Hollow Crown Fills Two Hundred Hours With Nineteen Distinct Ideas

Somewhere around hour twelve, standing on a ridge in Hollow Crown with three plumes of smoke visible in different directions and no marker telling us what any of them were, we wrote in the ledger that this might be the best open world since we started keeping records. Somewhere around hour one hundred and thirty, clearing the two hundred and eighteenth supply cache, we wrote that we had not seen a new idea in forty hours. Both notes are accurate and the report has to hold them together.

The count is the clearest way to explain how that happens. Across the full completion we logged 341 discrete objectives. Sorted by their underlying structure — what the game actually asks you to do rather than what the quest text says — they resolve into nineteen types. Two of those types account for 148 of the objectives between them.

The count

Nothing on that list is bad in itself. Clearing a camp in Hollow Crown is a real tactical proposition the first fifteen times, because the camps are hand-placed, the terrain matters, and the enemy composition varies enough to demand different approaches. By the fiftieth the terrain is the only variable left, and by the eightieth you have seen every terrain type the game has.

Where hour ninety comes from

We record the hour at which we first genuinely wanted to stop, and in this case the ledger says hour 88, with a note reading "nothing new since the mountain pass". The mountain pass sequence at hour 71 is the last time the game introduces a mechanic. Everything after it is recombination.

Hour 90 is our stop recommendation rather than 88 because the second of the three main story resolutions lands at 90 and it is very good. A reader who leaves at that point will have seen every idea Hollow Crown contains, all three of its best locations, two of its endings and roughly 40% of its objectives. They will also have had an almost unblemished experience, which cannot be said of anyone who continues.

What completion actually gives you

The reward for 100% is a short epilogue scene, a cosmetic item and a line of dialogue from a character who acknowledges your thoroughness. We are not being unkind by calling that thin; the developers plainly did not intend completion to be the point, and the game is structured for players who wander until they are satisfied and then leave.

That is a legitimate design and it is worth stating plainly, because a reader who compulsively finishes what they start will have a materially worse time with Hollow Crown than a reader who does not. The game is not built for us. Our job is to report what happens if you play it the way we do.

What it does better than almost anything

Traversal. There is no fast travel network for the first forty hours and the map is built on the assumption that you will walk, which means the landscape has to be worth looking at and it is. Sight lines are composed. Ridges reveal things. Rivers go somewhere. We logged 62 occasions where we abandoned an objective because something more interesting was visible in another direction, and in an open world that number is the whole ball game.

The writing in the three main story threads is also considerably better than the genre norm, and the second resolution at hour 90 is the strongest single scene we have seen in a game of this scale. None of that is undone by the padding. It is simply surrounded by it.

Our counting method and the definition of a distinct task type are described on the desk page. Stop-here notes for every game are collected on the rating page.