So over the past few years, I've seen a lot of people lamenting games for becoming shorter and shorter, ushering forth a time of epidemic where publishers are wanting us to play a game and then leave it to go latch on to their next release in rapid succession. And I have to ask, are you sure games are getting shorter, or do you just have a lot more free time on your hands?
There have always been short games. The original Sonic the Hedgehog can be speedrun in less than an hour. There have also been long games, such as Final Fantasy. And this trend has continued to this day, where the only difference, strictly speaking, is two things: People who grew up playing games like Banjo-Kazooie (itself only something like a five-hour game depending on how well you know where everything is) or Final Fantasy VII are now out in the "real" world, but with unemployment at an all-time high, a lot of them have quite a fair amount of free time (myself included). Also, there are simply a lot more games being released these days than there were back in the 80's or 90's. Over one-hundred and fifty games were launched this year alone (partly due to the launch of the Wii-U).
Now consider this: When a person is a full-time college student or has a full-time job, the chances of them having more than, say, two or three hours a night of "free" time is extremely small. Suddenly, that 20-hour game that you could've completed in two days when you weren't working has you spending three weeks to get to the end. Doesn't seem so short now, does it?
Now, I like pouring into a "long" game just as much as anybody else (my total play-time on my first completion of Persona 4 Golden was 74 hours), but there are a lot of games that simply feel like they're outstaying their welcome if they try padding out past 20 hours, to be frank. Take Assassin's Creed as an example. It doesn't have what I would call a short story, but most of the time you spend playing is padded out simply by travel time or doing pointless side-missions that have little-to-no practical reward other than adding to your "100%-o-Meter". Now, if the traveling is fun (as it usually is in Assassin's Creed), then that's all well and good, but it's not really contributing to the depth of the experience, it's just making the game longer. How much of that time spent running around are you actually doing something other than... well... running around?
I won't say there aren't games with purposely short campaigns, etc., that aren't designed for people to pick up the newest iteration every year or every other year, because anyone who has been playing attention to gaming in the last six years knows that there are certain franchise designed exactly for that, but at the same time, they're not really focused on or marketed toward the single-player market. By all stretches of the imagination, to a person who played over 200 hours in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare multi-player, it's just as "long" of a game as Baldur's Gate, but for different reasons. The six-hour campaign is really inconsequential at that point, because most of the people criticizing how short it is aren't going to play it anyway, and the assumed majority of people who buy it are going to play both, or the multi-player.
But is Mass Effect "short" because you can complete it in fifteen hours? (Probably less if you're really good, I'm just going by my last play-through, which was also my third and shortest while simultaneously finding the most stuff on the side.) It sure doesn't feel like a short game while I'm playing, partly because of the vast expanse of the in-game galaxy, partly because of the balance of dialogue to combat and the length of individual missions, partly because those damn Mako missions are annoying as hell.
A related issue is the fact that a lot of these purported short games also tend to be highly scripted and/or linear. That's a different can of worms that I'd prefer not to open, but it's impossible to avoid mentioning that maybe part of the issue behind "games are getting shorter" is that game worlds aren't as interesting to explore anymore, because there's just less to explore. Developers don't put in silly Easter Eggs very much anymore, there aren't all kinds of secrets and hidden passageways to find, and even in open-world games there's usually very little reason to actually explore, because there just aren't those small, fun things to find anymore.
So, Escapambillidandoes, what's your take on this?
[HEADING=1]EDIT:[/HEADING]
All right, I think I should clarify that the issue I'm really taking in this thread is that a lot of the time when I see people talking about how short a game is, they're saying it like it's a negative just because it's a short game. As if that diminishes the quality of the overall product by itself. As if being a longer game would somehow automatically make it a better game, regardless of the quality of the longer content.
There have always been short games. The original Sonic the Hedgehog can be speedrun in less than an hour. There have also been long games, such as Final Fantasy. And this trend has continued to this day, where the only difference, strictly speaking, is two things: People who grew up playing games like Banjo-Kazooie (itself only something like a five-hour game depending on how well you know where everything is) or Final Fantasy VII are now out in the "real" world, but with unemployment at an all-time high, a lot of them have quite a fair amount of free time (myself included). Also, there are simply a lot more games being released these days than there were back in the 80's or 90's. Over one-hundred and fifty games were launched this year alone (partly due to the launch of the Wii-U).
Now consider this: When a person is a full-time college student or has a full-time job, the chances of them having more than, say, two or three hours a night of "free" time is extremely small. Suddenly, that 20-hour game that you could've completed in two days when you weren't working has you spending three weeks to get to the end. Doesn't seem so short now, does it?
Now, I like pouring into a "long" game just as much as anybody else (my total play-time on my first completion of Persona 4 Golden was 74 hours), but there are a lot of games that simply feel like they're outstaying their welcome if they try padding out past 20 hours, to be frank. Take Assassin's Creed as an example. It doesn't have what I would call a short story, but most of the time you spend playing is padded out simply by travel time or doing pointless side-missions that have little-to-no practical reward other than adding to your "100%-o-Meter". Now, if the traveling is fun (as it usually is in Assassin's Creed), then that's all well and good, but it's not really contributing to the depth of the experience, it's just making the game longer. How much of that time spent running around are you actually doing something other than... well... running around?
I won't say there aren't games with purposely short campaigns, etc., that aren't designed for people to pick up the newest iteration every year or every other year, because anyone who has been playing attention to gaming in the last six years knows that there are certain franchise designed exactly for that, but at the same time, they're not really focused on or marketed toward the single-player market. By all stretches of the imagination, to a person who played over 200 hours in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare multi-player, it's just as "long" of a game as Baldur's Gate, but for different reasons. The six-hour campaign is really inconsequential at that point, because most of the people criticizing how short it is aren't going to play it anyway, and the assumed majority of people who buy it are going to play both, or the multi-player.
But is Mass Effect "short" because you can complete it in fifteen hours? (Probably less if you're really good, I'm just going by my last play-through, which was also my third and shortest while simultaneously finding the most stuff on the side.) It sure doesn't feel like a short game while I'm playing, partly because of the vast expanse of the in-game galaxy, partly because of the balance of dialogue to combat and the length of individual missions, partly because those damn Mako missions are annoying as hell.
A related issue is the fact that a lot of these purported short games also tend to be highly scripted and/or linear. That's a different can of worms that I'd prefer not to open, but it's impossible to avoid mentioning that maybe part of the issue behind "games are getting shorter" is that game worlds aren't as interesting to explore anymore, because there's just less to explore. Developers don't put in silly Easter Eggs very much anymore, there aren't all kinds of secrets and hidden passageways to find, and even in open-world games there's usually very little reason to actually explore, because there just aren't those small, fun things to find anymore.
So, Escapambillidandoes, what's your take on this?
[HEADING=1]EDIT:[/HEADING]
All right, I think I should clarify that the issue I'm really taking in this thread is that a lot of the time when I see people talking about how short a game is, they're saying it like it's a negative just because it's a short game. As if that diminishes the quality of the overall product by itself. As if being a longer game would somehow automatically make it a better game, regardless of the quality of the longer content.
) and it's still not finished (but close). I'd rather play more, but then again, I'm fine with the playtime so far.
