20-hour games are "short"?

[Bvenged]

I concur, under 15-20 hours is short in my eyes also. When I buy a game it's an investment, and the return is longevity and entertainment. That's why I posted Ghost Recon FS as my worst game of 2012. It was too short, had no replay value, required little player input and did not test the players initiative one bit even in harder difficulties... It was essentially a 30-40fps real-time CGI b-class action movie, with poor script and pointless explosions, mandatory action sequences and no repercussions for being persistently shit at the game )therefore no incentive to push yourself, learn and get better at it).

Skyrim, Dragon's Dogma, Dishonored, JC2, Minecraft and Hitman/AC all prove games can be done well with a long shelf life and plenty of fun, either through varied playthroughs, excessive open worlds or sandbox scenarios and challenges and arbitrary fun.

Even FPS I expect at least 10 hours of non-repetitive gameplay, with additional modes to make up another 5-10 hours on top. Halo and CoD do it well for the multiplayer incentive - but games should hit the 15-20 hour mark BEFORE they consider multiplayer, as it should always be assumed that the multiplayer will be mediocre at best (Max Payne 3) and only add another 2 to 3 hours as opposed to 20+ to hundreds of hours more game time.

Games that do not hit this guideline, in my eyes, are not worth £40 ($60). I will buy them for £30, or £20, or most likely, not at all. Like I said, games are investments, not products to use then throw away. IF they can't bring that to the table, there' no point in buying them. I'll spend the money on booze, food, the cinema/dvds, or someone else's game.

I'd wager that the limited length of games recently has been the size of Xbox data DVD's, and PC download sizes. Because we're not all Super-Fast Broadband, and we don't all have blu-ray optical drives on our machines, printing multiple discs and excessive download size can be avoided by cutting a gig or two from your game's size.

Give it a year or two and we'll likely see game lengths increase double to five-fold as international infrastructure speeds up with 4G and duel-fibre, and Xbox and PlayStation 8th gen consoles contain blu-ray drives. It will happen, we just have to be patient in this end-of-gen era.

 

[Neonsilver]

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).

I think it's not really a good idea to compare speedrunning sonic or playing banjo kazooie when you already know where everything is when you want to make a point about the length of a game.
In a game like Banjo Kazooie is a game where you have to search and find a lot of items, so if you want to compare it you have to compare the first playthrough since the search is a big part of the game.
The same goes for a speedrun and if you take the practice and multiple tries it actually has a lot more playtime.
And games like sonic felt a lot longer because they were often quite hard to beat.

On topic:
A short game is not a bad thing if it's a good game and a long game isn't automatically good, often long games are just padded. It depends on the games.

 

[Arina Love]

For RPG especially J-RPG 20h is short. I expect my J-RPGs last minimum of 30 hours, ideal is 50-55. For everything else it's very comfortable length.

 

[Ryan Minns]

Although games on average are getting shorter (Even RPG's barely reach decent lengths) It doesn't become unforgivable if the short time you spend is ok. Portal comes to mind for me, it was short as all hell and yet it's length was ok because it didn't pad anything. Some games try to artificially lengthen themselves by forcing you to stay put and defend for a specific period of time or kill a specific amount of enemies and while not a game breaker if it occurs too often it's just plain bad. Also when the developers try and force you to play a single way and the AI has a heart attack if you don't do it and it allows you to cruise through much faster it kinda sucks (Gears of war I'm looking at you)

Sure short games have always existed but when I pay $110+ For a console game and I have completed everything I care to complete in under 5 hours on my very first play through I honestly can't fathom why people tolerate that shit.

 

[The Lugz]

I would say 15 to 20 Hours is the ideal game length myself... I mean occasionally I WANT some more of the game, but I rarely feel truly dissatisfied at the length of a game around this length.

i don't think there really is an ideal length as such, only a point at which your currency is being burned faster than you're making it
because let's face it there are so-many gaming hours out there that you cant play every game completely
so the limiting factor is cash because time is greater than your life expectancy
and that isn't fluff, according to the Bethesda forums just the fallout and elder scrolls played to completion comes to 1.6 years of game-play that is of-course everything completed plus achievements and Easter eggs

there's 4% of your life gone right there ( not including breaks, sleep, food ect ie, productivity hours )

yikes, right?

anyway, game length.. don't think it matters on the whole

 

[Flames66]

I don't understand how/why people gauge games as being "20 hour" or "40 hour" or "5 hour" games. Everyone plays at different speeds and the average speed might have no relevance what so ever to the person playing.

 

[Jason Rayes]

snip.

really? Combine all 3 mass effect games that's almost 100 hours give or take..I don't know of many games that have that amount of time as standard (standard meaning NOTHING aside from purely 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

I played all three back to back when 3 came out and it took me about 240 hours. That wasn't "standard" as you probably guessed, plus I had all the DLC this time.

 

[BNguyen]

It all seems to me that games that have both a single player campaign and a multiplayer option tend to put more work into their multiplayer section, where the single player seems tacked on, which is why most single player parts are getting shorter and shorter - the biggest players of this technique are the first person shooter games of the last few years, which is probably also why the games themselves don't look too different from one another year after year. The companies found a process that works in their favor - the gamers want to kill each other in arenas, fine, they like the guns that they have formed strategies around, okay, trying something new at this point would most likely lose these companies money because frankly, we as gamers are not telling them to change or at the very least, we are not showing them that first-person shooter combat arenas have grown stale. Pretty visuals and Michael Bay style explosions are only pretty for a short while before it gets repetitive.
We need to be shifting ourselves from this now cesspool of a genre and find something that tries to break the mold and offer something different, which is why I typically look forward to seeing what Nintendo puts out - most (and remember I said most) of their titles are not first person shooter copies, and while some of their big name titles tend to be upgraded versions of past titles in series, it isn't always like this and most games tend to offer something different each time - for example the kirby and donkey kong games. While kirby not so much, donkey kong did show quite a change with the addition of Donkey Konga and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat through the use of the bongo stylized controller.

 

[Rylee Fox]

For me it depends on the genre and the game itself. I expect most RPGs to take me around 30 hours to complete while doing little to no sidequests. When they start to run longer than 30 hours I often just want the story to hurry up and end.

Digimon World 3 as a good example of that. I like the game but it runs 40-50 hours and I just get annoyed at its length and want the story to end already. Persona 4 however took me over 100 hours and I didn't want it to end.

Some games I think are just as long as they need to be. Portal and Bastion are examples I like to use for that. They are fairly short games, but I really don't think they need to be any longer than they are.

I mainly play games for the single player aspect. (I have no one to play games online with and most games I get are single player only anyway) If a games single player can't hold up to my personal preferences, I do not buy it, regardless of the multiplayer. As a result I tend to ignore FPS games.

 

[Vault101]

We need to be shifting ourselves from this now cesspool of a genre and find something that tries to break the mold and offer something different,

this is a problem that seems to affect the FPS genre first and foremost (which is a shame given how good of a storytelling tool it can be) other genres are doing "more or less" ok considering other things

[quote/]which is why I typically look forward to seeing what Nintendo puts out - most (and remember I said most) of their titles are not first person shooter copies,[/quote]
many other games are not eather....you know what? I have rarely ever played a brown style shooter

[quote/]and while some of their big name titles tend to be upgraded versions of past titles in series, it isn't always like this and most games tend to offer something different each time - for example the kirby and donkey kong games. While kirby not so much, donkey kong did show quite a change with the addition of Donkey Konga and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat through the use of the bongo stylized controller.[/quote]
not every game is a brown first person shooter

just because Nintendo rehashes their games doesnt not make it any better than COD doing it just because their fucking Nintendo and everyone gets a hard-on for zelda and mario/rant

yes its just my opinion, and yes I'm derailing topic by talking about ninteno and yes I am being an ass

 

[Vault101]

I played all three back to back when 3 came out and it took me about 240 hours. That wasn't "standard" as you probably guessed, plus I had all the DLC this time.

DLC would probably had 10 or so hours overall (mabye more) not to mention all that side stuff in ME1 which even I didnt bother with

also ME3 was probably thr shortest wasnt it? I think it was about 35 hours for me

 

[Monster_user]

If a game is shorter than 20 hours it needs replayability. Sonic has replayability, and many people still play the originals. Most modern games do not seem to create an environment that provides enjoyable replayability, especially the more story heavy games. Most Indie titles provide better replayability on average.

Zelda OoT is a game that I hold up as repayable. Fishing, archery, bowling, ocarina playing, all in addition to the regular combat, and exploration. Like the gambling, romance and fish of Mass Effect. I don't remember ME having much extra content aside from hidden missions. Mass Effect is the third type, multiple outcomes to every choice, makes each playthrough unique.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

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.

Thanks, it came from when I learned how make gifs, and at the time I was on my second watch through of Scrubs. I also have one of the Janitor doing a jig which is from the first season, and also one that is from JD's daydream at the carnival, where Dr.Cox is playing "Wack-a-Newbie". I'll probably end up rotating to one of them when I decide to change.

On the length thing, yeah, I'm baffled by how people set such arbitrary rules when it comes to playing/rating games. I'm willing to bet that such people miss-out on some experiences they would have loved.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

I played all three back to back when 3 came out and it took me about 240 hours. That wasn't "standard" as you probably guessed, plus I had all the DLC this time.

DLC would probably had 10 or so hours overall (mabye more) not to mention all that side stuff in ME1 which even I didnt bother with

also ME3 was probably thr shortest wasnt it? I think it was about 35 hours for me

Sometimes I wish I could see how other people play games. I can't use my friends, because they play games like I do.

The reason I say this is that ME3 took me 55 hours, that was playing on casual and trying to do everything I could find. I don't know, maybe I'm a little too thorough.

The one that made me wonder the most was DA2. With all the people razzing on that game and I saw people saying it was too short, that some said they completed it in under 17 hours. I just couldn't believe them because my playtime showed 48 hours when I beat it. I don't care how long DA:O was, I don't call DA2 being 48 hours as too short.

 

[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.

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?

I work on the assumption that I enjoyed both games, if I have doubts about a game, I don't buy it. I do not mindlessly consume anything that releases with a million dollar advertising budget.

As for others comments about padding and such, you act as if that doesn't already happen. If you are willing to rush out and buy something without the prior research then.. A fool deserves to be parted from his money.

Anywho, as I said, that is my personal view on the matter, you do not have to agree or assume I'm demanding it from the industry to be forced on every gamer out there. To me a games length has to be worth the money I'm being asked to pay for it. Usually I tend to go for RTS games, so value for money is pretty much guaranteed. With FPS games though, an 8 hour campaign is not worth 60 bucks IMO, especially an 8 hour set piece filled extended cutscene.

 

[devotedsniper]

All i have to say is i remember when fps's had single players that lasted over 10 hours, i can complete any of the newer COD's (or just about any other fps) within 6 hours, the only games i usually get my moneys worth for are either when they don't have multiplayer (witcher 2 20+ hour campaign) or games where the only real multiplayer is co-op. In fact other than rpg's and rts's i manage to finish the campaign usually in under 10 hours, and yes i don't finish everything but i don't want to sit around doing sub-quests which add very little or nothing to the actual story.

In fact the only games that come to mind lately which have single player content worth more than 15 hours that I've played in the last few months is far cry 3, the walking dead and hitman absolution. Maybe it's just cause i'm getting old (22) but i only play co-op when it comes to multiplayer now or games which require teamwork, i also cannot stand 12year olds screaming down the microphone because you wont do things there way or you kill them.

It all depends really, if a game has a story which is actually gripping i don't mind if it's somewhat short so long as i want to replay it later on, but a lot of modern games now i just can't be bothered to replay.

 

[Jodah]

Any length game is okay for me. What matters to me is the price. I try to follow the rule 1 hour = 1 dollar. So a sixty dollar game has to potentially last me sixty hours. Anything less and I won't buy it until it's on sale or I rent it.

Edit: I try to treat DLC the same but give more leeway there depending on how much I like the base game.

 

[shrekfan246]

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).

I think it's not really a good idea to compare speedrunning sonic or playing banjo kazooie when you already know where everything is when you want to make a point about the length of a game.
In a game like Banjo Kazooie is a game where you have to search and find a lot of items, so if you want to compare it you have to compare the first playthrough since the search is a big part of the game.
The same goes for a speedrun and if you take the practice and multiple tries it actually has a lot more playtime.
And games like sonic felt a lot longer because they were often quite hard to beat.

Since you're the second person who has latched onto this, I feel the need to point out that I'm not the best Sonic or Banjo-Kazooie player in the world, and I haven't played either of those games in close to ten years, but I can still beat them in ~1 hour and ~5 hours respectively. Especially with Sonic, actually, the stages only last an average of 3 minutes and you've got six stages with three acts each. The average play-time of a full run without going through any special stages EDIT: and with little/no dying :End EDIT should only be 54 minutes. I'm not even talking about blasting through levels as fast as you can here, either, because some of the stages can be done far faster than 3 minutes (I believe the fastest time for Green Hill Zone Act 1 has been under a minute).

As for Banjo-Kazooie, again I feel the need to clarify that I have not played the game in nearly a decade and never even made it to the last two levels when I was originally playing, and yet when I picked it up again earlier this year, I had very little issues with getting through it rather quickly.

Yes, going into a game like Banjo-Kazooie with absolutely zero knowledge of it will probably mean you play it for significantly longer than five hours if you end up liking it, but how is that not true of any other game? I'm using numbers from my last play-throughs of these games as punctuation to the fact that these are numbers done by a person who has been playing video games for twenty years, not a person who just picked up a controller for the first time in their life. Because that's the point. To a person who has been playing video games for twenty years, a lot of games (within the genres they know, at least) are going to seem "easier", and thus be "shorter".

 

[TelHybrid]

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?

Length is quantifiable, I.E. generally agreeable. Fun is qualitative. Bit of a different comparison, kinda hard to pinpoint. I get your point though.

OT: Good replayability is a tough thing for a developer to achieve. Older games did a great job of this, as often they lacked a save feature, which meant that players would spend hours repeating the same levels, which sounds very bad, but continue reading. Sonic is my favourite example, at least in his Mega Drive outings. Multiple routes in the levels made it feel like a fresh experience many a playthrough. Sonic 3 & Knuckles improved on this by making exclusive character routes via their abilities. SEGA had to really work hard to make the levels fun to play multiple times.

Trying to make a game fun to replay isn't done right the majority of the time. Tactics to add longevity to a game through boring repetitive tasks is not the right way, such as the jobs on Fable II to get more cash, or on other games walking for half an hour across the same terrain with no obstacles apart from generic enemy #243 followed by picking up 'key plot item', then taking back to plot based NPC, then repeat. Part of the thrill of side missions or repeating levels is the feeling of progression.

 

[Doom972]

It depends on the game's price. Personally, I expect a $50 game to give me at least 40 hours of content without repetition.