Poll: Game Everlasting, do you love long games?

[Atomic German]

In short, I do. I love it when a game takes almost 20 hours of hard work, sweat and tears to play. I can get by with minimum 8 hours, which when I was oddly 12, took me that long to beat Half-Life on the hardest difficulty at the time. Sometimes i even take my time to explore and mess around, just to extend the length of time I spend playing a game. Not sure why, i guess I like it when a game is as long and detailed as book and takes me as long to finish as it does to read and finish a long book.

Oddly enough, Dead Space 3 was one of those games, I clocked in at over 21 hours with grabbing all the optional missions and looking in every nook and cranny for all the secrets and collectibles i could find. Needless to say, and please don't judge, it wasn't disappointing at all.

In contrast, i found myself very dissatisfied after playing the CoD campaigns. And I discovered I disliked the game more because it was a measly six hours rather than the various cacophony of other complaints that usually accompany the title.

And in some cases I will try to cram as many hours as i can into a single game, even if theres no real playtime that can be counted. At this point in time I have clocked over 538 hours into Garrysmod alone, with Team Fortress 2(pre-hatfortress 2) at about 320 hours. I'd have to say the longest time ive ever clocked in a single session play had to have been a close tie between Sins of a Solar Empire at close to 3 hours total and a session of Leage of Legends at over 1 and a half hours.

I guess All i can say is that I love a good long game, what about you guys?


EDIT: Searchbar is being wonky for me, so automatic search bar approval.

Captcha: "The virus that causes shingles may already be inside you." - Thats okay, i didn't plan on sleeping tonight anyway.

 

[tippy2k2]

I love games that will keep me entertained for the duration.

If it can pull off 50+ hours (Mass Effect trilogy), awesome.

If it can only pull off 6 hours but I found that incredibly excellent (Darkness II), also awesome.

The length of a game is of secondary concern to me. However long the game can entertain me is how long I expect my game to last.

 

[Atomic German]

I agree with you on that, content matters a good deal indeed, especially if the game packs it with enough to keep me interested, but not overwhelmed or so little i get bored.

 

[AndrewF022]

Depends on how fun all of those hours are... I would still take a short fun game over a boring long game any day of the week and still consider it better value for money. The example I generally use at the moment is Dishonored vs Final Fantasy XIII. Dishonored I can beat in about 4-6 hours on normal, but I have so much fun playing it (and replaying it) that I don't care how short it is. Final Fantasy on the other hand is about 60ish hours long but for me there was only about 2-3 hours I actually enjoyed of it (usually the boss fights, the ones I like anyway)... so for me Dishonored is better value even though its much shorter. So for me its definitely quality over quantity.

Now on the other hand... A game like Skyrim or Dragon Age which stays fresh for well over 50 hours a piece... hell yes! sign me up! I love games like that.

 

[Zhukov]

Games that can hold my attnetion for more that 40 hours are few and far between.

Gameplay is already inherently repetitive. No need to rub my face in that fact with ridiculous game lengths.

 

[sanquin]

It depends on the game. I'm only talking single-player here as multi-player is technically limitless.

Shooters I wouldn't want to be longer than 15 hours.

RPG's with a strong story, I'd want a good 20 hours out of just the main quest, 40+ hours with side quests. (ME1 for instance.)

RPG's with a weaker main story I'd want shorter. Around 15 hours for the main quest, though side quests for these can be limitless for me since I get the most enjoyment out of those in such games. (skyrim for instance had a pretty generic story.)

Adventure games I'd want to be around 15 hours as well.

Puzzle games can last shorter for me. 4~6 hours or so. But then the price should also reflect that. For a puzzle game that you can beat in 4 hours I don't want to pay more than 15 euro's for instance.

Heck, I want almost any game type I play to be 15 hours or longer. Shooters and adventure games tend to become repetitive if you play it for too many hours in my opinion. RPG's have more room in that, with levels adding to your own powers and possibly changing enemies. So I would want them to be longer.

 

[Sack of Cheese]

If the game is good, I always get dissatisfied with its length no matter how long it is. If the game is bad, 5 hours still feel like a chore.
Although I'd expect at least 8 hours from shooters nowadays, around 50 hours with sandbox games, 30-40 hours for an average RPG.

 

[BrotherRool]

I used to like a good length of games, and now I absolutely hate it. 10-25ish is my range. Otherwise it takes so long to get through the game I feel like I'm seeing no resolution.

I bought Resonance of Fate, and it's got the potential to be a great game, but it's so darn long I can't digest the story and the combat becomes a drag. In the same way, amongst it's many other problems, FFXIII needed to be shorter.

I like FFXIII and I decided I was going to replay it over my two week easter break. I'm at uni and don't have a console there, so I've got a specific time window. And when the game is long enough that I can't get close to finishing it in the two week period I have, that#s a problem. (60hours/14 day = 4.2 hours a day. That's not an unreasonable length of time to play a game but it's fairly intensive. There are going to be a couple of days where I'm doing other things and suddenly I#ve got half a days worth of solid gaming to catching up on. I don#t want this stuff to dominate my life)

Generally speaking, there's very few stories that can be told over that length of time without disconnect or padding and there's very little gameplay that won't get stale by the 60th hour. I love FFX and I can't wait for the HD rerelease. But unless I just devote a couple of weeks completely to playing it, it's going to take forever to finish and the experience won't be the same

 

[aguspal]

The longer the better. Always.

Thats not to say I hate short games or anything... but, sure enough, If am liking something, I rather not want it to end sooner, right?

 

[redknightalex]

It really depends on the game for me, particularly the genre. If God of War III was anything more than an 8hr game, with challenges and harder difficulties, than I probably would have been more bored than I already was with the story and gameplay. Same thing with the Uncharted series. However, if Mass Effect or any Final Fantasy game required anything less than at least 40+ hours (at least for me), it would be horrible and entirely disappointing. If I averaged all my games together, I'd probably end up with an average length of 10-25 hours, minus multi-player, so that was my choice. Still, there's no real answer to this question as everyone loves games for different reasons.

If you will, think of a game as a book. Some books I want to read will be short and sweet, like reading one of Philip K. Dick's novellas ("We Can Remember it for You Wholesale," ie Total Recall) or even Starship Troopers by Heinlein. Others, I want to sink my teeth into a long epic fantasy novel, like A Song of Ice and Fire, or a sci-fi space opera, perhaps authored by Peter Hamilton, Asimov, or Alastair Reynolds. It all really depends on what I'm looking for, what I have time for, and what type of reality I want to live in for a few hours, days, or even weeks.

Games aren't so different.

 

[Atomic German]

I prefer games to be long yeah, but an end in sight is always a good sign that theres sensibility for the time management.

 

[karma9308]

Depends on the quality. I'd rather a 10 hour high quality game than a 40-50 hour grindfest. Obviously a 40 hour high quality game would be amazing, but are few and far between.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Depends on WHY a game is that long.

There's a very big difference between why I would play something like Terraria for 100 hours, vs something like World of Warcraft.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Depends on the quality. I'd rather a 10 hour high quality game than a 40-50 hour grindfest. Obviously a 40 hour high quality game would be amazing, but are few and far between.

this.

plus it depends on what the game is trying to do. if it's going for a big story/character setup, then yeah, i'd probably like a longer game, but if the story can be told awesomely in 10-12 hours, then by all means, it's your game to make. half the time though, alot of games do feel like rush jobs or shit was cut, and those 5-10 hours that were cut really could've made a great difference in the depth sometimes.

 

[dyre]

Other things equal, the longer the better! I love any game that can hold my attention for over 50 hours. Well, except for MMOs...whenever I play those I always regret the time wasted later.

 

[porous_shield]

I prefer a game to be around 20 hours. If a game is shorter than that, and has a natural ending, and I don't feel like they cut corners left and right, than I'm fine with that. On the other end of the spectrum, if a game is quite long and I don't feel like the length is just due to padding, fetch quests, and grinding than I'm fine with that too.

I extremely dislike padding in the form of mandatory side quests that exists just to add length to the game.

 

[Yopaz]

Agreed with the rest. It depends a lot on the game. However 25-40 hours is where I prefer my RPG games to be. I usually spend a lot more than that just going through the game at a slow pace enjoying it though.

If a game can manage 50 hours without feeling like it's being padded just for length that's great, but even though I like long games I want to complete them at some point too.

 

[CityofTreez]

10hr game in a tightly nit package > 30hr game stretched out.

Of course, there are games that can be very long or very short. (Fallout 3 can be beaten in 6hr or 30)

 

[MissP]

It's always nice to feel like you've gotten your money's worth in a game, and length has a lot to do with that. If a game is short but has replay value, that's just as good to me as a lengthy game (assuming it's fun all the way through and not padded to death). I tend to have a bit of completionist OCD when I play games though, so if it feels like it's just going on and on, but I still feel compelled to finish it because of the time already invested, then I start to resent its length.