Have you finished your Elden Ring playthrough?

Before I start a game, I want to know how long it will take me to finish it, therefore HowLongToBeat.com has been a mainstay of my gaming experience for years. While I normally use the website to predict how many hours I’ll be investing in a game, it turns out you can learn a lot about how many people played it and how many really finished it. Elden Ring’s HowLongToBeat page has received considerable notice, and the title should come as no surprise to anybody who has been even vaguely linked to the gaming business this year.

Elden Ring, as reported by Kotaku, has topped the HowLongToBeat leaderboards – its title of Most Completed with just under 6,000 players makes logical given how popular the game is, but what’s maybe even less shocking is that it was the Most Retired game on the site with 261 players. It was also much ahead of the second-place titles, with Stray’s completion rate of little under 4,000 and Tunic’s retired rate of 114.

However, keep in mind that this is only one website’s analytics, and it’s a site that a large section of the player population does not track their hours on, and may not even be aware exists. Even with such a tiny sample size, I can’t help but believe this is true. Elden Ring was teetering at the top of the year’s most played games on Steam. It was also by far the most popular title in March 2022, and has been around the top of that list ever since, particularly in single-player games. The retirement figures are much more difficult to understand due to a lack of data, but given how difficult FromSoftware games are, this does not surprise me in the least. I tried playing Elden Ring on a friend’s account to see if I could beat Godrick – after more than two hours of switching off, we eventually gave up.

Elden Ring also claimed the titles of Most Backlogged, Most Reviews, and Longest Games on HowLongToBeat, putting it at the top of five of the 10 categories that the website tracks. Elden Ring might be described in a variety of ways, but forgettable is not one of them.