14 DAY TRIAL // I have not finished Dark Souls 2 yet and, even if I decided to devote more of my limited gaming time to the title from From Software and Namco Bandai, I might never do it, which is a shame, given that I liked the core mechanics and I think I have the patience required to get past the difficulty.
One of the saddest realities of growing up is that just as players have more disposable income and the ability to get more titles, both in stores and via digital distribution, they have a lot less free time to enjoy them.
There was a time when I heard a game was 15 hours long and thought twice about starting it, worried that it might take just a weekend without any social contact to explore its every nook and cranny and see all it had to offer.
Now, when I hear that a game is about the same length, I worry that playing it would mean I need to at least drop my weekly Crusader Kings II sessions and the evenings when I play Wargame AirLand Battle in multiplayer.
Dark Souls 2 takes at least 60 hours to finish, this according to those who have also played and completed a run through the original title in the series.
For a gamer who is still getting acquainted with its quirks, it would probably eat up even more time, which might mean that this is a game I could remain involved with for the coming three to four months.
I am sure that there are plenty of enthusiasts who are willing to make this time investment in order to get the unique feeling that one gets when accomplishing some of the toughest challenges that our hobby can create.
But I suspect most of those who play Dark Souls 2 will do it for between 10 and 20 hours and will then decide that they need to move on to something else or return to some of their favorite experiences form the past.
Hard to complete, long experiences were once the hallmark of the video games medium, but the rigors of modern life probably mean that they will become less frequent in the near future.
And that is just one more reason to enjoy Dark Souls 2, which might be one of the last of its breed, even if I disabled my death counter, because the number it showed actively depressed me.