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Does Videogame Length Vary By Territory?
asphyxiation_query writes "I've been looking at the relative length of videogames (in terms of overall gameplay, how long the game stretches out from start to completion) based on region. Can Slashdot Games readers discern any obvious regional patterns or variations in this information? For example, are games from
Korea typically longer than Japanese? How do European and North American titles stack up in this respect?" Or is content similarly long if part of the same genre, regardless of country of origin?
Asian ones aren't shorter, that's a myth!!!
Oh wait, games. Yeah, nevermind.
How about Neverwinter Nights or morrowind (pc edition of course)?
Multiplayer FPS and MMORPG's obviously last a different amount of time depending on the player not the game. People are still playing Counterstrike. Noone ever played motorcity online.
I think this is one of the more idiotic questions I have heard in a long time. If he had specified the question to a certain type of game. Say RPG's then we could talk.
Oh okay allright lets give it a try anyway. I don't know if this is even true. Does japan have any Flightsim type games, if they have they remarkedly shy about it. Then again we got almost no Hentai/porn games wich japan seems to produce by the bucketfull. Africa seems to produce exactly zero games with Israel the only exception (Decent).
The old soviet union seems to have produced some excelltent teams although most of their games are known for their unpolished look. Operation Flashpoint and Republic are techinaclly intresting games but lacked the polish needed for the americans. (One review lauded an american game for including that .50 sniper rifle completing ingnoring the fact that the theather where less then half a mile accross, yes lambasted OFP for the fact that you could not hit a target 5 miles away.)
Oh well. Perhaps more intresting question is why certain types of games seem to come from certain regions.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For the most part ive noticed that Japanese games are quite a bit harder than the American counterpart. For example soul calibur 2 (GC). Many of the weapon mode challanges are quite a bit tougher with shorter times to beat stages, and harder battles than the equivalent american game. Not to mention an extra subchapter. Also Zelda TWW (kaze no takuto) is also quite a bit harder when trying to find the triforce shards. Im sure with enough though more could be thought of.
What's the best technique for picking the nose during an intense game session? Is it affected by the type of controller used, whether you're left- or right-handed, or even the genre of the game? This question has been bothering me for a long time, especially since I seem to be losing a lot to players with more accomplished picking techniques.
When someone speaks of a game genre where length matters, RPGs are the classic example. The US just isn't exactly known for producing the best RPG titles. But likewise, the US has produced many titles that offer greater length in terms of replayability. No one honestly expects a person to play through a Final Fantasy game ten times - but titles like Unreal Tournament and most PC games can be played again and again thanks to robust multiplayer components.
But is that "length"? Again, you are faced with the original dilemma - you're comparing apples to oranges. Specifically, comparing a designer-created "length" to a player-created "length." I would assert this isn't a meaningful comparison.
I think the prime example would be the difference between the original Final Fantasy IV release and the American (and possibly the European as well) release of Final Fantasy II for the Super Nintendo. The original FF4 was a PITA of a game (as it was finally released in Final Fantasy Chronicles) and Squaresoft had to release an easy version of the game. The easy version was the one that was released outside of Japan.
In a way, the harder version of FF4 was "longer" mostly due to the fact that you had to spend more time building up levels and earning Gil/GP in order to buy the expensive items. That doesn't include the fact that a lot of the enemies and bosses were even more difficult to defeat.
I'm with you 99%.
FWIW, I thought this was kinda an interesting question, which is why I let it through, but your howls of derision are also appreciated - it can definitely be argued that games are only long or short depending on the genre, not the country of origin.
One thing I've noticed, though, is that many Japanese games, especially action titles, give bonuses if you play through the game multiple times (such as Silent Hill, Resident Evil, etc.) This doesn't really seem to be the case quite so much with US or European-developed titles, where a lot of the bonuses are either gradually unlocked or unlocked with cheat codes. It's interesting to speculate on why there's this (possible!) different method of unlocking - do Japanese developers presume their consumers are going to want to play through the whole game again, or are they just being wacky and obtuse with their bonus awards?
Video game length is something you can't really measure. It's the addiction level that counts. Take for instance Diablo II. The game is very old, yet quite a few continue playing it. And it has a huge following in Korea.
Sure, there are short games. But IMHO it differs more from publisher to publisher than from region to region. Daggerfall was huge and published in the same year as D2. Yet I daresay that the people playing it never reached the numbers of D2. And it took a long time to play it properly. Strategy games would be a different breed. What's the game length anyway? Follow the main path? Or play it ad nauseum? Your gaming experience may differ depending how you play it. You can also rush thru Zelda and FF if you choose to.
20 minutes into the future
To do your own homework.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Not only is are the reasons for any investigation into gameplay length according to region questionable/non-existant, but how do you measure it?
Fucking stupid, possibly the stupidest thing I have read all day - and I have been going to alot of the commercial news sites, so that is saying alot.
How long is Everquest, Ultima Online, etc? What do these "endless" games do to the graph?
But, as someone above noted, you're comparing apples to oranges.
Take your example: Action games. I'm going to simplify this a tad bit. Yes, Resident Evil unlocks different game modes if you beat the game on normal. But so does Timesplitters 2 (hard mode, plus new characters and stages), or Eternal Darkness (eternal mode, and the ability to get closer to the 'true ending'), for instance.
Simmilarily, take another example: Racing games. It doesn't matter if I'm playing Burnout 2, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit or F-Zero GX. All of these games lead to unlocked cars and courses when you beat certain races. 2 of them even use the same 'purchase' system!
I think this is more a function of the game more than anything. Any game can just as easily have big goals for big rewards (just beating the game), or little goals for little rewards (collect them all, find obscure element x, etc.).
What really would be interesting is not what specifc countries develop, but what specific countries consume. For example, do Rareware collect-a-thons sell well in one particular region above all others? Do games with tons of unlockables break sales records somewhere else? I think that would give some interesting insights into different societies.
"The US just isn't exactly known for producing the best RPG titles."
I'd like to respectfully disagree. Case in point: Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Deus Ex, the Ultimas, Temple of Elemental Evil, Arcanum, and Fallout.
Now... if you're speaking specifically of console RPGs, please say that, and we can debate that assertion separately.
There's many ways to make a game longer, let's just discuss the RPG genre. You could make a game "longer" by forcing the player to build levels in order to beat enemies, by making enemies strategically harder (building up doesn't necessarily hurt, but isn't a necessity, knowing enemy weakness and attack patterns are more important), or by adding more story and dungeons (at least some of which are completely optional). Dragon Warrior is long in the first way, Final Fantasy Tactics is long in the second, and Fallout 2 is long in the 3rd way.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
for exampel the arcade games flooding the market are all short, and should be. you are not going to stand there playing a game for 50+ hours at the arcade without stopping - so thats fairly logical.
Now those games does not get really bigger for the console/PC - and the extras are often just poor addons to the coresystem. No a game like Ikargua takes 20-25 minutes to finnish - yet I've played for 15 hours and never finnished it without massive use of continues :/
20 or 20 hours? I do not know.
on the otherhand I do feel that american games often are bigger timewise then their japanese counterparts - even the RPGs - but my experience in this field is more PC vs. Console so that again might raise questions.
but as for the final I'd like to state that I think that some years ago I would claim jap games to have a longer lasting value then western games - but the quality of games from japan have been stagnat and the west are getting even better - so now I don't really know in general, but with the online MPgames pumping out over here I think the US and EU are now in the lead in the too many hours game park...
note: Nintendos call for simpler game design - as in the arcades - will probably make shorter games as well, but berhaps not from a gameplay perspective.
I think that it would be easy to say that play time varies by genre, at least in single player games. Then perhaps you could argue that certain genres are are more popular in certain countries.
However, even this is flawed. How long is the single player portion of Tetris or Bejeweled or the Sims? has anyone "beat" those? Do they have an end?
Of course there are many that do not really think about games like Tetris or Bejeweled when they think of videogames (not to even mention microsoft solitare but since that could be argued as a simulation of a physical game that complicates the issue). However, those games played by non-hardcore gamers, are videogames regardless if the person playing is l33t or not.
Then there is the question of multiplayer games. There are still people playing Doom online, so how do you messure length of that?
Thus we come down to the real fault of the question. Length of videogames cannot be measured the same way the length of a book or a film is. For a book, there are numbers of pages and for a film there are minutes of running time. These are objective measurements (disregarding issues like physical dimentions of the paper and how long you want to make the credits and whatnot). While it may take me longer to read a 300 page book than it does you, we have both read the same number of pages, and a 92 minute film is always 92 minutes. But how do we objectively independantly measure a game? Even games with definable beginning middle and end, and a definable way of saying, that, yes you did beat the game, are still not the exact same for 2 people. It might take me X number of hours to beat Doom, but it will almost certainly not take you that exact same ammount of time. Similarly, a game of Pac-Man can be over in minutes (if I get killed as quickly as possible) or a very long time (if I am good and know the patterns).
A possible question might be, Does a certain genre of games from a certain region that has a definable beginning middle and end have more and/or bigger levels than the same genre from a different region?" However, as stated, the question is flawed since there is no way of accurately determining length among all genres of videogames. It is like asking "Do sporting event lengths vary by territory?" It seems obvious that such a question about sproting events cannot really be answered and encompase every kind of sporting event. Similarlly, there cannot be an all emcompasing answer to the question, "Does videogame length vary by territory?" It is simply too broad and too vague.
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It is more difficult to make the comparison than simoniker let's on. As other early commenters have pointed out, the issue of genres is key, since there is little method or point to measuring Baldur's Gate to Tetris. Similarly, regional differences have in some measure evolved into genre differences entirely. The distinction of "console RPG" versus "PC RPG" makes that clear, and in fact it is as pointless to cross those lines as to say Soul Calibur gives more good play time than Mario Party. Although rare, there are instances of region-crossing in some of these genres, and therein lies the poster's question, I believe. How does Anachronox's (2001, Ion Storm, developed in Texas) length compare to that of, say, Final Fantasy X (2001, Squaresoft, developed in Japan)? The question was also raised as to how one can objectively measure a game's length. I think like so many things a game's length can never be proven, only approximated. If you really wanted to answer the poster's question as scientifically as possible, you would have a decently large number of randomly distributed players go through a selection of identical genre games from different regions. This could be done for different genres, such as console RPGs and PC RPGs, but no valid comparison could be made between the two (about region, anyway). Then you could get a statistically valid mean for the length of time to play each game, and voila -- a comparison base emerges (also known as a t-test).
Yes, I speak of Console RPGs.
How long are these games without the tedious battles? If you took out just the random encounters, Final Fantasy games would be reduced to a few hours (if your characters were magically levelled up as you progressed.) What are shorter games? Content-intense games. Longish FPSs are rare; Halo is long, sure, but it sure does get repetitive in some parts, doesn't it? How much non-repeated content is in that game, after all? This as opposed to the non-stop variety of environments and gameplay in short-but-sweet games like Metal Gear Solid.
And what is this regional nonsense. Are all Japanese developers the same? Average the lengths of Final Fantasy 8 and Gigawing 2 and you get your average Deer Hunter. We're all homo sapiens, Q.E.D.
Slashtrash.
Really, a pointless question. So NWN took me about two months to complete, Freelancer took about 2 weeks, GTA3 took the best part of three months.
:)
Yeah, playing about the same amount per day.
The thing is, these are all big, reasonably open games that still have a definite plot to follow and goals to accomplish. You can keep playing each one after you're finished and discover vast new parts of the game you didn't even notice first time around.
That's the problem, because for me the subjective "length" of the game is going to differ vastly from your subjective "length". UT2k3 is about 4 hours of gameplay on "adept", but several days on "godlike". For another person you could triple those lengths or more, and for yet another person you could reduce them. (But not by too much, I hope
Here's the question you should ask, because it's a much better question and one that truly holds more value for the gaming industry as a whole:
"Are computer games worth their value, territory by territory, genre by genre?"
Once you figure out that a GameCube title in America costs about USD 40 (GBP 26, JPY 450), but in the UK it's GBP 40 (USD 60, or JPY 700), and in Japan it's JPY 250 or less (about USD 20, or GBP 16), then you can work out if you're really getting good value for your money.
Oh, I live in England. Yeah, it sucks to be a gamer here, when we have to wait 6 months or more for titles that get released in the US or Japan first.)
Oh, anyone know why a great FPS is more expensive than a good RPG, when the RPG content generally stretches further (for me at least) than the content of an FPS? No, me neither.
Many people, including myself, say that Panzer Dragoon Orta is an excellent game even though it can be completed in 10-14 hours (less? a little more?) apart from replays and extras. On the other hand, I played Saga Frontier long enough to figure out that I wished it was over after the first five minutes.
I suppose that for people who have nothing to do all day but play games, such a measurement might be important, since they could run through several games per week. But for everyone else, what's the difference, really? In fact, I would argue that people with lives outside of video games should be pleased if they get one 40+-hour game per year. After all, it's not in the industry's best interest if someone can play Final Fantasy X for 4-6 months before needing another game.
I'm probably going to invite jeers for saying this, but it bears repeating because it's fundamental: If you're having fun, it shouldn't matter if the video game is 10 hours or 100 hours. Unless the flavor goes out of the game in less than 10 hours of play (which would cause me to call it a bad game with length of play probably being at the bottom of a list of shortcomings), you're probably getting your money's worth as compared to going to movies or buying DVDs.
If you are speaking of RPGs, long can mean different things. Is the game long because of a random battles every six steps (Skies of Arcadia)? Is it long because of endless cutscenes (Xenosaga)? Or is it so freeform that you could spend a year doing everything and not be done (Morrowind)?
Or is the game long because it has a lot to do, a great plot, great gameplay, (Crono Trigger, Baldur's Gate series, etc.)
There are games on both sides of the pond that fit either case.
I think genre plays a bigger part, I mean I just completed Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy on its hardest difficulty setting in a week (I say a week, it was 1-3 hours or so after work a day), I mean that just sucks for length (great game though). While RTS games I play take months to complete on a normal difficulty. (or it could just be I suck at RTS and have L33t FPS skillz ;-)
FPS games tend to be shorter in my experience while RPG is longer but RTYS seem to be the longest lived games I play (especially tose with random maps and skirmish modes).
Anyway that my $0.02.
How can you say that civilisation's do not advance... in every war we invent new ways to kill you.
I'd like to respectfully point out that NWN and Baldur's Gate are not US products. They are Canadian.
I'd like to respectfully point out that NWN and Baldur's Gate are not US products. They are Canadian.
;)
Good point. I think all of those listed could safely be called "North American" RPGs
However, it would be most appropriate to categorize them as "Western" RPGs, because that's really what we're talking about here -- Eastern vs. Western RPGs and their significant stylistic differences.
I did find it interesting to read that recently-localized GTA3 is selling quite well in Japan...
Multiplayer FPS and MMORPG's obviously last a different amount of time depending on the player not the game.
Somewhat true, but you can gather information based on average and combing the outliers, as any region will have "low, nominal, high" players.
This could also have decent bearing on standard RPG's, as for some reason many of the Square RPG's are bastardized when they come to the USA (FFIV J/FF2 USA, FFX USA in example), why modify the original gameplay - that's alway seemed silly to me (if they figure US isn't able to handle the original game, put an option in, shouldn't be a big deal with DVD's).
The length of a game is determined by how long the player chooses to play the game. An obvious statement, yes. But there are no clear-cut answers to the question posed.
Japanese RPGs are talked about a lot. I played Final Fantasy VII for 30 hours. Some played it for 100. The range for a single game can be so huge that it's impossible for any sort of meaningful measurement.
Meanwhile, I logged MANY hours in NFL 2K3 last year. How long does a football video game last? An individual game is short, but the games are bought in order to play many virtual football games. How long is a game like NFL2K3 or Madden? Depends on the player, and the range can be vast.
Resident Evil 2 has four scenarios. They overlap a lot, but they have different endings and some different sections. Some played 1 and that was good, and some played all 4. How long is Resident Evil 2?
I won't even get started on a Vice City or a Falcon 4.0 or especially a Sims or Animal Crossing!
The whole basis for the discussion is unsound.
> Case in point: Neverwinter Nights
Umm... developed by Bioware in Canada, actually. The publisher is American.