Poll: Are games getting too long?

[Aesir23]

It really depends on the genre you're looking at most of the time. RPGs, even action rpgs, tend to be quite long and have been for a very time but you'll usually find games in the FPS genre where the campaign is under ten hours long.

In terms of actual game length, games that are over twenty hours long are generally my preference since games in Canada are roughly $70-$80 now before taxes are tacked on so if I'm being expected to pay that much then I don't want a game I'll finish in under a day if I really get into it.

On the other hand, much like sumanoskae the actual length of the game sometimes has nothing to do with how long it takes me to finish. I've actually lost my interest in many open-world games due to how many of them fill the map with meaningless side-objectives or lack story direction. I think The Witcher 3 is actually one of my more ideal open-world games since they limit their filler and what filler is there is generally pretty interesting.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Not really, it's time that gets more precious and spread between so many different parts of life that the long games struggle to feel like they aren't just wasting it. Playing wasteland 2: director's cut recently has become a bit of an annoyance, though rewarding, but why no fast travel? When the game gives no hint of where some objectives are, whether you are in the wrong area and very much need to stock up on medical supplies, i can't help but feel a little agitated that a lot of my time is wasted doing the same bloody journey back and forth for one missed item, person or quest completion area. What is the game's point in flagging quests when it does nothing more than if you don't flag them? The map has no zoom or pan function, so feels like another hurdle to deal with. That niggly feeling starts to creep back in that i should be doing one of the many more important things in life, like eating or those unfinished projects.
If a game starts to force a grind, especially if the combat is repetitive/boring, then it is out. No time for fluff! I am not a fluffer!

 

[SquallTheBlade]

10hours is really short
30hours is short
60 hours is normal and expected
100hours is long but if most of the stuff of it is optional then thats pretty normal

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

I recently played a game called Another World specifically because it was only 2 hours long, and it was so refreshing to have a game that did everything it needed to and didn't out-stay its welcome. Sure there were some bullshit puzzles, but overall, I had a blast.

You sir, deserve a medal. Every game should aspire to do be as concise as possible. This is why I generally avoid RPGs these days. I mean, doesn't fighting the same group of enemies 100 times feel pointless after a while? You've proved you can beat them, then the game asks you to do it a couple of dozen more times. Why?

Adventure games have always been my favorite because they generally lack gameplay filler. Story filler can still exist, but that goes for any type of game.

 

[SquallTheBlade]

This is why I generally avoid RPGs these days. I mean, doesn't fighting the same group of enemies 100 times feel pointless after a while? You've proved you can beat them, then the game asks you to do it a couple of dozen more times. Why?

Because the gameplay is fun? Because the gameplay offers different kinds of approaches to beat them? Because they serve as practise for the real challenge, bosses? At least thats how I see them.

 

[happyninja42]

I think if you are making a point to do 100%, or as close as you can stomach completion, then you will very likely see a lot of "padding", as the OP stated. Because that's pretty much exactly what it is. Lot's of other stuff to do, if you want to do it. But it's not required for the game story, and is mostly there to satisfy the 100%-ers, and people who like to do gathering/easter egg hunting type things. I personally don't, so I tend to find the game length just fine for most games. If you just stick to the storyline stuff, you usually get a much more concise and focused playthrough, that flows along nicely. Only when you get sidetracked into 30+ hours of side questing, does the game feel padded.

 

[CaitSeith]

Open-world games tend to be longer. And this year we had several AAA open-world games. Meanwhile, most of the relevant non-open world games weren't AAA, were remasters or multiplayer only. So you could say (in certain way) "yes". Of course, if you played open-world only, you probably couldn't play the other shorter games from this year.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Cant say I have noticed much change really. RPGs tend to be the really long ones and that has always been the case. It took me 129 hours to finish Xenoblade Chronicles but I did do every possible affinity quest and beat all the optional bosses because I loved the game so much.

Personally I tend to play shorter games again nowadays simply due to time restraints. There was a time when I would blast through a 100 hour game pretty damn quickly sometimes in about 7 days because I did very little else these days 100 hours of play time is months of playing a game for me if I just play that one and no other. As such I am extremely picky about playing games especially long ones. Xenoblade X is the first epic kinda game I have played in a long time and after 37 hours it is still holding my interest but we will see how long it lasts.

I tend to like pick up and play games that I can still work at and get better so stuff like fighters are perfect for me atm especially as its one of my first gaming genre loves. I can spend hundreds of hours in them but there is nothing to complete as such and I get to have fun. I suppose Minecraft would also fit the bill if I cared about the actions in that game and could attach some sense of fulfilment to creating things in it.

 

[DefunctTheory]

Some games are getting longer, but I think this is just a rebound from the previous generation of extremely popular, extremely short games that's lasted a decade, particularly in AAA titles. There's always been long and short games, but it seemed for a while there that the games that really made money, were pushed hard by the industry and game journalist, and were discussed widely were very, very short, while longer games didn't seem to have the same penetration. The industry has taken a turn, however, and now big, long, expansive sandbox games are the big ticket item. They've always been here, but they're just getting more notice then previously.

There are still plenty of short as hell game. And even those 'too long' games can usually be completed in two power sessions, if you just slam through the main story and get on with it. Fallout 4 is what, 8 hours long if you ignore the world and just rush through it? The Witcher 3 is probably the only game this year that's long as hell and you can't rush through, even if you try.

 

[DementedSheep]

In general no, the long games are usually RPGs and sandbox which have always been long, there is just more sandbox games being released.
That said I use to love it when a game was 60+ hours and now it actually puts me off for the same reason others in this thread now prefer shorter games: time restraints.

 

[necromanzer52]

I recently played a game called Another World specifically because it was only 2 hours long, and it was so refreshing to have a game that did everything it needed to and didn't out-stay its welcome. Sure there were some bullshit puzzles, but overall, I had a blast.

You sir, deserve a medal. Every game should aspire to do be as concise as possible. This is why I generally avoid RPGs these days. I mean, doesn't fighting the same group of enemies 100 times feel pointless after a while? You've proved you can beat them, then the game asks you to do it a couple of dozen more times. Why?

Adventure games have always been my favorite because they generally lack gameplay filler. Story filler can still exist, but that goes for any type of game.

Ah, I see you're a fan of this game. Not sure I deserve a medal just for mentioning it though. I do generally prefer games that lack "filler", though sometimes I find it quite relaxing to mindlessly grind in rpgs while listening to podcasts or something. Just as long as the game has a decent story and plenty of things to do in between the grinding marathons.

 

[distortedreality]

I don't mind a long game - as long as it doesn't feel long.

TW3 didn't feel long. FO4 felt like a marathon. This despite me putting twice as much time into TW3.

 

[BytByte]

I see it more like the guy above me. I game is only too long or too short when you recognize it. The Dark Knight did not seem too long at two and a half hours, but Transformers: Age of Extinction felt much longer despite being only 15 minutes longer. A game could take 80 hours and as long as you are enjoying it, then it's probably not too long. If it is too long, even if it's only a 4 hour game, then it's because the game is not good enough and it feels too long because of that.

 

[DoPo]

Yes, in a sense. Linear games have gotten drastically shorter, with most FPSs being 6 - 12 hour experiences. Compared to the original half life or Deus Ex, these are really short.

I thought the original Half-Life was about 8-12 hours. Well, talking not a completely new person playing it, that is.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

Depends on what you actually consider to be the game.
Is it the main campaign, or all the other fuzz around it?

If you take Skyrim or Fallout 4, they are actually ridiculously short as far as the campaign goes and only if you try to clear all the stupid and lazily designed side quests of fetch this or that does it get longer. I did feel that Xenoblade went a bit too long. I lost interest at some point, stopped playing and then returned back to it. Took me 120 hours to do literally everything there is in it.

But in general, I would say games are getting shorter and shorter in the parts that are important, while bloating up the useless stuff. Adding a bunch of lazily designed quests, a huge paint brushed empty world that has nothing of interest, many indie games even go for the awful procedural generated worlds.

Developer are getting lazy, the consumer are giving them a pass. A bad world with really not much to see, generic, always the same dungeons, awful enemy design, but it has a shitload of fetch quests, so people give it a pass. They even claim it to be GOAT despite Skyrim being worse than Oblivion. It's all quantity over quality.
Open world games are getting padded out without getting fleshed out. Linear games are getting shorter and shorter. We are going towards a situation where we won't be getting many games with a medium length but quality content. Either Skyrim or multiplayer with tackled on single player campaign of 4 hours.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Since when was 20 hours a "really long game?" That's about my bare minimum for a good mid length game.

10 - 12 hours is fucking short.

This.

A game I only consider "long" if you're looking at at least around fifty to a hundred hours of play minimum.

What I WILL concede, however, is there are way too many games today that 'pretend' to be long by just adding junk to fill space and time. The worst examples being stuff like Far Cry and Assassin's Creed. Games that add 'stuff to do' rather than content. By that I mean they add tons of pickups and random little things like the ever-present "Ubisoft Radio Towers" (which have taken various forms, but they're all riffing on the same theme) that don't really ADD to the game so much as just give you another chore to complete.

yup, which is why I'm hesitent to say yes or no to this question.

some games *need* to be long, or *should* be long, while other games really need to ignore that advice and cut out all the bullshit from it, there are quite a few open world games that suffer from that sort of bullshit.

I'm comfortable with most rpg's lasting 35-50 hours, sometimes more or less depending on scope and developer size and whatnot. However that changes greatly for other genres.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

I think it really depends heavily on the game itself.

I mean, you could theoretically play through Skyrim's story in a few hours and conclude that you've 'finished' the game. Or you could do every sidequest, multiple playthroughs, and then install mods and do more playthroughs, and put about 500 hours into the game.

You could theoretically pick one character class in "Torchlight 2", and play through the entire game (I think it's 20-25 hours) doing as few sidequests as possible. Or you could play through the game multiple times with multiple different classes, trying multiple different builds, and put hundreds of hours into it.

My point is that one of the wonders of games today is that many of them give you so many different ways to play it that you could, theoretically, make just about any game be "too" long.

I'll be the first to admit that I usually have more games to play than I have time to do it, but I like that better than the alternative.

 

[The Enquirer]

They're certainly longer. I don't know if too long. Partly goes with the territory - all your examples are from the sandbox/RPG genre, where the whole point is "look at all the stuff you can do before even continuing the story".

It's all really about how you pace & structure your story. The Order 1886 is like 5 hours long, Journey is 2-3 hours. But nobody complained about Journey's length, whereas The Order's was its primary flaw. Kind of like movies - a critic can complain that at 120 minutes a movie is too long, even if there are plenty of other 120 minutes movies where length isn't an issue.

As for wanting to get your money's worth, you also have to factor in replayability. I've clocked in about 70 hours into RE6, a game I loathe, 35 of which are probably due to Mercenaries matches.

I'll agree with this. The one main thing you left out though was cost. Journey cost 15 dollars on release if I recall correctly. The Order 1886 cost 60 bucks if I remember that correctly as well. Plus it depends on your primary focus as well. With Call of Duty, at this point, I'd like to say almost everyone who buys one of those games is primarily buying it for the multiplayer. From there it's just a matter of how good the multiplayer actually is.

For the sake of giving a direct answer, in most cases I'm going to go with "no".

 

[MHR]

For me, the value of a game is about how much fun I can have with it, and for how long that fun can last. It's not about "finishing" a game.

 

[BoogieManFL]

A game is too long only if it doesn't hold your attention and keep you engaged.