As the end of the year draws near, I’m beginning to think about all the giantRPGs I could play during my time off. I always do this. In 2020, I had five days between my last freelance assignment for the year andCyberpunk 2077releasing, so I did the reasonable thing and started… the 100-hour RPGDragon Quest 11. When I have a few days off, I have a delusional faith in my ability to play games faster than is humanly possible.
The Holidays Are For The Longest RPGs You Can Imagine
Even when I do have the time, life gets in the way. I wanted to play throughFallout: New Vegason vacation earlier this year, but then hit a game-breaking bug. I was also having a bizarre issue that prevented me from installing the recommended stability mods, so I ended up dropping a game I was having a great time with. Other times, I just underestimate the amount of time I’ll spend in the car during the holidays, driving to my parents' house (4 hours away) and my wife’s parents' house (another 2 hours from my parents' house).
That isn’t the case this year, though. Her parents are traveling, so we’ll have two uninterrupted weeks at my parents' house. That means that I can worry less about ‘making the most of our time with family’, and more about the stuff that actually matters, i.e. gaming. That has me fantasizing about all the gigantic RPGs I could plow through, and the announcement thatCD Projekt Red is now in full production on The Witcher 4has me looking back fondly on my time withThe Witcher 3. It also has me feeling regret that I didn’t play everything the game had to offer during my initial playthrough.
Say what you will about CD Projekt Red, butPhantom Libertyproved it can deliver good expansions, even for troubled games.
I came to The Witcher 3 a few years late, so when I bought it, the expansionsHearts of Stoneand Blood and Wine were included. I fully intended to play those expansions at the time, but when I got to the end of my 80 hour playthrough, I just didn’t have the energy. I started Hearts of Stone, fought the annoying sewer-dwelling Toad Prince, and then never came back to it. I did this fairly often in thePS4 erabecause my console didn’t have much space. If I had infinite space, I would tell myself I was just about to come back to infinite games.
You Won’t Come Back To Finish The Expansions
At the time, I didn’t want to keep playing The Witcher 3, so it made sense to stop. But now six years have passed, and I know that to experience those expansions ahead ofWitcher 4, I’m gonna need to play the whole game again. I still have that late-game save and could load it up, I guess, but I would remember nothing about the controls, and it’s a game where I often felt confused about the systems the first time through anyway. People say the expansions are the best part of the game, but I worry that if I commit to playing it again, I’ll get to the end and, once more, stall out.
I had a similar experience withThe Outer Worlds. That’s a game that I played at launch, but I came back toObsidian’s sci-fi comedy RPG a few years later, bought the DLC, and played through most of the base game again. By the time I got to the expansions I had paid for, I’d kinda had enough, and dropped the game.
So, if you’re reading this and currently considering stepping away from a game before you play its critically acclaimed DLC, learn from my mistakes. Keep playing. Finish that DLC. Your future self will thank you.
