This is the last year of PlayStation 4. Can you imagine? Released 7 years ago and this November we’re getting PlayStation 5. By then I would like to be done with PS4, because I know that as soon as I’m switching consoles I will be lazer focused on new experiences that unlocks with PS5.
So now is the time to take a good look at the PS4 backlog and figure out, which games do I want to play and which games could I be without.
So I made a list by going to Wikipedia and look at every PlayStation 4 game listed there. Then I took a look at which games I own and what I would like to complete out of that. I ended up with a list of 36 games that I would like to play before I bury the PS4.
Here they are in alphabetical order.
- Abzû
- Apex Construct
- Bad North
- Beat Saber
- Beyond Two Souls
- Blasphemous
- Concrete Genie
- Control
- Dandara
- Dragon’s Dogma
- Erica
- Fe
- Gravity Rush 1
- Gravity Rush 2
- Hitman 2
- Hollow Knight
- Hyper Light Drifter
- Immortal Unchained
- Invisible Inc.
- Life is Strange 2
- Mirrors Edge Catalyst
- Moss
- Nioh
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Resident Evil 7
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Spider-Man
- Stardew Valley
- The Outer Worlds
- The Surge
- The Talos Principle
- The Witcher 3
- Untitled Goose Game
- Vampyr
- Wolfenstein: The New Order
- X-Morph: Defense
Cross referencing this list with !hltb I found out that here are 532 hours of game time in this list. In a year I usually clock something around 400 hours, so that is more gaming than I will complete this year. If I would play 1,5 hours every day I would make it.
The conclusion is that I must prioritize.
I did this by grading a couple of properties 1-5 for each game and then sorting by the average value. The properties I used to grade these games were
- Length (h)
- Meta Critic Score
- Hype
- Owning it
Length (h)
I know that I prefer short games. If a game is too long, it is usually repeating concepts, gameplay, levels or has a lot of backtracking. A mechanic I hate in a game is the feigned ending, where it pretends to end but there are several hours of more game behind it. Blergh!
So I went to HowLongToBeat and extracted the number of hours to beat each game. Then I graded them like this.
- > 20h
- > 12h
- > 8h
- > 4
- <= 4
You read it like this. If a game is longer than 20 hours its really bad. If a game is shorter than 4 hours that is really good!
Meta Critic Score
I am not a fan of Meta Critic. I think that it has a bad effect on the industry, and the meta critic score seldom represents what I think of a game. AAA titles that have ridiculous high meta critic sometimes makes me bored out of my mind.
Say Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. It has 93 on Meta Critic, but I hated that game so much that I rage quit after 30 minutes and never look back.
However there are games >90 score that I agree are very good, like Bloodborne, Celeste, INSIDE and Journey. So I let Meta Critic to also help me prioritize my list of games to play. I grade them like this.
- < 60
- < 70
- < 80
- < 90
- >= 90
This means that I’m more likely to prioritize a game that has a meta critic score over 90 rather than one that has below 60.
Hype
I should have a say in all this. I cannot just use empirical data to prioritize the list for me, so this is my hype score. With hype score I mean what games I want to pick up the most. I want to play all these games, but some of them is more because it is a game that “you should’ve played” and other are because I really want to play them.
I grade them 1 to 5.
- A game that I should have played
- I have a mild interest of playing this game
- I’m going to play this at some point
- This is something I’m excited about
- I’m picking this up asap
Price
I own 22 of the 36 games on the list. I usually wait for a sale before I buy a game and if I would prioritize all the games that I do not have it could become quite expensive. So therefor I will also include price I have to pay in the weight.
I grade them like this.
- >= 250 sek
- < 250 sek
- < 150 sek
- < 100 sek
- Free, already own
You read it like this. Free – or already own is good. Expensive games that I need to pay for is bad. I’ve compared prices outside of sales, I might pick up these titles during the year if I find them for a good price.
Sum it up!
That’s it. Now I calculate a weight for each game with the following formula.
= AVERAGE(Length (h);Meta Critic Score;Hype;Price)
This gives me a score between 1-5 for each game and I sort the list based on that score. I end up with the following sorted list.
Ok, this is quite crazy. The game that I am playing right now, Dandara, appeared on top even though I didn’t plan for it.
Now that we know the length of all games, and the length of the whole list, it is easy to calculate when I need to be finished with each game in order to make it before new years eve 31 december 2020. That is the right column called Completed. By updating this column as I complete games, I will get an updated prospect of when I can expect to be done with the whole list.
Right now I can say that I’m already 13 days behind schedule.
Replay 