10 Video Games You Play For HOURS Before Starting

“It takes a few hours to get going” is something nobody wants to hear about a video game, because that often means you’re in for a multi-hour slog of a time before it actually gets good.

Pacing is an incredibly important facet of any video game - developers don’t want to breathlessly ping players from one set-piece to the next without respite, but far more crucially, they don’t want their paying customers to get bored enough that they hit the big red “refund” button.

And these 10 video games all absolutely tested the patience of players, given that they didn’t really start for hours, and in extreme cases even dozens of hours.

Now of course, in literal terms you could pick the controller up and start playing these games within a moment, but each was so front-loaded with tutorialising and preambles that the meat of the adventure was still hours away from your impatient, sweaty-palmed grasp.

This isn’t exclusively a bad thing by any means, and honestly you might even love some of the prologues and tutorial sections on this list, but for large swaths of players, they were nevertheless obnoxiously overbaked intros before the game actually got going in earnest…

Assassin's Creed III pissed a lot of people off simply because the marketing wasn't honest about what the game actually was - at least in its opening hours.

Though the trailers implied we'd be playing as Native American assassin Connor from the jump, the opening hours instead force the player to take control of British Templar Haytham Kenway - who also happens to be Connor's father.

It takes about three hours for players to play as Connor, and even then, he's still a child when we're first able to control him.

On top of this, it's about another two hours before Connor gains his awesome assassin garb featured in the marketing, ensuring that Assassin's Creed III doesn't feel like it really starts until around the five-hour mark.

For this reason the prologue proved wildly divisive with players, enough that when a remaster was announced in 2018, game director Alex Hutchinson even admitted that the start was "too slow," and that if he made the game now, the Haytham section would've been interspersed throughout the whole game.