Elden Ring was apparently 2022’s most finished and most quit game

Did you complete your Elden Ring playthrough?

Before I delve into a game, I like to know roughly how long it’s going to take me to complete, so HowLongToBeat.com has been a staple of my gaming experience for years. While I usually use the website to get an estimate of how many hours I’m about to invest in a title, turns out you can glean a lot of information about how many people played a game, and how many actually finished it, too. One game’s HowLongToBeat page has been getting some attention, and that title shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been even remotely connected to the gaming industry this year: Elden Ring.

As reported by Kotaku, Elden Ring has topped the leaderboards of HowLongToBeat — its title of Most Completed with just under 6,000 players makes sense considering how popular the game is, but what’s somehow even less surprising is that it was the Most Retired game on the site with 261 players. It was well ahead of the second-place titles as well, with Stray‘s completion number settling at just under 4,000, and Tunic‘s retired rate coming in at 114.

Keep in mind, however, that this is only one website’s metrics, and it’s a site that a good portion of the player base doesn’t log their hours on, and maybe doesn’t even know exists. Even with such a small survey pool, I can’t help but feel like there’s some truth to this. Elden Ring was wavering at the top of Steam’s most played games of the year. It was also far and away the most popular title of March 2022, and has stayed near the top of that list since, especially when it comes to single-player games. The retirement numbers are even harder to contextualize from a sheer lack of data, but given how difficult FromSoftware games are, this would not surprise me in the slightest. I tried playing Elden Ring on my friend’s account to just see if I could beat Godrick — after switching off for over two hours, we finally gave up.

Elden Ring was also able to claim the titles of Most Backlogged, Most Reviews, and Longest Games on HowLongToBeat, which means that it takes the number one spot of five of the ten categories that the website accounts for. You can say a lot of things about Elden Ring, but calling it forgettable is not one of them.

Noelle Warner

Features Editor