By chance I stumbled upon information telling me that if I finish Pillars of Eternity, I can use the final save game to load into Pillars of Eternity 2, and the sequel would remember my major story decisions of the first game. Nice idea, but my instinctive reaction to that information was negative: I feel absolutely no desire to play Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire anytime soon.

Come to think of it, a game doesn't have one length for me, but two: The HowLongToBeat length it takes to reach the official end, and the number of hours it takes for me to get bored with the gameplay. In Pillars of Eternity, I reached the "I'm bored now" end hours before I reached the "game over" screen. And thus I really don't want to play the sequel, which, while not being exactly the same, would still have very similar gameplay. That doesn't make Pillars of Eternity a bad game. I did have 50 hours of fun before getting bored. I just didn't reach the official game end in those 50 hours. I decided to rush the last 10 hours, to see the end of the story, but the gameplay for that wasn't much fun to me anymore.

The boredom counter kind of resets over time. Thus if I play a current game, even if I had gotten bored with it at the end, by the time a sequel comes out years later, I might well be willing to play that. Playing an older game like Pillars of Eternity means the sequel is already available, and I could play it right away, but my boredom counter hasn't reset yet. In this particular case, curiously the turn-based mode of Pillars of Eternity has been added years after the turn-based mode of Pillars of Eternity 2, and is considered better. So I am even less tempted to play the sequel, unless they rework the turn-based mode for that one.

Note that getting bored before the end isn't unique to videogames. I did not buy Frosthaven, the sequel of the highly successful Gloomhaven board game, because Gloomhaven was already too long for me. We played like 20 scenarios of Gloomhaven, out of 95 existing scenarios, or around 65 for a full playthrough, and decided that we had enough of that game.

I'm still unsure what I will play next. But it probably won't be any 2D with pre-rendered maps CRPG. So it isn't just boredom with any specific game or series of games, but after X hours playing one genre of game I am ready to play something completely different, or at least different enough.