It’s called a residue– that long list of games you’ll “someday reach” but will ignore to re-run roguelike dungeon crawlers Hades yet again. Maybe you plan on having your backlog swell soon amid the barrage of new releases. It may have tripled in size thanks to a recent Steam sale. Whatever the case, a gigantic backlog can be so overwhelming that you don’t even want to try to tackle it, resorting to comfort food instead.
It doesn’t have to be. A large backlog can be a manageable behemoth as long as you know how to deal with it. The following advice should help you start on the right foot.
This article was originally published on December 12, 2020.
Assess the situation
At the weigh-in a residue, the first thing to do is figure out what you’re working with. Once you know how long it will take you to beat every game in your library, you can come up with a plan of action. Fortunately, there are many resources that can give you a good idea. for one thing reviews on your favorite gaming site will tell you how long it took the reviewer to get to the credits (besides any other optional goals).
A more comprehensive option is howlongtobeat.com, a compendium of 54,000 games, all complete with corresponding hourly counts. For each game, the site provides a rough estimate of how long it takes to reach the credits, how long it takes to beat the game and dabble in side quests, and how long it takes to complete a completing run. Although the tool hits fairly close to the mark, it’s not perfect; If anything, it underestimates the completion length by a few hours.
For example the site lists Spider-Man: Miles Morales as a 16-hour completionist run. It took our reviewer 20 hours to turn everything off, a figure consistent with other reports. Spirit of Tsushimatakes 57 hours to reach each goal, according to the tool. It took me a little over 66 hours to do this (although our reviewer made it in just over 55). In the meantime, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is listed at 117 hours for a full playthrough when that number should clearly have six or seven extra zeros at the end.
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Of course, every player plays games at a different pace, so you’ll never find a bullseye number that accurately tells you how long a particular game lasts. Still, resources like these can help you get a solid idea of what you’re watching.
Start big
You might tend to treat your backlog like a boss fight: by taking out the minions (smaller indie games) first so they don’t distract from the big bad (red deads, witchers, all with a Ubisoft splash screen). This is the wrong approach here. Instead, tackle the time waster games before moving on to the bite-sized ones.
If you don’t take it from me, take it from science. Corresponding a 2017 study from Harvard Business School, prioritizing smaller tasks can actually make you less productive. (Yes, in this case, a backlog is a task.) The thought is that checking off the little things will give you a warped sense of progress; you think you’re making great strides overall, but in reality you’re just procrastinating. When you reach your main goal – the one that requires the hardest movement – you will be exhausted.
Think of it in the following reductive terms. Their deficit consists of five games: Gray (three hours), Astro’s playroom (three hours), a transistor repeat (six hours), Bugsnax (eight hours) and late The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (100 hours for the main story and some but not all optional content). If you’ve completed the first four, you’ve checked off 80 percent of the items on your list. But those four items only make up 16.6 percent of the total playtime you face. Not that much progress when you look at it that way, right?
learn to stop
There’s another benefit of starting big: you’ll learn whether or not this massive open world is the game for you. If so, fantastic! The resulting 60 hours will feel like a breeze. If not, hey, you just freed up a lot of space on your console. (We all know how tight modern consoles, including the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/Swhen it comes to storage.) The question is when to throw in the towel.
There’s an old saying that you should read 100 pages of a novel before you decide whether to stop or not. There is no such number for games; Since everything arrives with a different number of hours, there is no one-size-fits-all. Personally, I find that playing a dozen hours of an open-world game – or an amazingly massive RPG – is more than enough time to find out whether you like it or not.
This is different for optimized games. Do you have to make it 10 percent play to see if it clicks? Maybe 20 percent? Anything over 25 percent feels unreasonable, like you’re putting more into a game than you’re getting out. It’s a fraction that you have to determine yourself, but whatever you end up achieving, knowing an approximate number of hours before you start playing – and sketching out those calculations in advance – can give you an idea of what when you should (or shouldn’t) go away.
That’s all to say that you should get used to the thought of giving up. It’s human nature to want to see things through to the end – finish the book, get through the movie, watch the whole series, beat the video game. Fuck it all! quitting is good. If you don’t enjoy something, there’s little reason to devote your hard-earned time to it, especially if it’s preventing you from spending that time doing something you might actually enjoy.
Consider a games-on-demand service
Don’t sleep on the various games on demand services available to you, all of which can reduce the sunk cost factor that can arise when trying your hand at lots of video games. For $9.99 per month, Xbox and PC gamers can access over 100 games Xbox Game Pass. (A $14.99 tier is also included bundled with EA Playa similar library of games from this mega-publisher’s library.) Meanwhile, for about the same price depending on which tier you choose, PlayStation users can sign up for PS Plus, a nearly identical service. Popular games are constantly ending up on these Netflix-style platforms. While the monthly cost is certainly not free, it does cost less than $60 to throw at a game you might be dropping out of.
accept failure
Trying to beat every interesting video game that hits the shelves is an insurmountable task. Doing that would be like trying to eat something all 27,000 restaurants in New York City over a lifetime; Without discovering the Philosopher’s Stone, you literally can’t do it. There just aren’t enough hours in life for that. Once you come to terms with this reality – and how it relates to the tens of thousands of games out there – you’ll be better able to get your backlog under control.
Read them through my box Backlog of backlog articles:
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