20-hour games are "short"?

[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.

 

[Dethenger]

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.

Wholeheartedly agree. I mean, there are people who can beat Dark Souls in thirty minutes because they know every shortcut, every enemy, every parry opportunity, etc., by heart. That doesn't by any stretch of the imagination make it a "short" game.

I think the only time a game's length should be a target of criticism is if that game is somehow unsatisfactory for how long it is. There are games that, while short, provide a satisfactory experience for the little time you sunk into it. On the other hand, there are games that simply can't carry themselves for how long they are to beat. Try and imagine if Call of Duty did have a 20-25 hour campaign: Would you want to spend 25 hours on a campaign that consists largely of moving from point A to point B while people shout context at you via radio? I would think not; for me, a short campaign has never been an issue with Call of Duty, because, sure, I'll eat potato chips, but eventually they'll start to make me feel sick.

 

[crazy_coug99]

I think it is a relative nature of how linear the game play is. If you take a good portion of FPS games where the story can be completed in a day, that would be considered short. But since these games are (now) marketed for the multiplayer it can be considered long depending on how long one plays. Now if you look at games like the Elder Scrolls or (in my case Assassins Creed Revelations) a player can spend a week on it and consider it to be a long game because of how much content is put into the game. Also needed to be noted is the replay value. If the story is short (or boring) the replay value would be low. Where as larger games like Borderlands those have high replay values because of the the multiple options in the game.

So in my opinion, the reviewers look at the single player campaign with a couple of hours in multiplayer (when given). so in total, a gamer has to look at the size of the game, how much the developer puts into those aspects (single and multiplayer), and the variety of that content there is.

 

[Treaos Serrare]

maybe i'm just biased, since i love 100+ hour rpgs but yeah a game i can beat in a day is kinda disappointing

 

[someonehairy-ish]

I don't think it really is a matter of games getting shorter. It's just that when we talk about 'games being longer' we're generally talking about the games we played as kids. And when we were kids, we were shit at games. I have yet to see a kid who isn't shit at games.
Me and a friend got through the first Halo game when I was 8 and it took us the course of several weeks, playing for an hour so every couple of days. Fast forward to now, and I could run the whole game in perhaps and hour and a bit, on normal difficulty?

Just a case in point.

Plus, older games tended to be much harder. So it wasn't so much that the game was long, it was that you were redoing chunks of the game over and over again and that made it seem long. Like the first prince of persia. It was, in itself, a pretty good length game, but only when you add on the fact that you were repeating everything a few times then it suddenly seems a whole lot longer.

 

[GAunderrated]

Game length doesn't matter to me at all. I can enjoy a 2-3 hour game as long as its an amazing experience such as Portal. Some of my favorite games I can beat in a matter of a few hours but they are so good I want to play them over and over again. I find it rare for people to say that they replay a 50 hour game over and over again.

 

[lacktheknack]

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.

However, I've put 47 hours into Mirror's Edge (two or three hour campaign), compared to the 33 hours I've pumped into Batman: Arkham Asylum (ten plus hour campaign), according to Steam. And that doesn't include the time I spent in Mirror's Edge from before "The Great Wipe" (at least twenty more hours).

Which one is worth more now?

 

[DrunkenMonkey]

20 hour games are not short. 20 hour games with no replay value gameplay wise, or a very good story are.

There's a distinction

 

[Sonic Doctor]

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?

So much this.

Seriously people, if you find game that is only a few hours long to be amazing, the definition of length changes.

The same goes for games that you think are terrible.

Example: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2. My first play-through took me around six hours(two hours was spent horsing around and looking for collectables). For the price, especially for me since I got the collector's edition, that was a damn short game. It was my first disappointing game purchase in almost a decade. Even though the game was short, it was so bad that it felt too long to me. The fight with Vader at the end was one of the most aggravating, stupid, and long boss fights I've experienced.

I will give my solid game length chart.

5 hours and under: Unacceptably short.
6-9 h: Short
10-15 h: Medium range:
16-25: Long
26-40: Very long
41-60: Ultra long
61-90: Ultra Mega long
91-???: It is a long ass game and I'm probably not going to get done with everything I want to do in it.

Edit: But as I said, how much I like the game can change that chart.

 

[shrekfan246]

I will give my solid game length chart.

5 hours and under: Unacceptably short.
6-9 h: Short
10-15 h: Medium range:
16-25: Long
26-40: Very long
41-60: Ultra long
61-90: Ultra Mega long
91-???: It is a long ass game and I'm probably not going to get done with everything I want to do in it.

Edit: But as I said, how much I like the game can change that chart.

Even if I didn't like your chart already (which I do), Janitor stealing Ted out of Kelso's office makes it so that I automatically must agree with the contents of your post.

But yeah, the point I'm trying to make is that the length of a game doesn't automatically make it better or worse. Short games can be excellent, long games can be terrible, and ignoring a game that might be really good because "it's short" just strikes me as a really juvenile thing to do. Refusing to buy any game that's shorter than [Insert Preferred Number Here] just because it's not that long is even worse, in my opinion.

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

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?

So much this.

Seriously people, if you find game that is only a few hours long to be amazing, the definition of length changes.

The same goes for games that you think are terrible.

Example: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2. My first play-through took me around six hours(two hours was spent horsing around and looking for collectables). For the price, especially for me since I got the collector's edition, that was a damn short game. It was my first disappointing game purchase in almost a decade. Even though the game was short, it was so bad that it felt too long to me. The fight with Vader at the end was one of the most aggravating, stupid, and long boss fights I've experienced.

I will give my solid game length chart.

5 hours and under: Unacceptably short.
6-9 h: Short
10-15 h: Medium range:
16-25: Long
26-40: Very long
41-60: Ultra long
61-90: Ultra Mega long
91-???: It is a long ass game and I'm probably not going to get done with everything I want to do in it.

Edit: But as I said, how much I like the game can change that chart.

I agree with most of this, and the only game that I can argue with that kinda breaks it is saying that Journey is probably the best short game I've ever played.

I'm more of a 'Am I having fun?' and does it justify the game's length, but I'm totally fine with a game being 10 hours if I think it's great because I've played some really long games that bored me to tears.

 

[CityofTreez]

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.

Sleeping Dogs, Dishonored, Borderlands 2, Hitman, Far-Cry 3, The Walking Dead, Mass Effect 3...

What more do you want?

 

[The Abhorrent]

I don't think that people are directly lamenting that games are getting shorter in general these days, but rather that the amount of quality 40+ hour long games (referring to the time needed to complete the well-paced central narrative on a typical or first time playthrough; it's self-contained and isn't split over multiple games either) has declined to almost nil since the HD generation. "Endless" games, such as MMOs and sandbox RPGs (not to mention any form of multiplayer), aren't really counted due to their lacking narratives; those seem to have risen, but it might be due to online gaming becoming much more prominent.

---

But yes, where have all the "grand adventures" gone?

Well, there's still a few examples from the modern era:
- Xenoblade Chronicles
- Dragon Age: Origins
- Final Fantasy XIII (there aren't a lot of candidates)
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Skyward Sword may also qualify, but I haven't really looked too much into it)

... yeah, already running out of ideas. While the Mass Effect trilogy qualifies as a whole, the fact it's split up into several games doesn't quite help things. Anyhow, the key point is that the story must feel long... but at the same time, not arduous and repetitive. These types of games seemed to be much more common before the last console generation, and looking at the above examples, only one (FFXIII) is known for its graphical prowess (though DA:O doesn't look overly dated).

40 hours is, for the most part, just a benchmark. Games which break that limit without becoming redundant and stale before their conclusion tend to be revered, and their general absence within the last generation has left something of an empty void which simply cannot be satiated.

 

[Cavan]

I personally feel it's entirely genre dependant and promise dependant. If the game promises me an 'epic' campaign, it better be epic or it better feel long and enjoyable enough to compensate. Price factors in, a cheap game can have less expected of it than an expensive one.

For a single player FPS 10 hours is fine, 20 hours would be great. Both the crysis games took me about 10 hours to finish and their length felt good. Both the first two Max Payne games took me about 4-5 hours to complete, they're a little on the short side considering and sometimes a bit padded even then, Max Payne 3 took me 12 hours to complete including restarting bashing my head at the highest difficulty because it was set higher than i'm used to.

For an indie game 2-10 hours is more than acceptable depending on price. Shank is a 3 hour game and I felt happy with it, Limbo is a 2 hour game and I was also happy with that.

For an open world game 30 hours would be better, without reaching a point where all the side missions become samey and the gameplay stagnant.

Occasionally something like the binding of isaac or FTL will blow that out the water and give me a great run for my money.

I put about 80 hours into Skyrim before losing interest, haven't touched any DLCs, that actually felt a bit long to me.

 

[Vault101]

snip.

really? combine all 3 mass effect games thats almost 100 hours give or take..I don;t know of many games that have that amount of time as standard (standrd meaning NOTHING aside from purley the main missions/tasks)

plus I'm not sure you could make a game like mass effect on that kind of scale 0_0 as one...thats insane

 

[Vault101]

Sleeping Dogs, Dishonored, Borderlands 2, Hitman, Far-Cry 3, The Walking Dead, Mass Effect 3...

What more do you want?

he wants the late 90's/early 2000's back...

seriously I wish people wouldn't make shit up...its fucking annoying