The term “video game” covers a fairly wide range of experiences, from a 4-hour jaunt through a horror campaign to a long, meandering journey through a fantasy realm. On Wednesday, Microsoft has announced a helpful new tool for the Xbox app on PC to help with this exact problem: it’s a feature that tells you on average how long it takes to beat a game.
The announcement states, among other things: “We’ve partnered with HowLongToBeat to create a unique feature that will make it even easier to choose your next PC game – starting today, you can see estimates of how long it will take you in the game details be used to complete a game pages for most PC Game Pass games.”
HowLongToBeat is a long-standing community project that allows players to submit data about the time it took them to complete a game, taking into account different playstyles. For example, it can take an average of 20 hours to break through a game’s main questline and defeat the final boss based on player submissions. Completing all side quests and unlocking optional paths can take 35 while playing the game at 100% can take 50.
This is a nice quality of life feature, especially since Xbox Game Pass has such an extensive library to browse through. Sometimes you’re in the mood to settle in and enjoy a 100+ hour RPG; other times you just want something chilled that you can switch off over the course of a few evenings.
There are a few other changes to the Xbox app on PC, including easier browsing and better layouts for a single game’s page. The latest update also boosts the app’s performance and reliability, launching 15% faster and reducing player reports of failed downloads by almost half.
