Elden Ring
One purchase, one paid expansion, nothing sold inside the game — and an answer to “how long does it take” that ranges from 25 hours to 200 depending entirely on which question you are asking.
- Is Elden Ring pay to win?
- No. There is nothing for sale inside the game at all after the purchase price, so the question does not arise.
- How long to beat Elden Ring?
- About 60 hours to reach the ending, based on aggregated player-submitted completion times.
The cost, in short
Pressure
000
To ending
060hrs
Scripted ending exists
Hours, depending on what “finish” means
- Mandatory content only
- 25 h
- To the ending
- 60 h
- Everything, all achievements
- 135 h
How this rating was reached
Hours come from aggregated player-submitted times, which is the only dataset that exists for this: no publisher publishes playtime, so there is no official figure to cite. That means the sample is self-selected — people who log completion times are more engaged than average, and the mandatory-only figure in particular comes from players who already knew where to go. The 150-to-200-hour first-playthrough figure is drawn from the discussion threads rather than from an aggregate, and it is presented as what experienced players report about their first run, not as a measured average. It is included because leaving it out is how the aggregated tables end up understating the answer for the people most likely to be asking. Shadow of the Erdtree adds roughly 30 to 40 hours and is not included in any figure above. The expansion is a separate purchase and a separate question.
The monetization, in full
Nothing is for sale inside Elden Ring. No currency, no cosmetics, no season pass, no paid convenience. The one paid addition is Shadow of the Erdtree, a conventional expansion bought once — the model of a game sold rather than operated.
That places it at a genuine zero on the pressure axis, and it is worth naming why that is unusual for a game of this commercial size: a title selling tens of millions of copies has every commercial incentive to add a storefront, and this one did not.
Why every source gives you a different number of hours
Search for how long this game takes and you will find 20 hours, 60 hours, 135 hours and 200 hours, from sources that all look credible. None of them is wrong. They are answering four different questions, and almost nobody says which.
Mandatory content only, about 25 hours. Straight to the required bosses and the ending, skipping optional areas. This is the figure forum posts mean when they say the game is shorter than its reputation.
A typical playthrough, about 60 hours. Exploring as the game invites you to, doing the side content you happen to find. This is the aggregated average and the closest thing to a single honest answer.
Full completion, about 135 hours. All optional bosses, all endings, all questlines. Roughly five times the mandatory figure.
A first playthrough with no FromSoftware experience, 150 to 200 hours. The most-upvoted answer on the relevant Reddit thread is 200 hours, and it is not an outlier — it is what happens when the combat system is new to you and deaths are frequent. This figure is missing from every aggregated table, because aggregated tables average away the people it describes.
Which number to trust for yourself
If you have played Dark Souls or Sekiro, the 60-hour figure will be close. If you have not, expect the upper half of that range and possibly beyond it — and note that this is the one axis where the game asks nothing of your wallet and a great deal of your time.
That trade is the point of this site. A game with a 78-out-of-100 pressure score wants your money; this one wants sixty hours and asks for nothing else. Which of those is the more expensive is a question about your own life, not about the game.
Sources
- 01Elden Ring — aggregated player completion timesHowLongToBeat ·
Full method behind these ratings: see our methodology.
Ratings are editorial judgments based on the sources cited above. They are not a guarantee of current pricing or mechanics, which can change after publication — check the source directly before making a purchase decision.