Wondering how long Anthem is? BioWare's new co-op game wants you to keep playing for hours, with endgame challenges and escalating difficulty settings, but there is a natural end point to the campaign, as well as a final mission. It's not insurmountably long, if you're pondering buying the game this week or signing up to Origin Access Premier to play through it.
PC Gamer's Tom Senior racked up 23 hours in Anthem by reaching the conclusion of the story, according to his counter on Origin, and "that's with talking to everyone in Tarsis", in his words. He finished at level 21. Tom played the second half of the game in hard mode, and the first on normal (then flipped back for the tricky final mission). He took the time to potter around in Free Play with the PC Gamer UK team for a couple of hours, as well, which might've slowed him down a little.
James Davenport, meanwhile, says it took him about 20 hours. Steven Messner, our reviewer, says it took him 34 hours to reach level 30. With that in mind, it also took him around 30 hours to finish the game, which "was me doing everything", he says. As you'd expect, that encompasses a lot more side content than Tom or James.
Somewhere around the early 20 hour range is to be expected if you're looking to finish it quickly, then—but there are a few factors that might make your mileage vary. Like Steven, you might want to do more side content as you go. If you're stuck in the Challenge of Legionnaires section, too, for example, you're tasked with a bunch of arbitrary activities to progress, which might take a while if you don't know how to beat them all. Our guide to the Tombs should help you progress if you're, say, stuck waiting for other Javelins to die so you can revive them and finally get on with the main quests.
Once the main story campaign is complete, you're given a whole bunch of extra tasks to complete as Anthem's 'Endgame' begins. We'll have more on that later this week, when we've had more time to spend exploring it, and checking out the game's Masterwork loot tier.
