Shadows, Still

 

For some 228 hours now since February 13th, I've been playing the video game Assassin's Creed Shadows, and I've still not finished my first full play-through. This is by far the most time I've spent in completing any game. 

Since neither the Bruins nor the Celtics played last night, and since the Red Sox played early and we covered them yesterday, the Gaming Desk is taking over posting for today to talk about Shadows. Remember, video games are e-sports.

Prior to AC Shadows, the most time I've spent completing a single playthrough of any game was 149 hours for Death Stranding. I'm almost 80 hours past that and still not through Shadows.  

Actually, my record for non-repeat time in a game is 335 hours in Ark: Survival Evolved and I actually never even finished that one. I played it single-player style although it's actually designed to be a multi-player game, and the enormous number of hours I spent were trying to accomplish alone what a team of players is supposed to achieve. After a while, I was just kind of hanging out in (barely) survival mode until the sheer futility of trying to craft a larger encampment finally got the better of me. 

But back to Shadows. I'm far enough into the game that I can see I'm approaching the end. I'm now at Level 61 and there are only three major bosses left to dispel, although side quests keep unexpectedly popping up. Also, there's still one ally I haven't yet found and some of those "how many of these things can you find?" quests that I may never complete. 

Shadows is a truly open-world game with a lot of freedom, but one consequence of all that freedom is I've not completed until late some side quests that should have been played earlier. For example, there's a side quest that unlocks a significant combat skill I wish I had picked up far earlier, and others where I finally find out who those seemingly random enemies who kept challenging me actually were, and why they were so angry with me. "I need you to kill all the silver bandits in the province," a samurai tells me, weeks after I had randomly taken out the last one.

I'm not going for full completion, i.e., every possible achievement, but I don't feel like I've beaten a game until I complete at least every quest and side quest, and uncovered every question mark on the map. My guess is it's going to take another 20 to 30 hours before I'm done, although if it takes longer I might at least be able to see that the game lasted longer than fucking Ark.