Are games getting shorter?

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endtherapture

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darth.pixie said:
Imagine BG2 if you will, as you would a modern game. It would be huge.
Yeah it's because of the obsession with flashiness. Every character in RPGs is now fully voiced - back in BG2 days to make a new quest (such as Kangaxx) they simply needed a writer, a character model which had been created before, and some dialogue and descriptions, because mechanically, everything was already present in the game.

Nowadays they'd have to get voice actors, new animators etc. for a quest like that.
 

Yopaz

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Anyone played Pokemon Black or White? They're not short. I've beaten Donkey Kong Country in 3 days with normal playing so games weren't that long before. RPG games of today want you to spend a lot of time on side quests, but you can ct to the main story and finish them quickly. Just because you skip out on content doesn't mean it's not there.

Some mdoern games are short, some are long, some classics are long some are short. The difference is that there are a whole lot more games now than in the days of the classic games. There's less quality control and then there will be a lot of short games on the market. There are still long games out there.
 

blizzaradragon

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I feel some games are getting shorter, but at the same time others are getting so long that it almost isn't worth trudging through everything(I'm looking at you, Dragon Age: Origins. Getting the Ultimate Edition is the only time I've said a game has too much content). However, most games are still within the good play range.

This seems especially true of games that they put on the Wii(at least first party and second party anyway, obviously not the utter crap they shovel out -_-). Donkey Kong Country Returns is actually a perfect example of a game I think both has a good play rate and replay factor. Won't cause you to trudge through the game to finish it, but won't be able to be beaten in one sitting unless you REALLY play through it, and is easy to go back to either just to play through again or to play co-op.
 

Jazoni89

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endtherapture said:
There is a trend of games getting shorter but there are exceptions to the rules.

I liked the length of Half Life 2 as a game - it's perfect, about 20 hours - it felt like a substantial game but it didn't drag on for too long or have repeated bits.

However Mass Effect 2 just felt short for me - as did Mass Effect, I'd come to expect about 55 hours for a Bioware RPG but getting about 10-15 hours out of it was not good enough.

Even the Witcher 2 seems really short - although I realise that there are multiple playthoughs and decisions to make, it still felt like a short game.

I think for FPS game we should have at least 20 hours for the single player, like Half Life 2, with 20 hours being very minimum for an RPG.
On my first complete playthrough of Mass Effect 2, with all DLC's finished, and every quest completed including the final mission, all came to 35 hours.

I don't know where you go ten hours from.
 

Something Amyss

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Vault101 said:
like for example aparently the recent SR3 its a little short..I dont know yet.and personally I cant tell as much as I take a long time to play games (or to put it another way play them in short bursts so it pads out longer)
I'm over 50% through in one play of two I'm doing (One for solo, one for co-op). On the other hand, I also played this game more in the first two days than I did the last game.

However, I'm sort of feeling this is a shorter game. I just don't remember how much time I spent on the actual missions in the last game. It could simply be perception based on how much time I've spent devouring this game.
 

endtherapture

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Jazoni89 said:
endtherapture said:
There is a trend of games getting shorter but there are exceptions to the rules.

I liked the length of Half Life 2 as a game - it's perfect, about 20 hours - it felt like a substantial game but it didn't drag on for too long or have repeated bits.

However Mass Effect 2 just felt short for me - as did Mass Effect, I'd come to expect about 55 hours for a Bioware RPG but getting about 10-15 hours out of it was not good enough.

Even the Witcher 2 seems really short - although I realise that there are multiple playthoughs and decisions to make, it still felt like a short game.

I think for FPS game we should have at least 20 hours for the single player, like Half Life 2, with 20 hours being very minimum for an RPG.
On my first complete playthrough of Mass Effect 2, with all DLC's finished, and every quest completed including the final mission, all came to 35 hours.

I don't know where you go ten hours from.
I didn't buy DLC, it's not part of the core game so I don't see why it should be counted as it? Otherwise I coyuld add another 10 hours onto Dragon Age and another 10 hours onto Half Life 2 (counting the episodes)

I did every loyalty mission, a few sidequests, got all the upgrades from the Normandy, it took me about 15 hours.
 

Sixcess

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Something that hasn't been brought up so far is games are becoming more forgiving (or easy, perhaps.)

Modern FPS: Hey, you've taken a lot of damage, but don't worry. Duck behind this wall for 10 seconds and you'll be good as new.

OldSchool FPS: Hey you've taken a lot of damage, and you've already grabbed all the health packs on this level. Guess you'd better just do the last six rooms with 3% health. Haha. Sucks to be you.

Portal and Portal 2 are perfect examples of this. VALVE went out of their way to smooth the play experience, which means a) the controls are effortlessly responsive and you'll rarely feel frustrated at trying to make that one perfect jump over and over again, and b) you'll rarely get delayed by anything for too long, making the game feel shorter.

If I get killed in a modern title I'll get kicked back to the last autosave point, maybe 5 or at most 10 minutes earlier. If I get killed in an oldschool title and haven't remembered to quicksave recently I'll be doing the whole damn level again.

It's possible to play through the campaigns of 90s shooters like Doom and Quake II in only slightly longer than it takes to run through many modern 'short' shooters. But you won't, because there's a lot of trial and error involved in learning the levels first.
 

everythingbeeps

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Are particular games getting shorter? Sure. Of course. Are they getting shorter overall? Of course not.

And even many of the games that are shorter are only shorter because they're cutting out the filler. Many "long" games are only long because they're packed with diversions, collectathons, and other artificial crap meant to keep you playing. Long playtimes aren't impressive in those cases.

And in any case, who's to say how long a game SHOULD be? People think a ten hour game isn't worth $60, and their main reasoning is that there are other games that are thirty hours. Big whoop. What they fail to consider is that the ten hour game might just be a much better game than the thirty hour game. That counts for something with me. Dead Space 2 was short, but it was all action. Assassin's Creed 2 took me like 30 hours maybe, but so much of that was just wandering around collecting stuff and buying buildings for my little town.
 

krazykidd

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Smertnik said:
krazykidd said:
The only games that are getting shorter are the FPS games .
Even that is questionable. FPS have never been famous for their length.
Well okay , FPS were not reknown for length. I should have probably given some example.

Goldeneye 007 , perfect dark , duke nukem 3D , quake 2 , turok

Vs

Modern warfare 2/3 , battlefield bc2 , battlefield 3, left4dead , halo3

Now , i will not deny that there are games with proper length like metro2033 and singularity , but a current trend is to cut down on single player to spend more time on multiplayer due to cost and whatnot . The past gen games didn't have online multiplayer so they had to make a proper lengthed singleplayer game to justify the 60$ cost. And i'm not here to debatr whether or not multiplayer is killing the genre , that a whole new disscussion.

Also
llew said:
krazykidd said:
Lol i like how you made skyrim into a genre.

Rpgs are not getting shorter . Darksouls , lost odessey , FF13 , dragon age origins, two worlds 2
3rd person shooters are not getting shorter . Gears of war 2/3 , lost planet 1/2 , mass effect 2 , alan wake (?)
SJRPGs are not getting shorter. Disgaea 3/4 , agrest war/zero
Hack and slash are not getting shorter. castlevania Lord of shadows , god of war 3 , dante inferno , bayonetta
Horror is not getting shorter. Resident evil 4 , resident evil 5( this one is shorter than 4 but they are both significantly longer than the first 3), dead space 1/2 , silent hill homecoming . ( these are to be compared to silent hill 1-4 , resident evil 1-3 , clock tower and games of the like in past gens )

The only games that are getting shorter are the FPS games . And those are the games that sell the most , go figure.
i like this man... he makes a very good point... the only games getting shorter are FPSes and thats because all the time gets spent on the multiplayer instead of the campaign
Adore me!
 

CD-R

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I don't think the games are getting shorter it's just that these days we have check points and game saves. So they feel shorter. Back in the day very few console games outside of rpgs let you save your game. So what would end up happening is you'd be starting games over from the beginning a lot. If you try playing an old school game on an emulator using save states you could finish a lot of them in an hour or two.
 

Dutch 924

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It's come from the apparent necessity for online multiplayer.

Developers usually put more work into the multiplayer because that's where the replay value is. Campaigns can only be done once or twice because of the repetativeness, especially in FPS games. But multiplayer offers variety through the different play styles of each player. Developers have recognised this, which is why Battlefield 3 advertised its multiplayer more than the campaign. Unfortunately, this means that there is less time, money and workforce to make a good singleplayer (Battlefield 3 can also be the example because of its crap campaign).
 

babinro

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Games are certainly shorter...but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Most games have streamlined mechanics that felt like a grind in ages past. You seldom come across backtracking anymore where it was a common annoyance in days past to pad out a game.

Many FPS titles that are 40 hours long involve seemingly endless corridors that feel the same and very little story development in the process. These days, the focus turns to action set pieces and storytelling. You're seldom walking around buildings for more than a few minutes without anything interesting happening.

The above being said, there are certainly games that feel too short to be worth full price. A game can be 5-8 hours long...but to be worth its price there had better be a great story worth revisiting and compelling reasons to go back.
 

Amanda Diamond

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Its not just your imagination. Blame it on the DLC craze. I play RPGs myself and I personally believe that the game should take enough time to tell its story, establish its characters and have a satisfying conclusion. However considering that games generally run at about $60, 50-100 hours for the main body of the game is generally what I believe is acceptable. (Not including grinding, which in RPGs should be minimal, or well woven in so it isn't noticeable and should equate out to maybe another 5-15 hours depending)

I actually want to applaud Bethesda in regards to Skyrim for making a long and, possibly to an extent, self sustaining game with dynamic events.(I'm not that far in mind you) Most of the RPGs I've played lately eke out to only about 40-50 hours(In the case of Dragon Age 2, that includes all of the F$%^& grinding)
 

Puddleknock

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MetalDooley said:
Nope.There has always been short games.I started gaming back in the NES era and loads of games back then were no more than a few hours long at most but they were often absurdly hard to compensate for the lack of length

Perhaps it's that,for various reasons,games are getting easier(which I honestly have no problem with)so the lack of length is more noticable
Agreed, even many games on the SNES and Mega Drive were much shorter than games made today.

Though I have no problems with games being short, Portal is an fantastic game and can be done first time in 2 hours. Indeed the second Portal had some pacing problems when they made the game longer than the first. As long as the game feels complete the length of the game should not matter.
 

Soxafloppin

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In a word "Some".

I played through the recent Prince of Persia game not long ago and it was over before it began, even more recently I plonked about 60 hours into Driver: San Fransisco, Which to me is a decent length.
 

Manji187

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Decent: around 15 hours (Resident Evil 4; on first playthrough)

Pathetic: 5 hours (Homefront)
 

kogane

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Tazzy da Devil said:
Games are definitely shorter. The most recent games I've played, Assassin's Creed: Revelations and Sonic Generations, have both taken me less than a day to beat.
Wow! So far, I've spend ~25 hours on Revelations, and I'm only in Sequence 3. I guess it depends on how much time you want to spend just exploring, training your recruits, freeing towns?

For me, a game should at least offer 20-25 hours of entertaining, side quests and all the other jazz included.
 

NerfedFalcon

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Blargh McBlargh said:
Games are getting shorter because people always demand the flashiest graphics, resulting in more time being put into those than in story and gameplay development.
You have summed up my thoughts exactly on this entire medium, and the 9 million people who bought Call of Duty 4.4 on launch day.



Why do we need even better graphics than we have already? Last I checked, I couldn't tell the difference between the fidelity in MW1 and MW3, or even MW1 and Half-Life 2 (except, y'know, the lack of iron-sights.) Bottom line: stop trying to upgrade your engine, stop spending hours and hours rendering the butt-crack of a player-character we're never going to see, and put all that time and money into making the actual game.

Also, if there's any finished DLC by the time the game comes out...ship it for free. And if that goes against your big-business sense, at least ship it for free with new copies.