Poll: The Order 1886 - Our critics are bullies

[Elfgore]

Time for Elfgore and his greatest PR input. "It's called criticism, everything gets it. Be a big boy, apologize for blaming the fucking internet, and accept that people may not enjoy your game."

Onto the topic, game length does decide my purchase, but other things get more value. For example, if The Order has a shit ton of weapons, a fantastic story, and engaging gameplay and combat. I'd buy it in a heartbeat even with the short playtime. Now, with what I think are four weapons, a better than average story, and typical TPS gameplay, the length is effecting my purchase. I don't think it plays to much into quality though, so games are too long for their own good. *cough* Final Fantasy XIII *cough*

 

[Mister K]

Can you make a good game that is 30+ hours long? Pfft, yeah. But same goes for games with smaller length, be it 15 or 5 hours. As long as the quality is good, then I am perfectly satisfied with short game.

But please, have at the very least 5 hours of actual gameplay and please DO price it accordingly. I mean, it's not like this game will grant us a revelation with it's 5 hours of mixed cutscenes/gameplay time, so IMO 35 USD is what such game is worth on a release day.

 

[Story]

Wow, I'm kinda surprised how many people said yes to this question.

The "real" answer to me is that it depends. Price has a lot to do with length too. However I voted no because done of my favorite titles of the last few years were short (Limbo, Transitor, Stick of Truth ect.)

 

[Totenkreuz]

Everything a game has factors into it's quality, even things which it does not have factors into it aswell. If it's for good or bad is up to each person and no situation is the same making each and every answer unique in some way.

Questions needs a strong definition so that each persons own knowledge and definition could readjust to the questions at hand, one cannot answer anothers question with their own logic if it is not explained and understood. What is needed is a strong fondation for the understanding of the question and an agreement for how it should be handled so that the answer, if nothing else, is constructed so that each and everyone agrees upon it.

Feelings about a topic should never rule over it, do not let yourself be trapped by it.

I'm sorry, but I don't think I can answer the questions any better. Other than, do not take personal opinions as facts. And if it's not a fact then why try and answer it with something which depends on facts?

Cheers.

 

[Bad Jim]

Yes, length matters.

I wish I had gotten a look at that 5.5 hour playthrough video, but it turns out that uploading an entire movie to Youtube will get your channel shut down.

They claim in the article that it was a speedrun, which would be fine since speedruns can be wildly faster than normal gameplay. But they are most likely the ones that filed the takedown notice, which would be an odd thing to do if it really was a speedrun since (1) it would disprove claims their game was too short and (b) speedrunners generally skip everything they can, so it isn't usually possible to enjoy the story by watching a speedrun as a substitute for buying the game.

Of course, it is possible that the channel was shut down for something else, or the takedown was issued indiscriminately and before the controversy on the length of the game. It is possible that the legal team didn't consider PR at all and shouldn't have issued the takedown but did. But it is safest to assume that it was in fact a regular playthrough that took 5.5 hours.

 

[laggyteabag]

Well, sure, but only if the focus of the game is on the singleplayer. For a game like The Order 1886, I imagine that I would be pretty disappointed with my purchase if it was only 5 hours long, and the only way around that is if it ended up being the best damn 5 hours of my life, and judging by the generally "meh" reviews, I doubt that it is the case. On the flipside, for something like Call of Duty where the singleplayer campaigns tend to be around 5-6 hours, it doesn't really phase me as the focus is on the multiplayer, and the campaign tends to be little more than an optional extra or a distraction.

If you are going to release a AAA game at the full £50 asking price, it had better be substantial, whatever it is. Having your game cost that much and only offer 5 hours of gameplay with no replayability other than playing the same 5 hour linear game over and over again isn't going to work for me, I'm sorry.

 

[irishda]

I for one am glad we continue to make a giant fuss about the length of something that hasn't even been released yet.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

I think about it this way: short length is typically coupled with low quality. Seriously, when was the last time we had a short game be good, let alone great? It's an attribute that you see all the time in disposable titles that are played once and then never remembered again. Typically if it wasn't thought highly enough to give it a decent running time then it doesn't translate to it also being good. Seriously, we're also not talking about a small side project like Portal or Far Cry 3 or an small title made by a small team like Braid or Geometry Wars, you're talking about a game that was clearly made to try and sell PS4s while also paradoxically just not being very good.

As for the dev team, this is what I say: welcome to the real world. I don't know what it is, but for the past decade developers have become really whiny and petulant. Criticize them and suddenly you're just a bully who clearly doesn't understand their artistic vision. Despite the mass inflation of egos abound I notice that a jump in quality hasn't come with it. If this is the current state of devs then we are in for a dark age in terms of quality and creativity.

 

[Prince of Ales]

And, the idea that someone is critical of your work makes them bullies needs to stop right now. If games are "art" then people should feel free to be critical of these works. (As someone who is an artist) Criticism is how things improve. If you don't like your work being battered by critics....don't release it to the public.

Constructive criticism is vital to art, yes, but I think there's a line after which criticism is just meaningless negativity. You have to stop and think "is this meant for me?". At the end of the day, we all have to understand that there are different opinions, different tastes. If you're not from the same market that this product was aimed towards, then why is your criticism valid? It's like if you had a range of bacon products rated by a user based meta-score, and it was review-bombed by fanatical vegans. Nothing about those reviews or the resulting meta-score would be constructive. It wouldn't help the makers, and it wouldn't help create a better product for the consumers.

I've never been into the Call of Duty franchise, for instance. Do you think my opinion of the latest installment is of any use to anybody? Of course not. I wouldn't know whether the latest was better than the last or be anything close to knowing. So if I was to participate in a review-bomb of that game, what would I accomplish? A slight sense of catharsis upon seeing a meaningless score going lower and lower, maybe. On the other hand, I'm a big fan of the Borderlands series. So upon playing the latest installment, my disappointment was justified. TPS was meant for me. That's the distinction. Now there's things I liked about the game and things (a lot more things) I didn't like. So I wrote up a proper criticism that I hope the developers read. That's a useful critique, because I'm the target market for the next game.

OT: Yes, I think length is a factor, for me at least. Most games I play tend to last significantly longer than 10 hours. I mentioned Borderlands: TPS earlier. That's a game I was mostly disappointed by, and I happen to have played it for over a hundred hours. And that's a game where the main criticism is that it doesn't have a proper endgame! For the record, I've played BL2 for nearly 650 hours:

 

[T_ConX]

They claim in the article that it was a speedrun, which would be fine since speedruns can be wildly faster than normal gameplay. But they are most likely the ones that filed the takedown notice, which would be an odd thing to do if it really was a speedrun since (1) it would disprove claims their game was too short and (b) speedrunners generally skip everything they can, so it isn't usually possible to enjoy the story by watching a speedrun as a substitute for buying the game.

Of course, it is possible that the channel was shut down for something else, or the takedown was issued indiscriminately and before the controversy on the length of the game. It is possible that the legal team didn't consider PR at all and shouldn't have issued the takedown but did. But it is safest to assume that it was in fact a regular playthrough that took 5.5 hours.

I doubt it was a speedrun, and it would seem that Eurogamer is prepared to talk about 1886's length.

The game lasted a total of six hours, 35 minutes - including cut-scenes that devour around a third of that time.

...but around a third of the time is spent on unskippable cut-scenes.

Unskippable! Every speedrunners worst nightmare.

But hey! I'm sure that those four hours of ACTUAL GAMEPLAY are totally worth the $70!

Of course, a relatively brief single-player 'campaign' is hardly novel in the world of gaming - much was made of Platinum Games' single-player title Vanquish being a four-hour game - an assessment that proved inaccurate but more importantly irrelevant. The joy was in the playing, in the experience - even once 'complete', you were left with the sense that your time with the game was far from over.

However, it's fair to say that Ready at Dawn has different objectives in mind. The Order: 1886 is a profoundly linear, dare we say it "cinematic" experience, where the developer revels in its immense technology, bombarding you with beautiful visuals, often to the detriment of the gameplay.

So I guess it's a 'Wait until I see it in a used bin for $30' game then.

There's also this 40X time lapse of the game, which I guess is sort of a speedrun...

 

[deathbydeath]

Look at Evolve which - as Jim Sterling put it - is "a game about selling DLC". There was all the controversy of how, at Day 1, there would be $100+ worth of DLC for the game...and yet it's doing just fine. Apparently the gaming community really doesn't care so much about such DLC practices despite how much it loves to complain about such DLC practices.

The day Jim Sterling is relevant is the day everything else ceases to be. DLC doesn't become a problem when it's released within X days of launch or is a download smaller than X gigabytes; it becomes a problem when, much like games in general, you aren't getting what you paid for. It shouldn't matter if Evolve has $400k+ worth of DLC on day one, provided that DLC is worth $400k+ and the game is worth $60(?).

OP: People aren't mocking the game simply for being five hours (even though it's 8-10). People are mocking it for being 5 hours on top of looking completely bland to begin with, and there's a difference. At least, I think that's the case. I gave up paying attention to game news months ago (before GG, you haters), so I'm ignorant about much of the buzz going on aside from a few snippets which I derived my argument from.

EDIT: He's totally right, though. The internet has become a nasty, nasty place and it's hell for anyone who catches enough of it.

 

[deathbydeath]

I think about it this way: short length is typically coupled with low quality. Seriously, when was the last time we had a short game be good, let alone great?

I finished Gunpoint in a single sitting/two hours, and it was my 2013 GOTY*. Seriously, that game is solid gold.


*- Granted, I barely played any new games in 2013 but seriously, check out Gunpoint.

 

[sXeth]

Length is not really the games main problem so much as you have a game about King Arthur's Knights fighting Monsters in Victorian England with Tesla-Steampunk technology and it somehow devolves into generic third person shooter vs humans in small arenas full of chest high walls for 98% of it.

 

[ExDeath730]

Maybe.

I didn't vote, because for me it depends on the pricing of the game. Something like Gat out of Hell can be a smaller experience, because it's not full priced, but for me that's the problem with the Order 1886, is the lack of content to justify the pricing. The other problem is that there's not enough quality there to justify the pricing and length.

Like a lot of users in the thread i think that there is a middle ground, and that games that are bloated and lack substance are not quality titles per se, but they appear better for the perceived effort the devs put into it, titles that are shorter are much more dependant on the quality, the gameplay, story, etc...

From what i could see, The Order 1886 was just another third person cover shooter with lots of cinematics and QTEs, so yeah...It's hard to justify lack of content when using a template so overused already.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Like many things, whether the game is long or short doesn't matter, not really. What matters is if the game is the right length.

I'd pay $60 for a 30 minute game if it was worth it.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

I think about it this way: short length is typically coupled with low quality. Seriously, when was the last time we had a short game be good, let alone great?

I finished Gunpoint in a single sitting/two hours, and it was my 2013 GOTY*. Seriously, that game is solid gold.


*- Granted, I barely played any new games in 2013 but seriously, check out Gunpoint.

Thing is you're also talking about a small game with a small budget and team that is tightly designed. A lot of six-hour actions set-piece games is that their short length is clearly not having any ideas or polish and trying to distract with some admittedly good presentation. There's a world of difference, especially where budgets are concerned. Gunpoint has an excuse, 1886 doesn't

 

[RoBi3.0]

Length shouldn't matter. The game should be judged on the merit and execution of its story and game play.

Just like a arbitrary page count is a bad way to critique books so is arbitrary game lengths. No one in their right mind would go "this book is bad cause it only has 150 pages. It takes at least 300 pages for a book to be good!"

If a game can tell a story in an interesting and satisfying way in 5 hour then good on it.


If for example The Order fails to tell an interesting story in a satisfying way in 5 hours critics need to explain why it failed instead of taking the lazy route and complaining solely about the length.

 

[ecoho]

yes it does but it can go ether way on how it effects the quality.

honestly the reason I hated (and yes I do mean HATED)this game is due to its FPS being set at 30, sometimes even dropping to 20, the black bars they put in so they don't have to work as hard and the dam screen tearing, not because its short. I mean seriously the less I had to spend with this game the better as they went for shiny instead of functional and that's just plain stupid.

 

[Iwata]

I started the game earlier today, on Hard difficulty and taking my time to explore the world and take in the sights.

I am around six hours into the game, and it seems to be winding down, but I have no idea how close I am to the actual ending.

But most importantly, am I enjoying it?

Absolutely, yes. The shooting is satisfactory, the story is pretty damn good, the atmosphere is amazing, the graphics are... well... it's the best looking game I have ever played, in my entire life. And I've been gaming since the mid-80's.

Is it worth the full price I paid for it?

To me, personally, no question about it.

 

[Amir Kondori]

If the game was amazing everyone would be buying it despite the length. People talk a lot about that stuff and the gaming press eats it up but at the end of the day gamers buy games that reviewers and friends they trust recommend to them.

The Order appears to be a mediocre game, at least according to the people I trust. It is short, it does have a lot of cut scenes, and apparently it doesn't really have a proper ending.

This is what happens when gorgeous graphics are the number one priority. Either developers need new tools to make fancy graphics faster and easier to make or they need to realize that fancy graphics won't help sell a terrible game just as much as average graphics won't hold back an awesome one.

Unless new development tools can be made to overcome the sheer number of man hours it takes to make these high fidelity modern titles studios are going to have to choose between putting out a graphical powerhouse and putting a deep and rewarding game.