a few years later I was already trained to think critically about every game I played to understand why I did and/or didn't enjoy them. My second attempt was very much "this writing is filled with tropes I dislike and am bored of and characters I don't relate to, and the gameplay fucking bores me at best and feels like I'm fighting the controls at worse". Maybe I'll replay it soon, I'm a father now so maybe I'll finally like Joel. Unlikely because that didn't win me over for any other sad dads.
Can we actually call out the western video game industry obsession with patenthood, especially fatherhood if there's a male protagonist or even male key NPC? Bioshock Infinite, Dad of War, TLoU, Fallout 3/4, etc. It feels like we get either no narrative or we get fatherhood themes. When those are lacking it seems like instead we keep getting "one last run" or "I am not suited to retiring" midlife crisis stories. It's been slowing down, mostly replaced by diversity messaging, but the male power fantasy has been replaced by the make whiny fantasy.
