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How long should games be?
Zombiemambo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The title is actually a little misleading since a game should be as long as it needs to be. But how long do you prefer your games to be? 5 hours of non-stop action, or an epic 60 hour story with 40+ hours of extra content?
I've discovered that 8-14 hours is the perfect amount for me. I have lots of games I want to play, and after about that time I usually lose interest in the gameplay. I'm playing the first Final Fantasy and it's around 16 hours or so that's good for me, even for a roleplaying game. God of War ended right when it should have, same with Gears of War. When companies advertise "60 hours of gameplay" I wonder how much of that is just padding with no substance just so they can move more copies. I used to think more hours = better game, but I've been burned so many times because I simply can't finish the game before it becomes really boring. FFVII is the exception, I spent around 40-50 hours the first time playing it and another 60 on my second playthrough, a lot of that spent on farming gil for Chocobo racing. It was one of the very few games that held my attention for more than 20 hours.
In order to avoid being a poll thread, give us a reason why you think that length is ideal, which games you thought lasted just as long as they should have or a game that needed to end 20 hours before it did.
I've discovered that 8-14 hours is the perfect amount for me. I have lots of games I want to play, and after about that time I usually lose interest in the gameplay. I'm playing the first Final Fantasy and it's around 16 hours or so that's good for me, even for a roleplaying game. God of War ended right when it should have, same with Gears of War. When companies advertise "60 hours of gameplay" I wonder how much of that is just padding with no substance just so they can move more copies. I used to think more hours = better game, but I've been burned so many times because I simply can't finish the game before it becomes really boring. FFVII is the exception, I spent around 40-50 hours the first time playing it and another 60 on my second playthrough, a lot of that spent on farming gil for Chocobo racing. It was one of the very few games that held my attention for more than 20 hours.
In order to avoid being a poll thread, give us a reason why you think that length is ideal, which games you thought lasted just as long as they should have or a game that needed to end 20 hours before it did.
Zombiemambo on
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Good lord.
Then again, I spent over 40 days collectively in WoW, so I shouldn't be saying anything.
The answer is still 17.4 hours. Precisely.
Another important idea is value for time invested, and I find that many things that call themselves RPGs or SRPGS really fail here, as you get a 3 minute monologue for 5 hours of gameplay.
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And that is why, for the past few years, I have tried to avoid JRPGs. I don't know why I should have to put up with bad gameplay to see the occasional awesome cutscene. VII comes to mind, but the story was good enough to ignore it. Random battles and grinding didn't seem like such big flaws when I couldn't put it down.
that being said, I loved Tales Of Symphonia (only mention it cause it's the longest game I've ever beaten) and was engrossed the whole way. up until then I thought I couldn't beat a game longer than 20 hours cause that was my standard bailing out point.
so I guess my point is... I don't care as long as they're paced well, but I prefer around 20 hours. It's like a hearty lunch without being a really stuffed-to-the-brim dinner.
The above instructions should be printed on a card and carried in the wallets of developers, who will then read it during idle moments to ensure it is committed to memory verbatim.
However, more recently, I've started playing The Witcher and am only about halfway through it at 20 hours and played Mass Effect constantly and beat it in 30. That's relatively short in the world of RPGs, though not more modern RPGs (discounting JRPGs which tend to be jam packed full of tedious time wasters). But I found that even at that length, they're still incredibly engrossing games.
I don't think it's so much the length as it is how long you can make a game and still keep it full of interesting content. I look at something like Oblivion and find it absurdly boring because while there's so much to do, so little of it feels worth my time. The Witcher, on the other hand, has some grindy boring quests, but the majority seem much more involved and many of them offer insight into the setting the game takes place in or ties into the larger story as a whole. What you do with the length is probably more important than the length itself.
Although, if anything goes beyond 50 hours I doubt my interest would last long enough to finish it.
猿も木から落ちる
If Max Payne 2 or Resident Evil 4 or Ninja Gaiden or the latest Castlevania were some monstrous fifty hour affair to complete, I wouldn't touch them for a second time. More is less.
Portal was a step in the right direction.
If the game is more linear, Then it can last as long as it wants as long as it doesn't repeat itself or otherwise go stale.
However, in terms of actual session playing time, I think 20 minutes is ideal.
What I mean by that is 20 minutes between each major in-game milestone. 20 minutes playtime to get through a level for example. 20 minutes to get from the start of something, some sort of arc (could be a storyline arc, or a gameplay arc, or whatever) to the end of it.
I find for me, that's the ideal time. It means I don't get bored, but I can have a quick play session and be satisfied with it because I feel as if I got somewhere, and didn't just spend 20 minutes walking from one place to another or something, I actually got from the beginning of something to it's conclusion.
I think this is what really hooked me on SWAT 4. It was the first game in ages to really get me back into gaming. If you know what you're doing and do everything correctly and succesfully, you get from the start of a level to the end of it in about 20 minutes ( I repeated levels maybe dozens of times or more sometimes, but they had good gameplay design that meant I was never really frustrated with it ). I just feel that 20 minutes is ideal for keeping your attention on something, some concept or some element, without getting bored with it.
Portal of course, is another really obvious example. A total of maybe 2-3 hours long, and each puzzle took maybe 20 minutes of your time max.
Most cartoons, sitcoms, and other stuff get from start to conclusion in around 20-25 minutes as well. As a result they've developed how to keep the experience, short, concise, punchy and engaging for that time period. I think a lot of games could benefit from adopting a similar philosophy.
One of my own personal benchmarks for a linear game is whether it can be speedrun. I know it sounds weird, but if you can get a good speedrun out of it, then I know that the devs have made a game that doesn't waste a lot of the players time. More often than not, I've found that if it's a linear game and you can't get a decent speedrun out of it (and by that I mean DRASTICALLY cut down the game time from a "normal" run), then it usually means that the game is going to make me waste a fair amount of time in between the good gameplay stuff.
My simple rule of thumb is that the more depth the gameplay has, the longer I'll spend playing it and enjoying it. The many hours I've spent on Civilization IV, Titan Quest, Resident Evil IV, N+, Lumines, and the aforementioned XBLA games are all good examples of this. Games where the gameplay isn't particularly deep, but the story is entertaining, I might play once and then sell or I might not even finish.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
*rim shot*
Yes, I know. That was awful.
RPGS -- around 25 hours of solid gameplay/story without getting excessive.
Sims, strategy, etc -- a looong time.
Patapon and GT5P are games that are getting a little on my nerves lately by going against this mentality.
I've gotten up to a boss in Patapon where you're simply not strong enough, and you have to replay previous areas to build up your strength and numbers. The same areas I'd completed earlier. The bad guys are a little stronger, so it doesn't even seem that your "Stronger" army is stronger in real terms at all. I don't like or want to do that.
GT5P is a pretty big offender too. The game pays you such a pittance for completing a race that you have to do it over, and over, and over, typically with the same car, to unlock alot of the nicer fast cars. And then when you finally save up to buy that Dodge Viper GTS and enter it into the American Cup, then the game gives you a big "sorry, you'll need a Ford GT to rank in the top 3"
Put simply, I don't want to grind though my small play sessions by rehashing things I've done in previous sessions. Throw in something different other than an arbituary and detracting increase in difficulty.
That's a trend that I really do hate, and it's something that more often than not puts me off even some of the better RPG's. The whole concept that you need to work before you can get to the fun stuff. You can't have access to the fun things now, you need to spend 3 hours climbing Mt. Doom and then we'll talk. THIS is what they want me to do with my downtime? More work?!
There's a reason that whole MC Chris rant on Kingdom Hearts 4 got as many hits as it did.
12 hours.
Good multiplayer games?
170+ is what its looking like.
Oo\ Ironsizide
We must look at the game itself, and the pacing of the game.
Portal for example, i had no qualms with it being just a scant 2 hours, worth every damn penny I paid for it. In fact, by the end when you are running through to the final confrontation with GLaDoS it honestly in my opinion could have been a bit shorter. (the final run from "assume the party escort submission position" to GLaDoS was just so out of place compared to the slower, more methodical pace of the game earlier, in my opinion, anywho i digress, this isn't a portal thread after all.)
Mass Effect on the other hand I have no qualms about spending 40 hours doing what I did in that game.
I think the time spent playing the game needs to be engaging, I think you should come away from a good game, and be able to say "yeah I like this part better" or "I wish such and such would have lasted longer" but if you are coming away and there are parts you just really don't care to play (MOTORCYCLE PARTS IN TOMB RAIDER I'M LOOKING AT YOU!) Then they probably could have been left on the cutting room floor.
To me also, price is and it isn't an issue, its hard to explain. If I pay 60 dollars for just an amazing shooter, that just happens to hit all the right buttons, but it only lasts 5 hours, will I really be satisfied?
But by no means do i think we should price games solely based on length (not that I'm assuming thats what you're proposing Ironsizide) I mean really though, there are plenty of 360 games that run shorter than 10 hours and they are going for 60 bucks a pop. (Bioshock being a superb example)
I agree completely. Screw that first village section in RE4, if a game is going to be an obnoxious pain early on, I'm not going to bother to play it.
20 if it is purely a single player game
Things start to get obnoxious after 20 hours I think, Mass Effect is the only game I've been able to play solo for that long (or longer).
Edit: I think what i'm getting at here is like, what if a game is 8 hours long, sure its a great game but suffers a few notches in reviews or whatever because of its length...
now take the same game, and add enough content to make it 12 hours, or longer for that matter, but it just so happens to be horrible, for whatever reason... now this game is going to suffer even moreso due to the fact that as opposed to a excellent, yet short experience, its now a longer, decent experience, being dragged down by some unbearable parts.
the reason i bring it up like this is because developers will (obviously) cut stuff thats not up to par with the rest of the game, and I respect the choice to cut it (as i'm sure anyone who would rather not play shitty stuff would), maybe shortening the game overall, yet at the same time increasing the quality of the game.
Quality Over Quantity, yes, yes.
to me anyway
but they dont...
basically what i am saying is that its a rip off to pay 60$ for a 5 hour long shooter where i am expected to play multi player and if i dont i am a horrible person because i am not the hardcorz
rpgs sould be 80+ hours the first play thru
or another thought, a game that is full price should last about two weeks of play time for a normal person that works, goes to school, goes out, etc... ie someone that plays about 1-2 hours each night. Like a complete season of a good TV show.
But with that said, 100+ hours is pretty excessive for a single player game, even if it does involve a ton of extra side-stuff.
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
Professor Layton was a perfect length, with enough to do after you've finished to keep me coming back.
For example:
Halo 1 - way too fucking long, repeating levels didn't help
Halo 2 - ended before it got going (cliffhanger or not)
Halo 3 - just about right
Another game I can think of that had 'epic' length was Tales of Symphonia. It was 80 hours long, but it didn't feel like it had any filler to reach that. And in a rarity in JRPGs, the ending didn't piss me off, so I didn't feel like those 80 hours were a waste.
But then you can consider multiplayer games - i think I logged just under a thousand hours in Halo 2 - but that's more of a replayability issue and not a length issue.
Assassin's Creed was too long. We ended up doing the same things over and over, hearing different people say the same lines. If it were half as long, I would have enjoyed it the whole time.
Bioshock was too long. The enemies stopped getting interesting, and instead just got double hitpoints. Not to mention the falling action of the story was weak.
COD4 is a great length. It's short enough for the player to stomach the respawning enemies and garbage like that. If it were much longer it would have just gotten painful. It also threw in things like the AC130 mission to really shake things up.
Devil May Cry 3 is close to perfect. If the player doesn't go back and farm, it provides just enough enemies for you to max out the level of 2 out of the 4 combat styles. The player will feel accomplished that he reached the end of that skill tree, and then encouraged to go back and learn Gunslinger and Royalguard. Not to mention the ending of the game was extraordinarily satisfying.
Ninja Gaiden is interesting. My first time through was about 22 hours. I played it again on the 360 (so I had to go back to Normal difficulty) and i beat it within 8 I think. Again, like DMC, the game doesn't provide you with enough to accomplish EVERYTHING there is in the game-- unless you farm UT like madness, you won't be able to try out absolutely everything. At least not the Unlabored Flawlessness.
This of course is for number of hours interested in the game. Some games have a shorter playthrough (NES platformers, Sonic games, etc) but have lots of replay value that keep you playing that short-form game for hours after you've already completed the main objectives.