I am looking for the longest (in terms of hours) and most difficult (in terms of complexity).
I’ve played a lot of Final Fantasy, Diablo Series, WoW, Everquest 1 and 2, Skyrim, Divinity Original Sin: 2, etc…
Older gameplay styles are preferred, but not a requirement.
So, what’s the hardest shit out there?
Never played it but I’ve heard good things about Darklands along the lines of what you’re looking for.
I wish I were young enough to enjoy sprawling RPGs again. I bought BG3 but I don’t have the time to devote to it like I used to so it molders in my Steam library.
Well, I’m mid-forties, work full time, and have a child. However, I was miserable and it got pretty bad. Eventually, with the help of a lot of therapy, I began to understand the importance of taking care of myself in an actual and meaningful way. When you sideline BG3 in lieu of other priorities, the thing that gets deprioritized isn’t the game, it is you. This concept seemed crazy to me at first, but I am now starting to understand it and believe that it is important enough to share.
It’s okay to tell people that you have gaming time between 6pm and 7pm nightly. No phone, no chores, just you and an adventure.
It’s not for lack of personal time. I just have way more things to fill that personal time. Playing with my radios or messing with my homelab or building out grammar and lexica for my conlangs and so on. I think I’ve also discovered my tastes have changed. I don’t want video games to frontload all the complexity anymore. How am I supposed to know what this or that class or race or stat does before even starting the game?
My vision being what it is a lot of games are unplayable now anyway.
Daggerfall is long as fuck (in universe, the adventure takes at least ten years.) The dungeons are massive serpentine mazes. Multiple guilds and factions, although they don’t feature overarching questlines - lots of radiant quests, but they never really feel boring.
It’s also fairly difficult - especially if you build a character without cheesing it with a guide. You need to be juggling multiple saves to prevent yourself being trapped in a certain death situation, mess up a quest, etc.
There’s a modern remake, Daggerfall Unity, which a lot of people say is a good way to play it nowadays. The original DOS version is quite playable through DOSBox though, and there’s lots of little quality of life tools that you can find online.
Hack, or its modern incarnation, NetHack. (No relation to the .hack comment. That’s a game based on an anime. Hack is a Roguelike from the 1980s, came out shortly after Rogue itself, follows a very similar format, and is arguably if not definitively the oldest true Roguelike currently developed. I mean, you can get NetHack on iOS and Android, not to mention all modern computers, and it still looks like it’s running on UNIX in the 1970s. ASCII art and all. Though there are “tile sets” that give it graphics, the original does not have any [graphics] to speak of (aside from the icon, I suppose). You are the @ symbol (well, that’s the symbol for humans), floors are periods/full-stops, walls are dashes and pipes and plus symbols for corners, dirt paths are pound/hashtag, and most monsters are letters (and uppercase is not the same as lowercase; d is dog and D is dragon, IIRC).
It’s a procedurally generated game. You start on floor 1 of a dungeon, and you have to find stairs down (>) and advance to the 35th or 37th (I forget) floor, at which point the Amulet of Yendor has a chance to spawn. The game is won when you exit the dungeon via the first floor. The bad ending is doing it without the Amulet (including right at the start!). You live a long life in obscurity. The good ending is exiting with the Amulet, in which case you live a long life, rich and famous. If you die, you get a tombstone showing what you accomplished. And you can potentially leave a ghost behind which you can fight in later runs (and get all those items if you defeat it).
The game is based on D&D, so you can level up. It’s also based on Tolkien lore, and there are a ton of neat things you can do (for example, engraving the name Elbereth, IIRC, into a floor space means certain enemies treat that space like a wall. Walking over it gives them a chance of being able to pass over it. It’s also turn based, you pause the game by not doing anything. Time only advances when you move. Hunger is also a thing, so you have to find food, or eat what you kill (some enemies are poisonous, and some give you perks, like eating a Floating Eye sounds disgusting, but you can see life forms through walls from pretty far away.
Did I mention the game is 100% free? And actively developed?
https://www.nethack.org/common/index.html ← Latest version released February 2023. So not actively actively develped, but updated more recently than, well, most games in this thread! Considering this is a game from the 1980s, that’s pretty impressive! They’re still fixing bugs and adding features.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous takes hundreds, for some thousands of hours to complete due to the complexity and sheer scope of it.
Thousands? Now we’re talking. I’ll check it out.
6 hours. That’s what I logged today, and I honestly am only stopping because I have to go to work in the morning.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. This is my life now.
Thank you!
Happy to help!
I mean, if you’ve played everquest 1 I feel like you’ve already hit the lore duration jackpot. It’s also more complex than most by far if you include classes that take a lot of skill to play well. Big difference between skilled and unskilled players for sure
Not really fantasy, but the Kingdom Come: Deliverance games are downright punishing and can take a long time.
Think realistic Middle Ages sim where your character is a weak little blacksmiths helper and has no clue what they’re doing.
It’s gotta be one of the early ones, before they figured out how to balance things. Something like Avernum, Geneforge, Wizardry, or Wasteland
Wizardry IV
Caves of Qud
Since you included the Diablo Series, I’ll assume that ARPGs are in consideration. Path of Exile
You could get into Dragon Quest games, if you want old school JRPGs. Complexity might be a bit lacking given the era, but doing the old NES ones without a guide is excruciatingly difficult and you can lump on RetroAchevements to add more pain. RA generally adds additional challenges to any older game so you have to play a little min maxing to accomplish them.
I mostly thought of it since RA is beta testing multi sets with DQ9 and getting every accolade might be one of the most insane things I could ever suggest.
The 7th Saga. SNES.
For it’s time, possibly… but I’ve played through it. There are others from slightly later that have so many possible endings and characters that I never felt like I fully completed them.
Longest grind? Runescape? Phantasy Star 3? disgaea if you don’t know what you’re doing
Daggerfall, maybe? Beat the game, side quests, visit every location.
