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Original post by Wai Re: Codeka How do you estimate the amount of play time a game has? Say hunting a rare monster involves these activities: 2 hr - Researching about the monster online 5 hr - Find other players to go with you 18 hr - Camp at the site where the monster is likely to appear, compete against other groups to get the monster, killing it enough times to get the rare item 0 hr - Fighting the monster 5 hr - Time earned to show off the rare item Total: 30 hours. Do you count it like this? So that if the game has 10 rare monsters that would be 300 hours of content?

It doesn't really work like that.

The estimation of time in these kinds of games, is an estimate of the time it takes to level. That is estimated assuming the player is either killing mobs constantly, or by doing quests constantly (or a combination of them both). In most of these games, the early levels can be done in a matter of minutes, but the later levels can take hours (or more).

This also doesn't factor in the time spent doing other stuff, which in these kinds of games, is usually a massive amount of time.

The kind of times Codeka mentioned, are common in single player games, or online games that are played like a single player game. MMORPG's however, employ lots of repetition and lots of very time consuming activities which means that time spent in the game is hugely increased. For example, the Neverwinter Nights type games, usually have campaigns somewhere around the 30 hours mark, which can vary with bigger and smaller games. In a MMORPG though, people can put 30 hours in over just one weekend, and can continue playing the game that intently for years.

So the 2400 hours mentioned above, sounds insane if related to a single player experience, but for an MMORPG, it is pretty accurate. For example, in the early days, it took even the more hardcore players, around a year to reach max level in EverQuest. That was putting in about 6 hours most nights, and sometimes many more hours over the weekend. So if you call it 6 hours average, and you multiply it by 365 days (for a year), that would be 2160 hours. The game then had an expansion pack, and most of these players then continued playing in to the next year. So the 2400 hour idea would be roughly describing content for a year or more.

Again though, that would not be an estimation of level time, because it includes massive amounts of time spent doing other things, like exploring and trading and crafting and just chatting to people. Designers generally wouldn't focus too much on that because everyone will play the game differently. You can have a rough estimate though, and then you can have quite an accurate estimate of level time.