Portal's length - is it a flaw? + game length in general

Inuprince

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Aug 12, 2008
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Let's get one thing clear, this is not a thread to bash Portal, because if it would be I would probably get thrown into a fire pit faster than the Companion Cube.

I was just thinking about critics nowadays, considering it a negative, if a single player game has a campaign which can be completed under 6, 8 or 10 hours, and I agree with this statement. Especially because a lot of games today don't have much replay value, while a decade ago, we were getting games that were much longer and had more replay value.

While Portal certainly has replayability, a lot of critics (even Yahtzee) and gamers seem to think it's length is perfect, it's just as long as it needs to be, etc...
So this brings up the question, is Portal considered to be so great, because it's only about 2-3 hours long, and thus it doesn't have time to become repetitive or the jokes to fall flat?
Because those are usually a few negatives mentioned about Portal 2, which was of course much longer and had to provide more content obviously.

I would like it if games would have longer single player campaigns, than the standards of nowadays, but maybe if developers would make shorter but more focused experiences, they should sell games with shorter campaigns for lower prices. Choosing if I'll get more than 100 hours of play with Skyrim or some generic shooter with a 6-8 hour campaign, is not really a hard decision when they sell for the same price at the start.

Portal of course was part of the Orange Box, but hey it was reviewed and later sold as a stand alone title so I think the question in the thread is still valid.
 

Melon Hunter

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May 18, 2009
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While you make a very good point about Portal's length being a boon in terms of not letting the content grow stale, I think this trend of complaining about game shortness is more to do with price.

Portal was never released as a $60 game, whereas many games that have that asking price these days tend to have a 6-8 hour campaign, with maybe a bit of multiplayer. The only ones that should be able to get away with that are either lengthy, replayable games such as Skyrim or Mass Effect, or the ones with short single player campaigns that also have plenty of co-op and mutltiplayer to back them up, such as Battlefield or Call of Duty (although Call of Duty is arguable, as it's released on a yearly basis at this point).

While it would be nice to have a tiered pricing structure that reflected length, I don't think we'll see that while people are happy to shell out $60 flat rate for a new game. Steam definitely has the right sort of idea with their system, but it'll take time for publishers to break the mindset that they can sell pretty much any game for the same price, regardless of content.
 

BloatedGuppy

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I thought both Portal and Portal 2 were a perfect length. Just enough content so they don't wear out their welcome. Keeping things brief is pretty essential in humor, too. Nothing gets stale faster than a joke.

I should make it clear, though, that I praise their length because Portal was a low to no cost game, and Portal 2 I picked up on a Steam Sale for a pittance. I don't think Portal 2 was fairly priced at $50+, despite its excellence.
 

Kahunaburger

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Portal is sort of a weird example - it's unique for a lot of reasons, particularly the quality of the writing.

The thing I want to see more of is short games that use procedural content more effectively - a game can be good value for money even if it only lasts a short time if it's something that is fun to play many times. See also: every multiplayer game ever.
 

Atmos Duality

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There's a great deal of subjectivity that goes into this.

The philosophy I follow for determining what a good game length requires asking a couple of questions:
1) Is the time spent attributed to legitimate gameplay and not padding/grinding?
2) Does the game spend enough time establishing some set of goals and provide an appropriate length for closure?

Sinking 500 hours into a game sounds impressive unless you attribute the vast majority of it to grind.
 

RJ 17

The Sound of Silence
Nov 27, 2011
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As Kahuna said, Portal is kinda in a league of it's own. It's just such a unique game on so many different levels. It's hard to judge it by terms of other games. For instance, a point that you brought up is replay value.

From a strictly technical standpoint, Portal and Portal 2 have absolutely 0 replay value. The entire game is just one puzzle after another. Once you know the solution to the puzzle, the challenge is completely removed from the game, thus making playing it again absolutely pointless...

...and yet you just can't stop playing it. I actually bought Portal 2 a 2nd time after I had already traded it in to help pay for Skyrim. Why? Because I love the game. I love the narrative through the game. I love being in the bowels of Aperture Labs and hearing Cave Johnson's rants over the PA system. I love Wheatley's accent. I love GLADoS's utter fear of birds. I know all the puzzles, I can breeze through the game in 5 hours, but it's still a very fun experience!

And that's why judging replay value is so difficult, as it clearly comes in many different flavors.

As for the original question at hand: is Portal/Portal 2's length a flaw? I would say no. Everyone says Portal had a perfect length. GLADoS never got old, the game itself never got old, the humor never got old. A lot of people equate Portal 2 as being just Portal stretched out a few extra hours to make it a "full-length" game. I disagree...kinda. I don't think it was Portal stretched out, I think it was 3 Portal games that were sewn together because (obviously) there's 3 major sections. You get a GLADoS section, a Johnson section, and a Wheatley section. Each one with it's own different style with a nice (at least I thought they were) intermission in between them in the form of running around "behind the scenes" of the Aperture labs.
 

GiantRaven

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Inuprince said:
I would like it if games would have longer single player campaigns, than the standards of nowadays
The standards of nowadays? There have always been full-priced games with incredibly short single-player modes. I never understood why people complained about this being a feature of modern gaming.
 

Seishisha

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Aug 22, 2011
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Time to weigh in and make myself look foolish, is the length a game even important, if you played it and enjoyed does it matter if your experiance was 10 hours or a 100 hours long? Personaly i dont think it does, bringing cost into the matter yes somthing like skyrim will give you more single player content than an average fps of the same price, and based on mathmatics you could argue that a game lasting ten times longer for the same price is ten times better, but again does it realy matter if you enjoyed it; this is the main point im attempting to make, lets pluck some more examples out of the air uncharted on ps3, widely regaurded as a good game but its not exactly going to keep you busy for weeks on end, length vs cost vs enjoyment, i have to say in my opinion enjoyment is the more important factor, and it what i base my opinions on. If somone were to ask me why i liked 'xgame' or 'ymovie' (which your more than welcome todo so) i wouldnt reply "because it was only five dollars" or "because it lasted me 50 hours". I often get the feeling that people in general over think everything, especialy when on the internet.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Seishisha said:
Time to weigh in and make myself look foolish, is the length a game even important, if you played it and enjoyed does it matter if your experiance was 10 hours or a 100 hours long? Personaly i dont think it does, bringing cost into the matter yes somthing like skyrim will give you more single player content than an average fps of the same price, and based on mathmatics you could argue that a game lasting ten times longer for the same price is ten times better, but again does it realy matter if you enjoyed it; this is the main point im attempting to make, lets pluck some more examples out of the air uncharted on ps3, widely regaurded as a good game but its not exactly going to keep you busy for weeks on end, length vs cost vs enjoyment, i have to say in my opinion enjoyment is the more important factor, and it what i base my opinions on. If somone were to ask me why i liked 'xgame' or 'ymovie' (which your more than welcome todo so) i wouldnt reply "because it was only five dollars" or "because it lasted me 50 hours". I often get the feeling that people in general over think everything, especialy when on the internet.
Well, yes, value is subjective and never boils down to a simple formula of more = better, but if I'm paying $50 for a game, it better not be 20 minutes long. I don't care how good it is.
 

Inuprince

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GiantRaven said:
Inuprince said:
I would like it if games would have longer single player campaigns, than the standards of nowadays
The standards of nowadays? There have always been full-priced games with incredibly short single-player modes. I never understood why people complained about this being a feature of modern gaming.
Maybe you are right about this, but then it's probably more about replayability. Some beloved titles of mine (from about 5-10 year ago) I probably played through each of them atleast 5 or more times, for some even more than 10 times. Even just decent titles probably got 2 playthroughs from me, because I was having fun with them.
I still keep up with gaming and love it, but these days, I play through them once or maybe twice and it's done.

For example one of my all time favourites is Mafia, it's one of the games I played most in my life, probably played it through 20 times. Then comes Mafia II, of course I had high expectaions like all other fans, but I wasn't even that disappointed with it - like many others, who I can understand btw, and I still only played through it once, and couldn't really get into it since ...
 

ResonanceGames

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A short game length is fine, but it has to match expectations about the project and the price point. If a $60 FPS was 4 hours long (and far too many are) then it would be too short, almost regardless of quality.

Journey is far shorter than even Portal, but that's OK for a $15 game that entertains throughout.

By the same token, 15 hours for an RPG is really pushing it on the short end, whereas that would be a relatively long FPS. A $15, 15-hour RPG would be fine, but at $60? No way.

As always, there will be exceptions, but I rarely come across them.
 

TorqueConverter

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I don't like this idea at all.

I have feeling that if we begin to assign a value to games based on a money to hours ratio then we are shooting ourselves in the foot. It's going to encourage game developers to needlessly lengthen the games to milk more hours out of the game rather than making a game of an appropriate length. What's more important, the gaming experience or some arbitrary ratio?

Would you like to see movies become 4 hours long just to say you have gotten a greater money to hours ratio, or would you rather the movie be paced well and be of an appropriate length as they are now? Pacing is the big problem here. The game devs will just make the games grindy and slow so as to milk more hours out of the game if we communicate to them that the number of hours is an important feature of a game.

I enjoy sandbox games, a lot. I am able to get loads of hours out of the games because there is often a persistent world with dynamic events occurring in the world. When I play sandbox games, it's not how many hours I can sink into the game that is important but how much fun the game provides. I sink hours into sandbox games because I genuinely enjoy playing the game and not because of some sort of completionist mentality or because the game is paced so slow that it forces hours onto me.

EDIT: Do we want our games to turn into episodes of Dragon Ball Z?
 

Seishisha

By the power of greyskull.
Aug 22, 2011
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BloatedGuppy said:
Well, yes, value is subjective and never boils down to a simple formula of more = better, but if I'm paying $50 for a game, it better not be 20 minutes long. I don't care how good it is.
Well as you stated value is subjective, perhaps some people wouldnt be bothered about spending 50 dollars for twenty minuets of entertainment, hell some strip joints can cost you more than that, you could easily spend that kind of money in a short amount of time just gambling, hence my initial statment, money spent or time invested does not equate enjoyment and as examples go i think yours is alittle far fetched, i know its just a hypothetical statment but i know of no single gameing experiance that lasts twenty minuets and costs fifty dollars, actualy scratch that, there is probably somthing in eve online's store you could spend that much on and gain almost no use of.
 

Inuprince

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Aug 12, 2008
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BloatedGuppy said:
Seishisha said:
Time to weigh in and make myself look foolish, is the length a game even important, if you played it and enjoyed does it matter if your experiance was 10 hours or a 100 hours long? Personaly i dont think it does, bringing cost into the matter yes somthing like skyrim will give you more single player content than an average fps of the same price, and based on mathmatics you could argue that a game lasting ten times longer for the same price is ten times better, but again does it realy matter if you enjoyed it; this is the main point im attempting to make, lets pluck some more examples out of the air uncharted on ps3, widely regaurded as a good game but its not exactly going to keep you busy for weeks on end, length vs cost vs enjoyment, i have to say in my opinion enjoyment is the more important factor, and it what i base my opinions on. If somone were to ask me why i liked 'xgame' or 'ymovie' (which your more than welcome todo so) i wouldnt reply "because it was only five dollars" or "because it lasted me 50 hours". I often get the feeling that people in general over think everything, especialy when on the internet.
Well, yes, value is subjective and never boils down to a simple formula of more = better, but if I'm paying $50 for a game, it better not be 20 minutes long. I don't care how good it is.

Agreed. This happened to me with Max Payne 2.
I'll probably prove GiantRaven somewhat right with this, because it's an older title with a short single player campaign, but I already replied to him :)

So, first Max Payne I got from a friend, and when the second one was out I was thrilled. I bought it for full price, it arrived around noon, I started playing in the afternoon, I only had a few breaks, but I stopped when around 8 pm I was already playing the third acts first chapters and suddenly thought - if this is anything like the first one - story structure wise - then I'm not going any further, because I don't want to finish the game all in one day. It was really bad, because I was enjoying myself very much, but had to stop, because the game was so damn short. I of course finished it the next day, since only a few chapters remained. Redeeming it of course was that I played it again and again a lot since then, so it was worth every penny. But I think few games have such high replayability these days, that's my opinion. But hey maybe I'm wrong.
 

Forgetitnow344

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Melon Hunter said:
While you make a very good point about Portal's length being a boon in terms of not letting the content grow stale, I think this trend of complaining about game shortness is more to do with price.

Portal was never released as a $60 game, whereas many games that have that asking price these days tend to have a 6-8 hour campaign, with maybe a bit of multiplayer. The only ones that should be able to get away with that are either lengthy, replayable games such as Skyrim or Mass Effect, or the ones with short single player campaigns that also have plenty of co-op and mutltiplayer to back them up, such as Battlefield or Call of Duty (although Call of Duty is arguable, as it's released on a yearly basis at this point).

While it would be nice to have a tiered pricing structure that reflected length, I don't think we'll see that while people are happy to shell out $60 flat rate for a new game. Steam definitely has the right sort of idea with their system, but it'll take time for publishers to break the mindset that they can sell pretty much any game for the same price, regardless of content.
/thread, really.

Portal 2 was pretty short, but I was happy to pay $60 for it. It made me happy in ways other games didn't, and its pleasant little runtime was definitely not a hurdle. Then you get games like Skyrim or Oblivion, for which I paid the same, and if you put the two together, I'm pushing something like 2000 hours.
 

Phishfood

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Portal itself is a perfect length for what it is.
MW3 campaign I completed in 2 hours according to steam, too short I say!

For me game length is a delicate thing. Both dragon age and witcher I stopped playing before I finished the story because I got bored of the mecahnics of the fights (and treking back and forth across the map)

I'd rather have a short campaign like portal that I love than a long campaign like DA where I get bored and end up not finishing it.