Well I find it great that we agree on so many things. Combat on FFX, FFXII and FFXIII and how combat should generally go. I can't quite put my finger on why I didn't like FFXIII combat though, it just felt a bit unreal, it was lacking feedback. Maybe it was the way battles didn't have consequence beyond the minute it took, or the way the enemies just stood around in a corridor in front of you completely unlifelike.
I'm afraid to say I still don't quite agree with you on the 60 hours though
nyysjan said:
BrotherRool said:
A 60 hour game can take a month for me now. I tried to replay XIII over easter and i just didn't have time.
Nothing wrong with game taking over a month to play through, you get value for your money after all, but the game needs to be entertaining for all the time you play it, which is where FFXIII failed, it simply did not entertain me, or many others.
There are a couple of ways I'd like to go about this, if it's okay with you. Some are practical things and others are more wider concept.
I think the practical is where we'll agree most so I'll start there. Games taking frickin' ages to make and cost a lot of money. FF games aren't meant to be sandboxes and we've got Skyrim and GTA if we want games like that, so the money has to go on creating a very tight and cool experience. But to be frank they don't have the time or money to do that when it takes 60 hours. FFX was last generation and had a huge development time and it was awesome but next-gen means that everything now is scale of magnitude harder. Even with FFXII they were beginning to show the strain of developing good and good looking games that big. I hope you agree that if we have to choose between 60 hours and 20 hours of much better quality with more realistic feelings worlds AND good story then the 20 hours is the way to go.
I'd also like to suggest that aside from it's gameplay and environment problems time was a direct factor of why it didn't entertain you so much. Not because 60 hours is too long, but because it stretches things too much. I'll be honest with you, the story and cutscenes of FFXIII are fantastic and probably something better than they've done for a long time. The concept was good. The Snow - Hope scene was amazing. The Snow-Sarah scene in the ice was amazing. The Hope and his father storyline was great. The Lightning-Hope storyline was great. Sazh had a really emotional arc with his son and him and Vanille made an okay group if nothing special was going on.
The only real fault storywise was they didn't develop and differentiate the bad guys very well. Nothing like Sephiroth or Seymour.
But time really ruined those storylines. They became too dragged out, people forget what was going on, tension was ruined. Some of this won't have affected you and some of it will. I know for instance the fact that the intro to the story took 20 hours made people switch of early and give up on the game, coming away with entirely the wrong conception. It's happened here on the Escapist, twice! Because Lightnings character arc took 20 hours before she started to change and 60 before finally changing people didn't even realise that the way she brushes people aside was portrayed as a negative trait. They thought that was how they stayed. People called her a bad role model for being too much like a guy because they didn't stick around to find out that actually her whole storyline was her realising she was acting abnormally and too coldly and becoming a frickin' surrogate mother to Hope. How more woman important can a character line be?
And I'm not going to say it's their fault for not sticking it out, these are people I respect who are intelligent. The game was just designed too long.
And something I hope you'll be able to empathise with more, the game was less entertaining because there were longer waits between story revelations. In FFX (it was my favourite game of all time, forgive me for harping on about it so much) you were really driven from cutscene to cutscene. It was all 'I'll quit after the next cutscene. Okay the next one. Maybe the one after that'. In FFXIII you'd watch the cutscene and then after half an hour when nothing has happened you'd turn off and go to bed.
This is still a bit of a practical issue, if they had the development time to do as much as they did with early FF's a 60 hour game would be great, but they don't and the story suffers.
But the last one is about 60 hours games in general. I'd like to qualify this. 60hours can be a good length for a game. But those 60 hours should be 20 hours story and 40 hours optional messing around.
A 60 hour story isn't concise enough, when it's played over a month it's easier to forget things to disconnect, the story meanders and they don't drive it through where they should. It's hard to shape a proper tension cycle or build a proper climax, because, to be frank, it takes too long. Films can be too wordy, too ungainly. 1000 page books are too much like doorstoppers and bar flow. And 60 hour games are too long.
This isn't a hard and fast rule. There have been plenty of good 60 hour stories, but it is easier to make a good 20 hour story and harder to make a 60 hour one that doesn't become a mess that turns off all but the best fans.
I'd rather they play it a little safer and allow people who can only play a few hours a week (lightweights!) a chance to enjoy it as well. MGS4 despite being a bit ungainly in the individual cutscenes, told an amazing and tense story in much less than 60 hours. Mass Effect does it in 20. I think FF should readjust to whats more possible and have a go at it too. The game will be better for it
