Best Sci-Fi Games Over 100 Hours Long

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Lots of science fiction games promise endless content, but only a select few truly offer over a hundred hours of gameplay. Fully experiencing these games often requires weeks or even months of dedicated exploration. Some are so complex that players might spend fifty hours just mastering the basics, like building and piloting a spaceship.

Many games now let you explore at your own pace and make your own choices, rather than following a strict storyline. While they can be quite lengthy, that’s actually a draw for many players. If you enjoy losing yourself in expansive worlds and don’t mind investing a lot of time, these games are perfect. The estimated completion times listed come from the website HowLongToBeat.

No Man’s Sky

Completionist Time: 154 Hours

  • Explore a procedurally generated world with billions of planets.
  • Progress depends on how much exploration, discovery, and upgrading a player chooses to do.

No Man’s Sky is an expansive game focused on exploration and survival rather than having a defined ending. It features a massive universe created through procedural generation – meaning planets, creatures, and landmarks are all uniquely created by the game’s systems, rather than being pre-built by developers. This results in a virtually limitless world to discover.

Players can explore a vast number of locations and uncover many secrets. They’ll spend their time studying alien life, collecting plants and animals, searching for valuable treasures, and journeying across the galaxy.

EVE Online

Completionist Time: 746 – 3333 Hours

  • Massive universe where players take part in trading, combat, exploration, and politics alongside thousands of others in real time.
  • Running corporations and fighting in wars that unfold over months or even years.

It’s practically impossible to truly finish EVE Online, which explains why estimates of how long it would take to complete everything vary so much. For many dedicated players, the game feels like a whole second life. What sets EVE Online apart is that almost everything – the economy, the politics, everything – is shaped by player actions. Instead of being heroes in a world, players are the foundation of the universe, and their choices have real, lasting effects.

Becoming skilled in EVE Online takes dedication, with complex character development that can take months. This long-term commitment is a key reason why players remain engaged for years. The game features a dynamic social environment built around player-run Corporations and alliances. These groups engage in espionage, control the in-game economy, and wage large-scale wars. These battles aren’t pre-planned events; they’re genuine conflicts driven by players competing for resources and economic dominance.

Elite Dangerous

Completionist Time: 677 Hours

  • The game is a flight simulator and sandbox set in a 1:1 scale recreation of the Milky Way galaxy, featuring 400 billion star systems.
  • Players take on jobs like trading, bounty hunting, deep space exploration over massive distances, and fighting against the mysterious alien race.

It’s incredible, but this game recreates the entire Milky Way galaxy at a realistic scale. Elite Dangerous is a space simulation that lets you fly a 1:1 replica of our galaxy. This immense size is the reason it takes so long to complete – players need to travel vast distances to experience even a small portion of the game, often venturing far beyond the core areas of human civilization known as The Bubble.

This game features a vast universe, making long-distance travel time-consuming and demanding careful preparation. Becoming truly skilled – unlocking all ship upgrades, completing challenging missions, and thoroughly exploring – requires hundreds of hours of dedicated gameplay.

Stellaris

Completionist Time: 369 Hours

  • It’s a 4X strategy game where players manage a civilization’s growth into a massive galactic empire.
  • The main time sinks are mastering the deep economic and research systems, managing planets across a huge map, and surviving large, galaxy-threatening crises.

Unlike games where you control a single ship, Stellaris puts you in charge of an entire galactic civilization. You start with a newly spacefaring civilization and guide it to become a powerful empire that spreads across the galaxy. It’s not just about exploring space – Stellaris is a strategy game that demands careful planning and a long-term approach.

Players who want to fully experience the game, from first contact with aliens to tackling galaxy-level threats, can expect to spend roughly 369 hours doing so. With numerous research options, character traits, and star systems to manage, the game can be quite complex, even for those familiar with the genre.

Fallout: New Vegas

Completionist Time: 131 Hours

  • The huge playtime comes from the extreme branching paths, which force players to complete the long, unique quest lines for the four competing major factions to see all content.
  • This is a massive open-world RPG set in the post-nuclear Mojave Desert, where the player controls the fate of the region.

As a huge fan, what I love about Fallout: New Vegas is how much freedom you have and how your choices actually matter. It’s a long game, and that’s mostly because of the different factions you can get involved with. The main story is good, but honestly, it feels like a setup for the real conflict: a war between the New California Republic, Caesar’s Legion (who are seriously tough and a bit scary), the enigmatic Mr. House, or even going it alone with the help of a cool computer named Yes Man. It’s amazing how much replay value that adds!

Picking a side in the game creates lasting rivalries, effectively blocking access to a lot of quests and storylines. To experience the full scope of the Mojave Wasteland, players need to explore different decisions and their consequences, often playing through the game multiple times.

Starfield

Completionist Time: 148 Hours

  • Players explore a galaxy with over 1,000 planets, focusing on space travel, resource gathering, and uncovering ancient alien secrets.
  • The game has deep systems for building custom spaceships, managing planetary outposts, and leveling up a complex skill tree.

Starfield is a huge game designed to keep players engaged for a very long time. It takes around 150 hours to fully experience everything because of the enormous amount of content, both carefully created and automatically generated. While the main story can be finished in about 30 hours, truly completing the game means finishing all the major questlines from groups like the United Colonies, Freestar Collective, Ryujin Industries, and the Crimson Fleet. Each of these storylines is substantial, with plenty of missions and rewards to earn.

Completing everything in Starfield takes a lot of time, and it’s not just the main story. The game requires players to scan every plant, animal, and mineral on every planet, which means landing on a huge number of worlds. On top of that, players can spend hours building the perfect spaceship and setting up resource-gathering outposts.

Cyberpunk 2077

Completionist Time: 107 Hours

  • A first-person shooter where a mercenary takes on dangerous jobs to survive in a high-tech, dark future.
  • Players navigate complex relationships and political power struggles that determine which of the multiple endings they will see.

If you only play the main story of Cyberpunk 2077, it will take around 25 to 30 hours to finish. But the game offers a lot more than just the main story – it’s packed with optional missions and activities that change the world around you and impact your character’s journey. Expect to complete numerous side jobs to fully experience everything the game has to offer.

A big part of what makes Cyberpunk 2077 special is its side quests. While the main story takes around 30 hours to finish, completing those extra missions can easily turn that into a 60- or 70-hour game. For players who want to experience everything, it can even take over 100 hours, because these side quests aren’t simple tasks – they offer deep, lengthy storylines for characters like Panam Palmer and Judy Alvarez.

Satisfactory

Completionist Time: 228 Hours

  • This is a factory-building game focused on designing and optimizing massive automated production lines.
  • Progress largely depends on gradually expanding, refining layouts, and solving efficiency problems that players set for themselves.

In a game like Satisfactory, where you build a huge, open-world factory, 100 hours of playtime is just the beginning. You might even need that much time just to finish the main storyline! A big part of what makes Satisfactory so lengthy is the Project Assembly. To complete the game, you’ll need to construct a giant Space Elevator and send important components to a station in space.

The game has roughly five stages. The first one is easy and quick, lasting just a few hours. But as players progress, each stage becomes significantly more challenging. Reaching the final stage requires a substantial time commitment.

X4: Foundations

Completionist Time: 419 Hours

  • Simulates a living space economy where ships, stations, and factions operate independently of the player.
  • Building an empire, managing fleets, and influencing the galaxy takes time.

X4: Foundations isn’t your typical space game focused on ship combat. It features a realistic economy where everything – ships, stations, and more – is constructed from gathered resources. Gameplay starts slowly, with players beginning as a lone pilot with a single ship. Building a space empire with fleets and stations requires mastering complex game mechanics.

In this game, you’ll control pilots, trade goods, and construct enormous spaceships. Building even a single component can be time-consuming, and large ships are made up of many parts. Players will also invest significant time in either conquering the galaxy or destroying the Xenon, a hostile alien race.

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach

Completionist Time: 115 Hours

  • Sam travels across large open worlds set in Australia and Mexico.
  • Deliver cargo, rebuild infrastructure, and link isolated colonies while managing terrain, weather, and enemies.

Both Death Stranding 2: On The Beach and the first Death Stranding take about the same amount of time to complete, though the sequel includes two to three additional chapters. Players in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach will explore two new regions – Australia and Mexico – while working to maximize their Connection Levels to reach five stars.

Achieving a perfect, 5-star rating for all locations is a major factor in why finishing the game as a completionist takes around 115 to 118 hours. The game also intentionally creates challenges to slow players down. Dynamic weather and disasters, like sandstorms, can block your path or ruin your supplies, forcing you to carefully plan your route or wait for conditions to improve.

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2025-12-29 14:38