20-hour games are "short"?

[DustyDrB]

It depends on the type of game. I love both Enslaved (~8 hours long) and Fallout: New Vegas (~40 hours). If I really love a game, a short length won't bother me. I'll almost surely play it again. Twenty hours is on the lower end of what I expect from an RPG, but some games (like the first Mass Effect) I hold in high regard despite them struggling to meet that mark.

 

[zehydra]

Speedruns are not really what you want to base gamelength on, as you already know how to do everything perfectly in a speed run typically.

You should calculate average time to beat on first play-through, since that in the end will be the experience of the game that mattered the most.

 

[CCountZero]

Part of the reason why I'm genuinely hopeful that Baldur's Gate won't be the only oldie to get a spit-shine polish.

I love that I can now play it again, without having a load of tech problems to deal with, but what I love even more than that is for people who weren't around in those early years of games, getting to experience exactly what the old-timers mean when they're lamenting the steady decline in game length.

And the original BG isn't even the best example, BG2:SoA will be getting "enhanced" as well, or so the word is. Can't wait.

Personally, I think that games these days are plagued by being too easy. I'm not the type of RPG-lover who despises first-person shooters, but I do wish that they'd be a lot harder. I can't even remember when the last time I got stuck on a first-person shooter level was, but it may well have been prior to the 21st century.
(And yes, while I'll admit that I never start out on the very hardest difficulty, my second play-through always goes straight there. I wanna know how the game "handles" first.)

 

[josemlopes]

Games can be longer, but if they fail to keep the interest for that long I rather have them short. And short games arent bad as a rule, COD 4 and the first Portal prove this. Never got to finish the Portal 2 though, lost interest by the end of that "old Aperture" section.

I do like long games too, like Dark Souls, the thing it that they really need to fill their lenght with interesting content instead of stretching the same boring stuff (the Assassins Creed series is a big offender of this, I want to plan and assassinate people, not pick up flowers)

 

[irani_che]

i dont usually buy games at full price

to me, a game is too short if it feels like it cut out suddenly or just never really got going

and there is no point in having game that is very long and feels it

ME3 was over in less than 20 hours, in that time you could have cut out a kidney and i wouldnt notice

Portal felt short to me because i felt that there was plenty i wanted to do with the portal gun, hell give me an open world level just to dick about on

I like total war games but shogun 2 felt like it drags on, it could have 500 hours of gameplay but i didnt want to play it

 

[shrekfan246]

Personally, I think that games these days are plagued by being too easy. I'm not the type of RPG-lover who despises first-person shooters, but I do wish that they'd be a lot harder. I can't even remember when the last time I got stuck on a first-person shooter level was, but it may well have been prior to the 21st century.
(And yes, while I'll admit that I never start out on the very hardest difficulty, my second play-through always goes straight there. I wanna know how the game "handles" first.)

"Games are getting easier" is another can of worms as well, much like "games are too linear". It's also a much slipperier slope to try discussing, because when you're talking to somebody who has been playing video games for 20+ years, is it really that video games are getting easier, or is the issue just that the person is better at playing them? If you've been playing first-person shooters since Doom first hit the market, obviously you're going to know what you're getting into if you pick up Halo, Resistance, Call of Duty, or Crysis. But to someone who has just barely gotten into playing video games, learning the mechanics those games hold could be immensely more difficult, and thus the overall difficulty of the game is much higher.

For instance, I've never really played RTS games, and because of that I'm absolutely terrible at them and even something like Starcraft 2 is incredibly difficult for me, whereas if you found somebody who has been playing RTS' since the early 90's, they would probably tell you that Starcraft 2 is the most simplified, "dumbed down", and easy RTS currently on the market.

 

[Mistilteinn]

It really does depend on what genre of game we're talking about before we can call 20 hours 'short'. On the one hand, a 20 hour RPG would seem pretty short, while on the other hand an FPS with a 20 hour campaign would seem ludicrously lengthy. That being said, if a game is only five or six hours long but lends itself a lot of replay value--or has some quality that makes the buyer want to replay it--then it's a good buy. Personally, I remember being able to beat the original Uncharted in around 5 hours after my first few playthroughs, but I'd just play it over and over since I found it so enjoyable. Other times, I'd beat a short game like Megaman 9 and never touch it again since it was fun, but I didn't feel the want to replay it, despite it having replay value.

 

[Exius Xavarus]

To me, it's a matter of whether the game feels short or not. Games like Tales of Vesperia/Symphonia/the Abyss/Graces f and White Knight Chronicles feel like really, really fucking long games. Even Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning feels long as hell. I'd go so far as to say that Halo: Combat Evolved is a long ass game. That's just me, though.

Now, Dishonored is a game that feels short. My first time playing through it, I took about 20ish hours, which is quite an acceptable length. But Dishonored felt short. It felt like there could have been more- should have been more.

I think there's a difference between numerical play time and actual content to play. Also as others said, it's largely genre-dependent.

 

[mirage202]

My personal dislike of "short" games is the price.

If I get Game A that has a 40+ hour campaign for £30/$60 that is fine with me, but if I then pay the exact same price for Game B that is only 8/10/12/15/20 hours worth of campaign, that is a bad thing.

Now if they could set what constitutes long and short as an industry standard, and then charge money accordingly, perfect.

Indie games can be good examples of this, somewhere between $5 to $20, and you can end up with many many hours more than most AAA titles, some even going so far as to offer infinite replay potential.

 

[Rednog]

To be honest I really don't mind a 6-10 hour game if it is a finely crafted experience. It honestly drives me nuts when a game pads things out. For example a games like Saints Row or GTA would be much shorter if every other mission didn't send you half way across the damn map, granted when they give you exposition while driving that's fine, but when you're traveling in silence it's dumb. Or games like Skyrim, I think I finished all the achievement based missions (what I would call the meat of the game) in like 30 or so hours, because I quick traveled everywhere and I just collected upgrades instead of piling everything in my inventory. But I know people who have like 300 hours in Skyrim because they're exploring everything, but I honestly don't see the point when almost everything outside the core missions is just copy/pasted generic stuff, oh great you get to clear out another 20 rooms filled with the same draugr you've killed a hundred times before.

Don't get me wrong, as a kid I would eat up stuff like this because I wanted the most time for my buck. But nowadays when I can actually afford games but don't have all the free time of a kid I want that concentrated experience. I don't want things to be distilled across hours of fluff.

I would actually argue that this trend of people arguing that if a game isn't like 20+ hours it's not worth buying is more toxic to gaming than people accepting 6-10 hour games. Why do you think companies are tacking on all this garbage multiplayer? Because it "adds hours".

 

[shrekfan246]

My personal dislike of "short" games is the price.

If I get Game A that has a 40+ hour campaign for £30/$60 that is fine with me, but if I then pay the exact same price for Game B that is only 8/10/12/15/20 hours worth of campaign, that is a bad thing.

Okay, but consider this:
Game A has a 40+ hour campaign, but you have absolutely no fun while playing through it.

Game B has a 10-20 hour campaign, but it's some of the most fun you've ever had playing a video game.

Which one is worth more, then?

 

[Olas]

I've had Risk games that lasted over 20 hours, and even then we usually stop because we get bored not because the game is over. Still, I'd rather a game be short than tedious or slow, so if you only have 20 hours worth of content, 20 hours is probably the best length for your game. But then also charge less for the little game since you're giving me less playtime.

Another factor to consider is replay value, I've probably played Metroid Prime close to 20 times now. I pretty much have the entire game memorized. Anyway, it's safe to say I've probably milked close to 500 hours out of it by now just because of how much I love revisiting it.

 

[Reven]

Speedruns are not really what you want to base gamelength on, as you already know how to do everything perfectly in a speed run typically.

You should calculate average time to beat on first play-through, since that in the end will be the experience of the game that mattered the most.

I agree, especially because using the logic that a game's length is determined by the fastest run possible, a huge game can be considered criminally short! My favorite example is Morrowind, in which i saw a video of someone completing it within 5 minutes (not including the intro, no cheats, just alot of luck) Or another that completed it in less than 7 minutes, which required more luck, and possibly no glitches but i would need a confirm.

OT: personally for an rpg i feel it has to be at least 30 hours, It took me 40 hours to beat Kotor 1 and i wanst going for a complete play-through either.

 

[CCountZero]

Personally, I think that games these days are plagued by being too easy. I'm not the type of RPG-lover who despises first-person shooters, but I do wish that they'd be a lot harder. I can't even remember when the last time I got stuck on a first-person shooter level was, but it may well have been prior to the 21st century.
(And yes, while I'll admit that I never start out on the very hardest difficulty, my second play-through always goes straight there. I wanna know how the game "handles" first.)

"Games are getting easier" is another can of worms as well, much like "games are too linear". It's also a much slipperier slope to try discussing, because when you're talking to somebody who has been playing video games for 20+ years, is it really that video games are getting easier, or is the issue just that the person is better at playing them? If you've been playing first-person shooters since Doom first hit the market, obviously you're going to know what you're getting into if you pick up Halo, Resistance, Call of Duty, or Crysis. But to someone who has just barely gotten into playing video games, learning the mechanics those games hold could be immensely more difficult, and thus the overall difficulty of the game is much higher.

For instance, I've never really played RTS games, and because of that I'm absolutely terrible at them and even something like Starcraft 2 is incredibly difficult for me, whereas if you found somebody who has been playing RTS' since the early 90's, they would probably tell you that Starcraft 2 is the most simplified, "dumbed down", and easy RTS currently on the market.

I don't really disagree with anything you're saying here. I know plenty of people who are in the situation that you describe.

I might have been unclear, as I was thinking more along the lines of the range of difficulty, rather than every level of difficulty being made harder.

Back in the old days, you'd see a much wider range of difficulty options, many of them far beyond "how quickly does the enemy react", which seems to be the most common factor in games today.

The old Unreal Tournament featured that kind of difficulty style, granted, but in these modern days that is almost all there ever is. For shooters, it's a very good way to introduce newbies to the game, but once the mechanics have been mastered, it just becomes "unfair".
Case in point, Unreal Tournament is very easy to get into, starting on Newbie. Slide it up to Master? Yeah, that's just... no.

Another style often used, and featured prominently in games like the Mass Effect series, is how much punishment an enemy can take prior to death. That, IMO, isn't a bad style to use in that sort of game, but which would for obvious reasons not work well in any of the "modern military" shooters.

Anyway, my point is, a large part of what made gaming great in the past, was that you really felt like you were learning, and getting better.
Eventually, you'd start to feel that spill over into other activities, and you'd actually start thinking faster, and paying attention to things you might not have noticed before.

And that's before we get into games that actually do try to copy something from reality, and teach you how it functions.

Off the top of my head, the only modern example I can think of is Minecraft, teaching me circuitry.

 

[shrekfan246]

Brevity Snip

All right, I understand what you mean. I think maybe "simpler" might've been a better fit than "easy"? Not "simpler" as in stupider, of course, but in the fact that a lot of games do play out very similarly to their contemporaries. If you've played one "modern" first-person shooter, you'll probably know the gist of how to play through most "modern" shooters, and like-wise for a fair number of RPGs or MMOs or action or hack&slash games.

Simple vs. Complex games is a debate I don't want to get into in this thread, though... I can certainly agree that older games were most definitely more complex than a lot of games being made today, but like most things that's both a blessing and a curse.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

The problem isn't the length of the games, it's with how easy they are these days. And honestly, it's the consumer's fault more than the developer's. See, here's the thing; games used to be short. SHORT. We're talking you can beat them in under 30 minutes short; maybe under an hour if it's a longer game. The catch is that the games were also legendarily hard; hard to where even to this day people can brag about being able to beat the first Castlevania; 25 years after it was released!

They could do that back then, though. Games were expected to be hard. Any game that you could beat within a few days of buying it was laughed all the way to FuncoLand (anyone else remember that place?), it was the hard games you wanted to hold onto. Those were the ones that beat you; those were the ones that you wanted to get revenge against. Then... I dunno, something changed.

Enter the PS2 era (when I first heard about this kinda thing); enter... Devil May Cry. This was not a game that went easy on the gamers, and gamers absolutely revolted against it. Everywhere I went I was hearing stories about people flooding into Gamestops to return DMC because they didn't like how hard it got on the higher difficulty settings. Even with the option of the easier settings, people didn't like that the hard mode was... well... hard. Maybe it got started before DMC, but it was the first game where I really noticed that kinda thing. Gamers just stopped liking hard games.

Now let's head over to the business side of things. 3D graphics are EXPENSIVE today; especially if you want the cutting edge. If you want really-good-but-not-spectacular graphics, they're manageable, but that won't cut it in the Triple-A market. So graphics are EXPENSIVE; not just with a capitol E, but with every letter capitalized... and italicized. You could probably buy a small island nation with the money it takes to develop a Triple-A title, and the biggest chunk of that is going straight into the graphics.

*Ahem* Anyway... so graphics are EXPEN- *slap* Sorry... they cost a lot, and gamers don't like challenge anymore, they want to be able to beat their games, and they've demonstrated that they don't want many obstacles in their way. The result? Any Triple-A game today is going to have a very short campaign mode. Short, and easy. Now granted, some games get away with challenge. Halo's Legendary difficulty is just that, and Gears of War can be pretty merciless as well. They probably get away with this because the high difficulty slips by while everyone is whooping over the multiplayer; cheese through normal mode of the campaign (if you even play it), then just hop over the multiplayer.

So in short, games are as short as they are (while seldom having the challenge to compensate) is because graphics are too expensive to risk the whiny majority of gamers avoiding your game like the plague. Unless you have a good multiplayer mode (IE: Gears, Halo, or CoD) to distract the ignorant masses, then giving even the option of higher difficulty is too much of a risk in today's market; and if your game's main selling point is going to be the multiplayer, why waste too many funds on a single player campaign that you know most of your target audience is going to ignore or just cheese through once?

So either way you slice it, today is a very sad time for single player content in the Triple-A market. If you want a good single player game, stick to the indie market, or play yesterday's Triple-A games.

 

[Vault101]

6 hours is not worth full price...it just isn't

20 hours is a good short-ish general length....10 is a "mabye"

 

[Vault101]

The problem isn't the length of the games, it's with how easy they are these days. And honestly, it's the consumer's fault more than the developer's.

oh bugger off...seriously, its a chicken or the egg thing

[quote/]See, here's the thing; games used to be short. SHORT. We're talking you can beat them in under 30 minutes short; maybe under an hour if it's a longer game. The catch is that the games were also legendarily hard; hard to where even to this day people can brag about being able to beat the first Castlevania; 25 years after it was released![/quote]
to me that doesnt sound like a good thing....sound more frustrating than fun, while I like challenge I also like to have a big old adventure...like assasins creed or mass effect, I like story


[quote/] Any Triple-A game today is going to have a very short campaign mode. Short, and easy.[/quote]
are we only talking about FPS's here?

[quote/]So either way you slice it, today is a very sad time for single player games in the Triple-A market. If you want a good single player game, stick to the indie market, or play yesterday's Triple-A games.[/quote]
indie? like what? Journey? Unfinished Swan? they are art peices...but easy shallow example of games, this year weve had Borlerlands 2, hitman, far cry 3, ME3, Dishonoured, max payne 3, sleeping dogs....I mean for fucks sake..

I don't know much about the indie scene anyway

 

[Terrible Opinions]

Yeah, totally depends on the type of game and the price. Generally speaking, a 40 hour FPS campaign would be boring. A 20 hour RPG is an appetizer. $60 for a five hour game would be a pretty bad dollar:time ratio given the sheer roiling mass of other games out there that I could have spent that money on instead.

Many old games padded their length with difficulty, life/continue systems, and high memorization requirements.

 

[sXeth]

Its at least partially related to pricing.

Taking some games Iv'e played this year.

Dishonored cost 70 odd bucks and can be largely taken down in 6 hours (or less). Soem folks'll replay it to hit other paths, but many not.

AC3 costs the same amount, and hovers in around 8-10ish hours.

Skyrim's still at the same price point, and is probably going to eat up at least 20, even taking it pretty head on.

Hell Yeah only lasts 3-4, but also only charges 12 bucks.


It's not necessarily that the games are too short, its that if they start dipping below 7 hours and don't adjust their pricing, they're becoming a very dubious investment, effectively costing more then a theatre ticket, or (as 10/hour is min wage here) requiring you to actually outwork the time spent playing the game to pay for it.