Pretty sure it's just an estimate, based off how long it'd take you to complete almost every main quest/dungeon/ and as many side quest's as you can handle.

I put in about 150 hours or so on my first play through, I'm only about 10-15 in on my 2nd charcter and I'm level 17 I think already. It just depends if you like to explore EVERYTHING. My first play through I did as much as possible, but tried to stay away from finishing the main quest, and it seemed like I'd easily eclipse 300 hours if I finished the game on that one. But halfway through I wanted different perks, and wished I did things differently, so I suspect once u've played through, or mostly through, once, you'll knock down the 200-300, sometimes even 400 hours down to 100-200 based off efficiency alone.

and Ive stopped to stare @ the night sky more than once, how can you not.

I get your point here and really I'm a morrowind guy myself. As soon as beth makes an RPG I'm sure I will love it and that it will have a lot of choices. I thought I was on the Skyrim aka "Action Adventure with some classic RPG elements" page though. I find it hard to get into the RP of anything where nothing the "hero" does matters at all. Back in morrowind time NPCs knew things had changed even if they didn't know why, in Skyrim nothing matters.

Hahahaaha, I thought the same thing.
The only choices you get are kill person A/ or kill person B.
Is there 300hrs of gameplay? Sure is, the problem is that most of it is lame as hell. I couldn't even RP the way I want, I found myself rolepretending most of the time.

It's sad, really. When you step back and look at how beautiful Skyrim actually is, it's truly breathtaking(even if the scaling is really awkward, a mountain looks huge in the distance but turns into a foot hill one you reach it) I can't believe there weren't more quests that you could complete without showing everyone how good you are with a sword. Maybe the DLC will have more RPability, but I doubt it. Hack n slash seems to be what most players want, not me.
I wanted the speech skill to have more use, but it seems like that's a crazy statement now adays with BGS.

Skyrim is still a good game, just not atall what it could have been.

Sure but in Morrowind (I played Oblivion but wasn't a huge fan) if you killed someone other NPCs knew, If you were good they knew, you gave back artifacts they knew, you killed a guard they knew. Skyrim you save them they have no idea, killed a million NPCs for the stormcloaks who cares walk right into solitude hell go hang out with the jarl they don't care about that only your sweet roll. I mean really we don't even bother naming NPCs anymore why would anything matter in a world where 95% of the population is named bandit, guard, foresworn, etc? All jarls have the same quest help 5 and buy a house, hell I would rather one require a kiss to just fetch for 5 people.

They both are abit ridiculous, think about it, how would EVERYONE know you found and returned a daedric artifact? They wouldn't, only certain people would, same goes for skyrim though, if you become Tulius' right hand man, im SURE people would know about it, but they dont, Obliivion seems to have gotten it the best so far, if you were the champion of the arena, people knew, if you were the arch mage or the leader of the fighters guild, people knew, but they didnt know you were the gray fox, or the leader of the DB, because they shouldn't, because if you do your job right, they WOULDNT know. The NPC's shouldnt be psychic, but they shouldn't be mentally inept either.

Am I the only one observing people discuss how long this game will occupy their time, until it reaches the amount to finally move on? Looks like around 300 hours is the answer...

You're right I'm not saying they should know everything. But they should know something anything at all would be good. I killed a dragon wearing stormcloak officer armor in windhelm. Guards reacted by telling me they are worried when people have weapons in hand????????? WTF no really?

It is a bit ridiculous...the guards are the only informed people in the game, lol, they state anything from the obvious, to the most outrageous..... " I spotted some bandits ACROSS THE ENTIRE MAP the other day, dont go there", its like, really? HOW did you know that......but like i said, thats why i think oblivion had it right with the info.

i think im at around 250. still have DB, half of the CoW, & a handful of locations.

So chatting about the game is not cool? Man sorry almost thought this would be the place to do that. Oh and I'm sorry you can't just stop watching . Without this topic my Skyrim time would have not been as high.

That assumes that you did the same things with those three characters

if you did different things with those three characters, then yes, it does count

Example- If I play every quest in the game except the Companions, by your logic here, when I make another character and play the Companions questline, it doesn't count towards overall content, because it was a differnt character

You have 500 hours playtime, and you're wondering where they got 300 hours from? what?

I'm currently at 258 hours on a single character who is level 55 atm. My character is basically good so I've not done any of the Dark Brotherhood or Thieve's Guild quests. I've also avoided anything that involved human sacrifice so that left quite a few in my book as well. I'm still working on the main quest line but have completed most other quest lines and have visited most locations in the game although I'm still finding one here and there as I travel around. I mostly walk/run but occasionally use a horse or fast travel. My character is a mage with very low health so I have to be fairly careful in unknown areas because he can be one shot fairly easily especially by archers. I do not do a lot of actual role playing where I'm spending time doing menial labor tasks or trying to create a pretend life. I spend the majority of my time in the game going from quest to quest and exploring. If I did every quest in the game I have no doubt I could easily hit 300 hours.

So that makes me ask the question, "What is content"? I think we all tend to define that differently. And where one person may not consider using your head to imagine things as content I would differ and say that is a way to add infinite content to a game such as this. It's called role playing for a reason. All the decisions in the game should not be made for you. Neither should all the games content be pre-made. Leaving the game open ended results in a world that is extremely flexible to the imaginary role player. It also leaves a lot of flexibility for modders to add content without worrying about breaking something else in the game world.

That said, what works for one gamer does not necessarily satisfy another. So for one person to get 75 hours and feel they are done with the game doesn't necessarily mean it's the game's fault, or the fault of the people who created it. Bethesda's games are never really going to satisfy gamers who are looking for a compelling story driven game. They just aren't designed to cater to that. Instead the world of Skyrim is broken up into small side stories, many of which can be found in the multitude of caves and dungeons scattered across the landscape. Many of those stories are contained in written text found within those locations. The player who isn't willing to do a bit of reading will totally miss out on that content depriving themselves of some of the more interesting stories in the game.

Now I'm not saying that Skyrim couldn't have been better. Any of these games could be better with enough development time and a massive budget. But overall, for me anyway, Skyrim exceeded my expectations as a game world. It's beautiful, challenging, fun to explore, and absolutely packed with totally unique locations with lots of interesting things to discover. It is extremely rare for me to have over 250 hours invested in a single game much less one character without much repetitive play. And by repetitive I mean the grinding that many of these games require in order to level certain aspects of your character. I never felt I had to grind anything and yet the progression occured as I played giving a much more fluid experience and still I managed to close in on the 300 hour mark. I may hit it yet as I still have things to accomplish on this character. What you get out of Skyrim is up to you as the player, but the content is definitely there.

I'm up to 635 hours total... early characters are dead and gone. My 2 current ones have about 35 each, both trying to avoid the MQ.

I don't know what to say, you got 500hrs out of the game but your complaining that they said there's 300hrs in a single play through? I bet you can't name another offline game that you got 500hrs out of that was released last year. Bethesda games are what you make of them, some people will get less then 40hrs out of a play through and others will get 500hrs. It all depends on your play style.

Greg

Im on 322 hours and I feel jipped because I should have finished the game 22 hours ago.

Fixed. also i have about ten characters and about 500 hours logged and i'm still discovering new stuff and RP'ing. look for rare books or just beautiful locations. there's a great place in the forest with a giant tree bridge over waterfalls.

About 150 hours of gameplay with being at level 67 with one singular character. I think I won't be happy with another alter ego doing the same things again.

You think that, but you will have forgotten half the dungeons you have cleared allreay and they will feel like new again.

Same, except for the 13th playthrough part xD

I think what they meant was, that if you wanted to have all the perks, go into every dungeon, explaore the entire map, complete every quest (including every type radiant story quest), have every pierce of armor and weaponry, find all books and read them, listen to all the voice dialog (without skipping), include time that people who have never played video games has to learn the mecanics then you would have 300 game play hours. Of course if you are used to video games and only play a melee character, a lot of items and stuff will be excluded, and the only way to get the rest out is by playing another character which means that u will also have to play through the majority og the game again.
I doubt that the OP has played more than 200 hr of the same quests over again (sencond time u play through it goes much faster because u know what happens). But anyways everyone plays differently and thinks different things are fun, I for example think it is quality time to wonder around the map and find secret locations and examine the landscape and so on, it does not have to apply to anyone else, therefore it is difficult to say what is quality game play time

I made an account just to post in this thread. We know that the developers did a speed run and completed it in little over 2 hours. I'm not at 300 hours yet but I don't that much fee time on my hands. I think it us easily achieveable with all the radiant quests. Even alot of the dungeons take around 45 mins to clear and there are about 160 of them, it all adds up. It just boils down to how you like play the game.

I just got to 395 hours last night, on 4 characters.

Actually, I'm cutting back for other things.

Before I retired, I was into WoW. Even with a job working 40 hours per week, I still played around 85 hours WoW every week for almost five years. And if there was a holiday weekend, that was another 15-17 hours on top of that.

Since then, I've slowly lowered the amount of time I'm playing. When Sky was released, I easily clocked 8-10 hours per day (I'm retired now). However, now I'm down to about 5 hours per day. I have to learn to relax - I'm very competitive with myself and others, always driving to get to the next level, the next dungeon, etc. It's not easy to make an adjustment like that, but necessary for my health.

Interesting, I'm 400+ hours in and I still haven't done everything, nor have I even barely started the main quest.

300h seems like a lot of gameplay but if you do every single quest and discover every single location and loot every single dungeon 300h comes pretty fast especially if you don't fast travel. I'm pretty sure they didn't lie when they said they stopped counting after some time.