Doom will have About 13 Hours of Single-Player Gameplay

Putting aside the odd Metal Gear Solid and Witcher 3s, games have by and large been getting shorter and shorter--there’s a host of reasons for that. Making longer games is more expensive, gamers are growing up, which means they need longer breaks between sessions, or can only play in short bursts, and there’s an ever-increasing focus on multiplayer gaming that makes the necessity of a meaty single-player game necessary. Will that ever excuse games like The Order: 1886? No, but it can justify sometimes lacking single-player stories in games like Call of Duty.

DOOM, the upcoming re-release of the classic FPS that put the genre of the map, has been making no secret of the fact that it’s going to have a robust multiplayer, a stark contrast to the game that inspired it, but it’s still going to have a single-player campaign. As for how meaty that campaign was going to be, well, that was a mystery… until a junior detective over Twitter had the brilliant idea to actually ask the official Doom twitter account how long it will be.

...And they answered pretty much straightaway. Not really so much a mystery as it was ‘something we should have done sooner’.

“The difficulty level plays a factor, but folks playing at the office average 13+ hours in the campaign.”

That’s a bit longer than the average campaign for most first-person shooters, but not that much longer. And, given that the folks at the office are probably pretty familiar with the work, I think putting it at about 15 hours wouldn’t be unfair. Not bad. Perhaps not what players are looking for, but, at least it’s better than the industry standard, which is enough to be thankful for.

Plus, the multiplayer bits. Can’t forget that.