Developers and publishers alike have all tried to make their games worth the price, even if their plans to do so haven't been on the up & up. There are those that’ll try to milk their audience like an overly eager farmer with microtransactions, season passes, etc. But generally, they’ve tried to make the base game worth the recommended retail price, like making the game longer with side quests, minigames, extra challenges, achievements, and more.
Rockstar Games are particularly infamous for their expansive sandbox games. But how long do they take to beat exactly? Some players leave off after the main story, while others want to beat the game 100%. So, this list will rank Rockstar’s longest games by using HowLongtoBeat.com’s All Styles metric, which averages out the casuals and completionists to a fair idea of the game's length.
10 Grand Theft Auto 3
First, the game that changed everything. GTA3 turned the series from a top-down, 2D effort that had to pay the newspapers for controversial press, to a 3D one that didn’t have to try to shock and impress people. The game brought Liberty City to life in such a way that it became THE reason to get a PS2 on release.
They’d have more than enough time to see what it offered too. On average, GTA3 takes 19 ½ hours to complete, with 15 of them spent on the main story alone. The rest is spent on protagonist Claude doing side missions or the player taking on the LCPD in a tank. Might as well go big or go home.
9 Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
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If people liked GTA3, they loved GTA: Vice City. Its story was like a dark twist on Miami Vice, complete with the 80s beach city setting and classic era soundtrack. What could beat switching on some Hall & Oates while racing onto a pavement full of PIGs? (Patrol Invest Group). It was a touch beefier than GTA3 too at 23 hours.
The late Ray Liotta makes the 18-hour main story a joy to play with his performance as player character Tommy Vercetti. But still, it’s the side activities and new locations that pull the players in. That, and there are 120 different vehicles on land, sea and air to drive, and 40 weapons from guns and grenades to swords and chainsaws to try out. Chances are they’ll go beyond those average hours.
8 Midnight Club: Los Angeles
Before they saddled up for the Red Dead series, Rockstar San Diego created Midnight Club, a series of open-world racing games. MC: Los Angeles was intended to be the biggest in the franchise with 10 different kind of races, 58 cars (including DLC), and an L.A map that dwarfed all the previous games’ maps combined.
On average, it amounts to 27 hours of burnt digital rubber across the City of Angels. With all the races, cars, collectibles, special moves, and more, Rockstar San Diego really wanted to keep the players busy. But surprisingly, according to HowLongtoBeat.com's data, there’s still an entry in the series that outlasts MC: L.A by an extra 9 hours.
7 L.A Noire: The Complete Edition
Before that game gets revealed, Rockstar’s next longest game stays in Los Angeles, but swaps out street racing for crime solving. L.A Noire actually started life before developers Team Bondi gave Rockstar the publishing rights, but they would receive help from multiple Rockstar studios across its lengthy, tortured development. Rockstar joined the project in 2006, and the finished game came out in 2011.
Nowadays, it’s easier to find the Remastered version based on the game’s Complete Edition. The extra DLC cases and goodies join the main story cases, street crimes, achievements and more to give players 30 ½ hours of sleuthing, shooting, tailing, and reading uncanny facial expressions. Even if players stuck to the main story alone, it’d last longer than the early GTA games at 25 hours.
6 Red Dead Redemption
Poor Red Dead Revolver. It wasn’t a particularly terrible game, but it was fairly unremarkable and short. HowLongtoBeat clocked its average completion time at 7 ½ hours. That would still make for a better evening than, say, the original Street Fighter. But like Capcom’s brawler, Red Dead got a real redemption through its sequel.
Red Dead Redemption was hailed as the best open world game ever made on its release. Which is largely thanks to its beautiful yet brutal recreation of the Wild West, smooth and responsive gameplay, and intriguing story. On its own, the game is only an hour and a half longer than GTA: Vice City at 24 ½ hours. But throw in its Undead Nightmare expansion, and it tops off at 33 ½ hours of horse riding, gun-toting, and wondering just who the Strange Man is.
5 Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition
This is an odd one. Despite MC:3 DUB being on older hardware than MC: L.A, with smaller maps, and less stuff overall, HowLongtoBeat ranked it as the longest of all the Midnight Club games at 36 hours. This isn’t even including its Remix Edition, which added an extra map in Tokyo but was somehow a few hours shorter at 25 ½ hours.
Anyone trying to beat both games’ main and side content would see themselves racing through Atlanta, Detroit and others for a day and a half! Why is it so long? There are still a lot of cars to get, customize, and race through the city streets. Finishing 40 races equals up to about 19% completion according to the game’s career mode. At that rate, it may be the only racing game people will need.
4 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
For many, the 90s hip-hop action of GTA: SA remains Scotland’s greatest gaming export. Others prefer the neon cheese of GTA: Vice City. What isn’t in doubt is that GTA: SA is the bigger entry. Instead of recreating New York or Miami, it recreates whole chunks of California and Nevada as the titular state of San Andreas.
Players find themselves pulled back into the gang life across Los Santos (L.A), San Fiero (San Francisco), Las Venturas (Las Vegas), and all the land in between them. The chaos of the main story, side missions, and following the damn train come to 42 hours of gameplay overall. Possibly even longer if players had to play through the original, broken version of the Supply Lines missions.
3 Grand Theft Auto 5
All that time in San Andreas can all be for naught spiritually, as players can track down and kill CJ in GTA5, the series’ return to Los Santos. The most recent game in the series turned 10 years old in 2023, yet it’s been kept alive for the past decade by its multiple ports, updates, and a near-constant supply of content for the Online Mode.
Michael, Franklin, and Trevor’s stories may as well be window dressing next to fans’ custom characters playing golf or bingo between heists. If Rockstar ever figure out how to port the full game to VR platforms, they’ll have essentially created Star Trek’s Holodeck. Then again, GTA5’s 44 hours are probably more comfortable as a joypad/keyboard & mouse experience than a first-person, headset one.
2 Grand Theft Auto 4: The Complete Edition
If GTA5 is so big and expansive, why is it still shorter than its predecessor? GTA4’s dour characters and locale initially put players off. Not enough to stop it being one of the most successful games of all time. But the new serious tone did push some players into picking up more explosive counterparts like Saints Row 2 instead.
Or at the very least, they’d hang on until they got more exciting side content like The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Alongside it having the series’ first online mode, all this content made its Complete Edition the longest GTA game ever at 49 ½ hours. But it’s not the longest Rockstar game ever made. That would be...
1 Red Dead Redemption 2
No game is worth 100-hour crunch work weeks, nor mandatory, unpaid overtime. Nonetheless, the result led to critics and fans alike calling Red Dead Redemption 2 the greatest open-world game ever over its predecessor. Others were cooler on it, as they much preferred John Marston’s story to Arthur Morgan dealing with the remnants of the Wild West as it enters the 20th Century.
Still, the gameplay was as good as ever. The world was bigger, the move set was expanded, looking after horses became a more involved process, and there were a ton of events and minigames for players to dive into. Combined with it being the series’ first foray into online play with Red Dead Online, players have 76 ½ hours of cowboy fun ahead of them. Try not to do it all in one sitting.