20-hour games are "short"?

[mirage202]

My personal dislike of "short" games is the price.

If I get Game A that has a 40+ hour campaign for £30/$60 that is fine with me, but if I then pay the exact same price for Game B that is only 8/10/12/15/20 hours worth of campaign, that is a bad thing.

Okay, but consider this:
Game A has a 40+ hour campaign, but you have absolutely no fun while playing through it.

Game B has a 10-20 hour campaign, but it's some of the most fun you've ever had playing a video game.

Which one is worth more, then?

I work on the assumption that I enjoyed both games, if I have doubts about a game, I don't buy it. I do not mindlessly consume anything that releases with a million dollar advertising budget.

As for others comments about padding and such, you act as if that doesn't already happen. If you are willing to rush out and buy something without the prior research then.. A fool deserves to be parted from his money.

Anywho, as I said, that is my personal view on the matter, you do not have to agree or assume I'm demanding it from the industry to be forced on every gamer out there. To me a games length has to be worth the money I'm being asked to pay for it. Usually I tend to go for RTS games, so value for money is pretty much guaranteed. With FPS games though, an 8 hour campaign is not worth 60 bucks IMO, especially an 8 hour set piece filled extended cutscene.

 

[devotedsniper]

All i have to say is i remember when fps's had single players that lasted over 10 hours, i can complete any of the newer COD's (or just about any other fps) within 6 hours, the only games i usually get my moneys worth for are either when they don't have multiplayer (witcher 2 20+ hour campaign) or games where the only real multiplayer is co-op. In fact other than rpg's and rts's i manage to finish the campaign usually in under 10 hours, and yes i don't finish everything but i don't want to sit around doing sub-quests which add very little or nothing to the actual story.

In fact the only games that come to mind lately which have single player content worth more than 15 hours that I've played in the last few months is far cry 3, the walking dead and hitman absolution. Maybe it's just cause i'm getting old (22) but i only play co-op when it comes to multiplayer now or games which require teamwork, i also cannot stand 12year olds screaming down the microphone because you wont do things there way or you kill them.

It all depends really, if a game has a story which is actually gripping i don't mind if it's somewhat short so long as i want to replay it later on, but a lot of modern games now i just can't be bothered to replay.

 

[Jodah]

Any length game is okay for me. What matters to me is the price. I try to follow the rule 1 hour = 1 dollar. So a sixty dollar game has to potentially last me sixty hours. Anything less and I won't buy it until it's on sale or I rent it.

Edit: I try to treat DLC the same but give more leeway there depending on how much I like the base game.

 

[shrekfan246]

There have always been short games. The original Sonic the Hedgehog can be speedrun in less than an hour. There have also been long games, such as Final Fantasy. And this trend has continued to this day, where the only difference, strictly speaking, is two things: People who grew up playing games like Banjo-Kazooie (itself only something like a five-hour game depending on how well you know where everything is) or Final Fantasy VII are now out in the "real" world, but with unemployment at an all-time high, a lot of them have quite a fair amount of free time (myself included). Also, there are simply a lot more games being released these days than there were back in the 80's or 90's. Over one-hundred and fifty games were launched this year alone (partly due to the launch of the Wii-U).

I think it's not really a good idea to compare speedrunning sonic or playing banjo kazooie when you already know where everything is when you want to make a point about the length of a game.
In a game like Banjo Kazooie is a game where you have to search and find a lot of items, so if you want to compare it you have to compare the first playthrough since the search is a big part of the game.
The same goes for a speedrun and if you take the practice and multiple tries it actually has a lot more playtime.
And games like sonic felt a lot longer because they were often quite hard to beat.

Since you're the second person who has latched onto this, I feel the need to point out that I'm not the best Sonic or Banjo-Kazooie player in the world, and I haven't played either of those games in close to ten years, but I can still beat them in ~1 hour and ~5 hours respectively. Especially with Sonic, actually, the stages only last an average of 3 minutes and you've got six stages with three acts each. The average play-time of a full run without going through any special stages EDIT: and with little/no dying :End EDIT should only be 54 minutes. I'm not even talking about blasting through levels as fast as you can here, either, because some of the stages can be done far faster than 3 minutes (I believe the fastest time for Green Hill Zone Act 1 has been under a minute).

As for Banjo-Kazooie, again I feel the need to clarify that I have not played the game in nearly a decade and never even made it to the last two levels when I was originally playing, and yet when I picked it up again earlier this year, I had very little issues with getting through it rather quickly.

Yes, going into a game like Banjo-Kazooie with absolutely zero knowledge of it will probably mean you play it for significantly longer than five hours if you end up liking it, but how is that not true of any other game? I'm using numbers from my last play-throughs of these games as punctuation to the fact that these are numbers done by a person who has been playing video games for twenty years, not a person who just picked up a controller for the first time in their life. Because that's the point. To a person who has been playing video games for twenty years, a lot of games (within the genres they know, at least) are going to seem "easier", and thus be "shorter".

 

[TelHybrid]

My personal dislike of "short" games is the price.

If I get Game A that has a 40+ hour campaign for £30/$60 that is fine with me, but if I then pay the exact same price for Game B that is only 8/10/12/15/20 hours worth of campaign, that is a bad thing.

Okay, but consider this:
Game A has a 40+ hour campaign, but you have absolutely no fun while playing through it.

Game B has a 10-20 hour campaign, but it's some of the most fun you've ever had playing a video game.

Which one is worth more, then?

Length is quantifiable, I.E. generally agreeable. Fun is qualitative. Bit of a different comparison, kinda hard to pinpoint. I get your point though.

OT: Good replayability is a tough thing for a developer to achieve. Older games did a great job of this, as often they lacked a save feature, which meant that players would spend hours repeating the same levels, which sounds very bad, but continue reading. Sonic is my favourite example, at least in his Mega Drive outings. Multiple routes in the levels made it feel like a fresh experience many a playthrough. Sonic 3 & Knuckles improved on this by making exclusive character routes via their abilities. SEGA had to really work hard to make the levels fun to play multiple times.

Trying to make a game fun to replay isn't done right the majority of the time. Tactics to add longevity to a game through boring repetitive tasks is not the right way, such as the jobs on Fable II to get more cash, or on other games walking for half an hour across the same terrain with no obstacles apart from generic enemy #243 followed by picking up 'key plot item', then taking back to plot based NPC, then repeat. Part of the thrill of side missions or repeating levels is the feeling of progression.

 

[Doom972]

It depends on the game's price. Personally, I expect a $50 game to give me at least 40 hours of content without repetition.

 

[otakon17]

It depends on the type of game. I love both Enslaved (~8 hours long) and Fallout: New Vegas (~40 hours). If I really love a game, a short length won't bother me. I'll almost surely play it again. Twenty hours is on the lower end of what I expect from an RPG, but some games (like the first Mass Effect) I hold in high regard despite them struggling to meet that mark.

You beat Mass Effect in under 20 hours? The hell is wrong with you? You didn't explore AT ALL then, which was half the fun of that game and they subsequently made it into a shooting gallery with the sequels(not getting into that though).

OT: I'd say 20 hours is an acceptable playthrough time of most games nowadays except for meaty open world types. To cite an opposite example, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night only took me just over 11 hours to beat fully(not 201%, just the true ending) the second time I played through it. However, there was a gap of well over 10 years in between playthroughs and I didn't even bother with a guide for it. However, those were a great 11 or so hours.

 

[DustyDrB]

It depends on the type of game. I love both Enslaved (~8 hours long) and Fallout: New Vegas (~40 hours). If I really love a game, a short length won't bother me. I'll almost surely play it again. Twenty hours is on the lower end of what I expect from an RPG, but some games (like the first Mass Effect) I hold in high regard despite them struggling to meet that mark.

You beat Mass Effect in under 20 hours? The hell is wrong with you? You didn't explore AT ALL then, which was half the fun of that game and they subsequently made it into a shooting gallery with the sequels(not getting into that though).

Haha....I've played Mass Effect start to finish 13 times. I wouldn't say exploring is half the fun in it (not even close), but I'd say I finished at least 85-90% of the content for almost all of those playthroughs (I even found all the Matriarch writings/Salarian IDs/Turian insignias in one go at it, which is totally NOT worth the effort). You can have a pretty thorough playthrough in about 17 hours. Granted, this comes much from an intimate familiarity with the game. So I know where to go and when. So it's not a speed running situation, just the kind of efficiency that comes with having played a game a ton.

 

[Tallim]

It depends on the type of game. I love both Enslaved (~8 hours long) and Fallout: New Vegas (~40 hours). If I really love a game, a short length won't bother me. I'll almost surely play it again. Twenty hours is on the lower end of what I expect from an RPG, but some games (like the first Mass Effect) I hold in high regard despite them struggling to meet that mark.

You beat Mass Effect in under 20 hours? The hell is wrong with you? You didn't explore AT ALL then, which was half the fun of that game and they subsequently made it into a shooting gallery with the sequels(not getting into that though).

OT: I'd say 20 hours is an acceptable playthrough time of most games nowadays except for meaty open world types. To cite an opposite example, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night only took me just over 11 hours to beat fully(not 201%, just the true ending) the second time I played through it. However, there was a gap of well over 10 years in between playthroughs and I didn't even bother with a guide for it. However, those were a great 11 or so hours.

Actually I finished ME1 in about 12 hours and I was certainly exploring and doing everything I could find. The issue was I stumbled upon the ending without really noticing it was the ending.

OT:

I love Vanquish and that game is really only about 3-4 hours long but I never felt that it was too short. You can't really look at game length in terms of time playing as that's rather subjective. I mean I can finish Fallout New Vegas faster than I can finish Vanquish. Does that make NV short?

 

[DustyDrB]

I played all three back to back when 3 came out and it took me about 240 hours. That wasn't "standard" as you probably guessed, plus I had all the DLC this time.

DLC would probably had 10 or so hours overall (mabye more) not to mention all that side stuff in ME1 which even I didnt bother with

also ME3 was probably thr shortest wasnt it? I think it was about 35 hours for me

The first game is easily the shortest, if we're talking about trying to do everything. It was also the most padded (Mako sections both on main missions and planets, the "collectibles" like the Matriarch writings/Salarian IDs/Turian insignias/rare metals). I'd say my average playthrough is about 25 hours, though I know I've finished it in under 20 (not skipping a lot of content, either).

I think Mass Effect 2 and 3 are about even in how long it takes me to get through them. Mass Effect 2 is still pretty padded, if only for the planet scanning. Mass Effect 3's planet scanning doesn't really take that much time. Though the game's length is roughly the same as Mass Effect 2 (35-40 hours sounds about right), I'd say it's the "meatiest" of the trilogy.

And I say this as a guy who puts both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 in my top 5 games (ME2: #1, ME: #3), and as a guy who doesn't even bother to rank Mass Effect 3 (not that I hate it either. Just has way too many issues to ignore).

 

[Neonsilver]

There have always been short games. The original Sonic the Hedgehog can be speedrun in less than an hour. There have also been long games, such as Final Fantasy. And this trend has continued to this day, where the only difference, strictly speaking, is two things: People who grew up playing games like Banjo-Kazooie (itself only something like a five-hour game depending on how well you know where everything is) or Final Fantasy VII are now out in the "real" world, but with unemployment at an all-time high, a lot of them have quite a fair amount of free time (myself included). Also, there are simply a lot more games being released these days than there were back in the 80's or 90's. Over one-hundred and fifty games were launched this year alone (partly due to the launch of the Wii-U).

I think it's not really a good idea to compare speedrunning sonic or playing banjo kazooie when you already know where everything is when you want to make a point about the length of a game.
In a game like Banjo Kazooie is a game where you have to search and find a lot of items, so if you want to compare it you have to compare the first playthrough since the search is a big part of the game.
The same goes for a speedrun and if you take the practice and multiple tries it actually has a lot more playtime.
And games like sonic felt a lot longer because they were often quite hard to beat.

Since you're the second person who has latched onto this, I feel the need to point out that I'm not the best Sonic or Banjo-Kazooie player in the world, and I haven't played either of those games in close to ten years, but I can still beat them in ~1 hour and ~5 hours respectively. Especially with Sonic, actually, the stages only last an average of 3 minutes and you've got six stages with three acts each. The average play-time of a full run without going through any special stages EDIT: and with little/no dying :End EDIT should only be 54 minutes. I'm not even talking about blasting through levels as fast as you can here, either, because some of the stages can be done far faster than 3 minutes (I believe the fastest time for Green Hill Zone Act 1 has been under a minute).

As for Banjo-Kazooie, again I feel the need to clarify that I have not played the game in nearly a decade and never even made it to the last two levels when I was originally playing, and yet when I picked it up again earlier this year, I had very little issues with getting through it rather quickly.

Yes, going into a game like Banjo-Kazooie with absolutely zero knowledge of it will probably mean you play it for significantly longer than five hours if you end up liking it, but how is that not true of any other game? I'm using numbers from my last play-throughs of these games as punctuation to the fact that these are numbers done by a person who has been playing video games for twenty years, not a person who just picked up a controller for the first time in their life. Because that's the point. To a person who has been playing video games for twenty years, a lot of games (within the genres they know, at least) are going to seem "easier", and thus be "shorter".

To explain why I latched on that argument, I'll explain how I understood the topic you started. You started a topic about the length of games and that often gamers feel as if games today are a lot shorter than in the past. Since older games were a lot more limited by their hardware than today and if you consider the best possible plathrough, it is probably harder to find a shorter new game. But it is pointless to discuss the raw length of a game and it is more important how much time a gamer invest in a game.

That is the reason why I had to point out that your argument is flawed. With your argument you ignore a lot of time people play games like Sonic or Banjo Kazooie.
I understand that you wanted to say that a lot of people look at the past games with their nostalgia goggles, but if you say a game is short based on a speedrun, you could also say a Final Fantasy is short because you can beat the final boss in a few minutes.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

it honestly depends on the game and the genre, if the games story just does NOT allow for longer than 15 hours, then so be it, but alot of games, especially in the fps category, have been fucking so weak in this category for a while now.

but since i play rpg's the most, this is my overall feel on it:

20 hours for main campaign/storyline = good enough for me probably, don't wanna pad it TOO much wiht unnecessary requirements
>50 hours for main campaign/storyline = hm..you have one epic ass game to tell or you should've broken it down better.

and for jrpg's they tend to reach that last requirement more than enough times.

granted that's just spitballing, not every game has to hold true to that, there are plenty of exceptions i'm sure.

 

[shrekfan246]

To explain why I latched on that argument, I'll explain how I understood the topic you started. You started a topic about the length of games and that often gamers feel as if games today are a lot shorter than in the past. Since older games were a lot more limited by their hardware than today and if you consider the best possible plathrough, it is probably harder to find a shorter new game. But it is pointless to discuss the raw length of a game and it is more important how much time a gamer invest in a game.

That is the reason why I had to point out that your argument is flawed. With your argument you ignore a lot of time people play games like Sonic or Banjo Kazooie.
I understand that you wanted to say that a lot of people look at the past games with their nostalgia goggles, but if you say a game is short based on a speedrun, you could also say a Final Fantasy is short because you can beat the final boss in a few minutes.

I understand your point.

And I'll make this counterpoint:
When games take 20+ hours to fully complete one play-through, how many people are really going to be motivated to play it multiple times?

Games like Sonic or Banjo have such longevity because they're short, and that's what people seem to be forgetting. If you like the original Sonic the Hedgehog, then you can play it over and over again over the course of twenty years, like I have, and never feel bored with it. But that's because it's not a long-winded, heavily scripted text-spewing monster of a game. It throws you right into the action with bite-sized chunk stages that take less time to finish than cooking lunch.

Yes, there are long games people replay multiple times, such as Final Fantasy or Persona or plenty of other JRPGs, I won't deny that. But if those are the only types of games you deign worth buying, how much are you really getting out of everything?

I suppose the confusion I'm getting is primarily because I love almost every different genre. I love FPS', I love RPGs, I love action games, I love adventure games, I love (some) racing games, I love genre hybrids, I love stealth games, I love platformers. And so every year there are more and more games that I want to play, but every time I see one that's going to last me for over 50 hours, I just get this sinking feeling because it's very rare that the game is actually engaging enough to keep me wanting playing for that long.

There are most certainly people out there who probably only play JRPGs, and so for them, having a game that's over in 20 hours is a huge disappointment. But I guess I just don't understand the mentality behind only being interested in one or two genres. Er, wait, that's a little off-point there, isn't it?

 

[Fursnake]

I like games of moderate length (15-20 hours) and I enjoy games with a hefty length (can put 100+ hours into them). I just don't care to spend $60 on something a game that only lasts 15-20 hours. I care little for the multiplayer components of single player games. This is why I don't preorder games anymore unless I hear the word or concept "open world" attached to it. I'd pay $20-$30 for 15-20 hours of gameplay, but not $60.

 

[TK421]

Now consider this: When a person is a full-time college student or has a full-time job, the chances of them having more than, say, two or three hours a night of "free" time is extremely small. Suddenly, that 20-hour game that you could've completed in two days when you weren't working has you spending three weeks to get to the end. Doesn't seem so short now, does it?

I am both of those things, and a 20-hour game is still short. I paid $60, and I expect many, many hours of entertainment. If a game is only 20 hours long, it sure as hell better have some awesome replay value for the length to not diminish the quality of the game.

Edit:

I like games of moderate length (15-20 hours) and I enjoy games with a hefty length (can put 100+ hours into them). I just don't care to spend $60 on something a game that only lasts 15-20 hours. I care little for the multiplayer components of single player games. This is why I don't preorder games anymore unless I hear the word or concept "open world" attached to it. I'd pay $20-$30 for 15-20 hours of gameplay, but not $60.

This pretty well sums it up.

 

[Skoosh]

It all depends on the game. Different genres have different expectations, just like kids movies are shorter than gritty scifi movies generally. You say it doesn't lessen the quality of the game if it's short, but it can! Think if you go to a restaurant and get an amazing, wonderful burger, but it's 1/4th of the size of a standard burger. You're still starving and wondering why the hell you payed full price for something that wasn't even half a meal, even if it was tasty. Same goes for games. For some games, there's such a thing as too short. Same with being too long and having nothing but a lot of filler. Exactly where this like is (20 hours, 5 hours, 40 hours) all depends on the game, so I can't really comment on "is 20 hours short" but in general, I don't know anyone to call 20 hours a short game unless it's an RPG. Maybe a bit on the shorter side, but not worth mentioning.

 

[aguspal]

More hours of gameplay is always best so long as the quality dosnt suffers from it.

 

[Neonsilver]

To explain why I latched on that argument, I'll explain how I understood the topic you started. You started a topic about the length of games and that often gamers feel as if games today are a lot shorter than in the past. Since older games were a lot more limited by their hardware than today and if you consider the best possible plathrough, it is probably harder to find a shorter new game. But it is pointless to discuss the raw length of a game and it is more important how much time a gamer invest in a game.

That is the reason why I had to point out that your argument is flawed. With your argument you ignore a lot of time people play games like Sonic or Banjo Kazooie.
I understand that you wanted to say that a lot of people look at the past games with their nostalgia goggles, but if you say a game is short based on a speedrun, you could also say a Final Fantasy is short because you can beat the final boss in a few minutes.

I understand your point.

And I'll make this counterpoint:
When games take 20+ hours to fully complete one play-through, how many people are really going to be motivated to play it multiple times?

Games like Sonic or Banjo have such longevity because they're short, and that's what people seem to be forgetting. If you like the original Sonic the Hedgehog, then you can play it over and over again over the course of twenty years, like I have, and never feel bored with it. But that's because it's not a long-winded, heavily scripted text-spewing monster of a game. It throws you right into the action with bite-sized chunk stages that take less time to finish than cooking lunch.

Sorry, but I don't really see where this is a counterpoint. I said that if you discuss the length of a game you have to discuss the amount of time people invest in the games and how much time someone invests in a game depends entirely on the game itself.
If I understand you correctly you want to point out that it is important how good a game motivates the player to pour time into it. I pointed out that you were excluding a lot of this time in your first argument.
And with my example of Final Fantasy I just wanted to make it more clear that you were excluding part of the game with your argument. I didn't want to say that all games should be like JRPG's. while I like those from time to time and they are certainly long, they often lack in long-term motivation and in my whole life I think I have finished 3 JRPG's at most.

 

[fix-the-spade]

So, Escapambillidandoes, what's your take on this?

The problem with a lot of short games is that there is no re-playability attached. Alternatively when it is it's arbitrary to the point of being retarded (think 'smash all the TV's' in Call of Duty 4).

My favourite game of all time is Lylat Wars (Starfox 64), you can bust that game end to end in 45 minutes. Even beating all three routes with medals, unlocking pro mode and beating them all again can be done in a day (if you're good, or obsessive).

Despite that it's still brilliant, because the 45minutes it take to get end to end is about the best rail-shooter there's ever been, the draw back in is nothing more than to beat it again, but better than last time.

Current short games have lost that simple fun. Shooters like CoD and Halo are now little more than training modes for the infinite and frequently shallow multi player. In both the crap you've unlocked is more important than whether you can use it or not and there will be a couple of maps available.

No fun, little (or facile) variety and no value in skill, most modern releases are rubbish!

 

[fix-the-spade]

Okay, but consider this:
Game A has a 40+ hour campaign, but you have absolutely no fun while playing through it.

Game B has a 10-20 hour campaign, but it's some of the most fun you've ever had playing a video game.

Which one is worth more, then?

Obviously B, but the trouble is that most games released now are under ten hours in length (twenty if you're playing for detail) and boring while at it.

Like Halo 4, I bust through that in just over seven hours, on Heroic, aside from the trench run in the last level I can't think of anything in it that stood out as especially fun, or even more interesting than the original. Aside from couple of stupid mistakes on my part I didn't even die much.
Even the enemies are weak, it's historically been a strength of Halo that different enemies require different approaches, but except for double tapping the Jackals every enemy in the game is beaten by pointing dakka at them and holding the trigger, it's barely different to Call of Duty now.

Full price games are all turning into short, dull identikits of each other and it's pulling the fun out of gaming!