Peter Suderman on the Vastness of Fallout 4
This week's Vox column takes a look at the incredible vastness of the video game Fallout 4, which has already consumed about two and a half days of my life.
Here's how it starts:
Two days, nine hours, and 17 minutes — that's how long I've spent playing Fallout 4, the post-apocalyptic role-playing video game, since its release on November 10. I know this because the game keeps track and tells me every time I start it up. That's 57 hours and change — almost one and a half workweeks — since the game arrived on my doorstep, and an even larger percentage of my waking hours. By the time you read this, my tally will almost certainly be even higher.
I knew this would be the case when I bought the game, because I've played previous games from Bethesda Softworks, the studio behind the Fallout franchise: the fantasy RPGs in the Elder Scrolls series, Morrowind and Skyrim, which share many gameplay mechanisms and design elements with the Fallout series, as well as the game's predecessors, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas (which was created by a different studio, Obsidian, under a license from Bethesda). I spent dozens, in some cases hundreds, of hours playing each of those games, too: All together, I estimate I've spent about 375 hours on them, not including what I've put into Fallout 4.
That's an incredible amount of time — more than 15 complete days of my life since 2009, when I first started playing the games.