Single Player Dying?

[MiracleOfSound]

Everyone is bitching about MW2 being too short..

Portal was less than 3 hours long, and it seems to be considered, in these parts, an immaculate gift from the gaming gods.

 

[JemJar]

Everyone is bitching about MW2 being too short..

Portal was less than 3 hours long, and it seems to be considered, in these parts, an immaculate gift from the gaming gods.

Portal is an immaculate gift from the gaming gods.

More to the point, Portal was priced more sensibly for being the short experience it is. MW2 is more expensive than the entire Orange Box was at launch.

Now I've not bought MW2, but the impression given is that it's ended up being constructed as a sequel to MW1's multiplayer with a campaign tacked on like an added freebie. When compared to CoD 1, 2 or 4 this perhaps looks like a bad thing. When compared to Battlefield 2 perhaps not.

 

[AlphaOmega]

If it isn't at least 30h+ and it is marketed as a SP focussed game the devs are money grubbing assholes.

 

[Kinghoza]

They seem to be more interested in the graphics and boobs rather than the actual gameplay

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Everyone is bitching about MW2 being too short..

Portal was less than 3 hours long, and it seems to be considered, in these parts, an immaculate gift from the gaming gods.

Portal is an immaculate gift from the gaming gods.

More to the point, Portal was priced more sensibly for being the short experience it is. MW2 is more expensive than the entire Orange Box was at launch.

Now I've not bought MW2, but the impression given is that it's ended up being constructed as a sequel to MW1's multiplayer with a campaign tacked on like an added freebie. When compared to CoD 1, 2 or 4 this perhaps looks like a bad thing. When compared to Battlefield 2 perhaps not.

I dunno, I'm amazed people feel the campaign was tacked on... it obvioulsy had an incredible amount of work put into it.

It's got a moment in almost every mission that would be the climactic showdown in any other FPS, it's just epic and huge and dramatic all the way through.

Any longer than that and it just would have been too exhausting... I was shattered after my first playthrough.

ANd while I too feel The Orange Box is the best value deal in gaming right now and I love it to bits, it's a similar kind of thing, as in the single player is a third of a big whole.

It's certainly a lot shorter than HL2 though, but for adrenalin rushes per minute, no game has ever come close to MW2. In my opinion, of course.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

Are you new to the internet? I'd run screaming from 99% of the people on here if I met them IRL.

That's because you're either a gutless pansy, hopelessly socially inept, or just really unlucky.

Seriously most people online just annoy the hell out of me in games, never shut up, hurl abuse at each other, and generally act like dicks, that's why if I multi-player, which is rare, it's only with people I actually know, and if need be punch them if they act like that.

Here's the general breakup that I've found:
50% silent and therefore uncharacterized.
25% normal/tolerable. In short, the ideal person.
12.5% intolerably annoying.
12.5% normal with secret malfunction. That seemingly nice enough guy you played with? A few games in, he offhandedly mentions how there's a bunch of niggers wandering his neighborhood, and how someone ought to do them in.

The insufferably annoying make up a remarkably small percentage of the people you run across. Just, like fundamentalist Christians, they're so loud and bloody annoying that you remember them better than you remember the quiet, entirely undefined people.

 

[Da_Schwartz]

For me a single player game should last as long as it takes to tell the story. Sometimes 7 or 8 hours in a game can start getting stale. Done that, acquired this, seen that already..etc etc. If its well written and has a good amount of memorable moments and a few kick ass levels here and there then i see no mean to milk a title for 15+hours. Quality > quantity. Uncharted 2 is the perfect example of this.

 

[x434343]

Fuck quantity if it's a quality game. Oblivion anf Fallout were fun, but if given a choice between them and MW2 or Half Life, I'll go with MW2 and Half Life.

 

[KillSmiley]

Shrinking single player is nothing new. I first heard complaints about short games ten years ago. There was a significant drop in game length between the 16- and 32-bit eras, and it just kept getting worse. I read an article around 2000 that noted that the average PSX game had gone from 12 hours to 10 in the span of a few years. Multiplayer and DLC definitely have a hand in this, but the main culprit is and always will be improved graphics. Developers want to spend lots of time making their games look nice, which explains both the reduction in length and increasingly common delays.

I do pine for the days of 15-20 hour single player campaigns, but you may want to be careful what you wish for. Developers do listen to their audiences, and their response to the complaints of shrinking games has been to pad the hell out of their games. A lot of things that gamers hate - backtracking, reusing levels, fetch quests and unnecessary minigames, to name a few - are dirty little tricks that the designers use to make their games look longer than they really are.

There's the catch. A 6-hour game is certainly very short, but sometimes that's just how long it was meant to be. Trying to force it to 12-15 hours will only dilute it. Think of a game like a speech - a ten-minute speech is certainly very short, but padding it out to twenty minutes to make it a more acceptable length will ruin it more often than not.

 

[Biek]

Ive been having this problem. I pay full price for a game. play it. finish it. Then ignore it. Its a huge money sink. I hate to admit it but when I played WoW I didnt have this problem. It was way cheaper to pay ? 23 every 2 months than buy one or two games every month.

 

[TheLefty]

I somewhat agree. Some games are better to be rented especially if you're only going to play through it one. If I were you I'd rent games.

 

[tkioz]

I somewhat agree. Some games are better to be rented especially if you're only going to play through it one. If I were you I'd rent games.

That's a problem because developers hate rental almost as much as they hate second hand copies and pirated copies, so as far as I can see, they never want us to rent something, yet they still make games we can finish in an afternoon and expect us to pay full price.