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The Myth of the 40 Hour Game
Over at Wired, Clive Thompson talks about the myth of the 40 hour game, the typical length of time listed on the side of a game box nowadays. Mr. Thompsons discusses the ways in which that estimate fails to jive with reality. From the article: "This game offers about 40 hours of play. This is precisely what I was told by Eidos — and countless game reviewers — when I picked up Tomb Raider: Legend earlier this year. As I gushed at the time, Legend was the first genuinely superb Lara Croft game in years... I was hooked — and eager to finish the game and solve the mystery. So I shoved it into my PS2, dual-wielded the pistols and began playing... until about four weeks later, when I finally threw in the towel. Why? Because I couldn't get anywhere near the end. I plugged away at the game whenever I could squeeze an hour away from my day job and my family. All told, I spent far more than 40 hours — but still only got two-thirds through."
Man, I really wish their game wasn't as good as it is. And to think they gave me *more* game than they advertised! Oh, what false advertising is this?
I demand my crappy games back that I beat in a week.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
How much you wanna bet this guy would still be whining if he only got 35 hours out of it?
and he complains?
Someone call the waaambulance.
34486853790
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What's he complaining about? Long games = good.
A good rule of thumb is that when a PC game is touted as having 40 hours of gameplay, you can expect about 16; when a console game touts 40 hours of gameplay, you can expect 200. That's just the way it is, and has always been in my experience.
Maybe the estimate is based on a average skill level, and you just don't make the cut.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
I've come to the conclusion that "40 hours of gameplay" refers to being able to complete the game in 40 hours if you know exactly what to do and make no mistakes. If you have to solve a puzzle or replay a part of the game repeatedly, that adds onto the "40 hours" listed on the box.
Actually, I was expecting him to indicate the other way. When I bought Prey a couple months ago, I was expecting 5-6 hours single player, got 7.5 and was happy.
It's been a long, long time since I've seen a game, especially in my preferred genre (FPS) that carries anywhere near the playtime promised.
So, isn't this more of a problem that the estimates are just totally wonky across the board, and vary wildly between genres and the players playing the games, and not a singular "40 hour myth?"
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
My stepson was dissappointed in Tomb Raider because it only took him half the time as it said on the box. The key difference is likely that when you play a game here and there it takes you awhile to get back into it and get your groove back. If its summer break and you play for twelve straight hours, well, its not going tot ake as long. What would be interesting is if he took a week off to just play the game, and see how he does. Not likely, but interesting;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
40 hours of length is great, although I think unrealistic for most genre's to shoot for. Back in the golden days of RPG's, you expected to put anywhere between 25-50 hours on one. It was great, because it would keep you busy for a month or two depending on how much you played and provided enough time to develop a great story. Games such as Mario 64 provided countless hours as well, because they're exploration and challenge based games. Games like the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and the GBA/DS counterparts only offer an initial 7-15 hours of gameplay, but the replay value is through the roof.
I think when it gets silly is when it's one extreme or another. I remembered when I played through the last Contra game for the PS2. This game took me less than an hour to beat the first run through. No very much replay value either. I felt ripped off. On the other end of the spectrum, look at the Dragon Quest series. The logged in about 75 hours in the last two installments until I got bored and gave up.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Quoting "time to complete" on a game is nonsense, and always has been. Time to complete for a 12 year old kid? for a thirty year old guy? for someone whose crap at FPS games? for which level of difficulty?
I play games because i want to immerse myself in another world, and play with some interesting stuff. Its not a race. I dont keep a clock going as I play (although oblivion does that for me for some reason).
Whats important is FUN, nothing else. People can't easily define fun, so they try to come up with other metrics.
how many unique units does it have?
How long is it to complete?
How many DVDs does it come on.
I had someone complain about one of my games once because it was "only 23 MB". Apparnatly they didnt want a "good" game, a "fun" game or an "original game" or even a "game with depth", they just wanted one with a bigger filesize. I played Elite for most of my childhood. it was 48k. Was I ripped off?
whats the time to complete for Chess anyway? I'm still working on that one.
One day maybe game reviewers and publishers will shut up about how much bump mapping the game has, shut up about what hollywood actor did the voiceover, shut up about how long they *think* it takes to complete it, and just sell their game on the basis of it being a GOOD game.
King Kong is a long movie. Its also shit (in my opinion, YMMV). Applying the metric to books and movies is clearly nonsense, so why apply it to games?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Perhaps if the editor played fewer video games, then he wouldn't have made such a classic ass of himself by writing: "fails to jive..."
I suggest you read Slashdot
The author of this article makes a very good point. I am one of those gamers that has very little to play between work, school, and family. It is very frustrating to start a game and have it take months to beat, if I ever finish it. Yet I have friends who can beat the game in one weekend (although they don't do anything else that weekend). I don't know that there really is a solution to this problem unless they make the easy level of play easier and the hard level of play harder. I know that with some games I have had to turn to cheat codes and/or walkthroughs just to be able to beat it in a finite amount of time, yet I lose the fun and satisfaction of beating the game outright. It would be interesting to find out what solutions can be found.
I've been thinking about this for a while. I mean, I've been playing WoW for nearly a year and my main is just now reaching level 48. I don't have the time a 16 year-old does to power level for 2 weeks straight to reach 60. With a career, other projects, a bit of a social life and a significant other, there just isn't time for me to start a grinding session at 4 in the afternoon and wrap it up 12 hours later.
WoW does, in some ways, accommodate us "soft-core" players, but at the same time what often motivates me to just shut the game off for the night, apart from my other responsibilities, is being surrounded by "hard-core" gamers who freely hurl insults of "n00b" to who actually have a life outside of the game and places a higher priority on other more important life activities. not everyone can be a 60 in two weeks. there are more important things than this or other games, and i'm not just talking about work or sleep.
sad robot making broken music
The question is whom is saying the game will only take 40 hours to complete: a complete neophyte at the game or a play/beta tester that has run through the game several times?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
I have spent the last five years trying to finish Descent3.
I'm not exaggerating. Every now and then I'll slog through another half a level or so, invariably getting killed a few times. What with its full 6-degrees of freedom and insanely squirrely foes, it has got to be the most difficult FPS game I've encountered.
Well, I'm certainly getting my money's worth.
First, I've found that while working on any problem, given sufficient time to focus (maybe an hour), I can often improve my productivity by taking a break of a few hours or a few days. True, the longer I leave it, the longer it takes to get back in the groove, but if it's just, say, an hour a day, I'd still be better than ever by the end of the hour.
But more than that, he mentions a long list of unfinished games. Sounds like a quitter to me. Two thirds of the way through Tomb Raider: Legends, halfway through Kingdom Hearts II. I don't think it would've taken him any longer to actually finish Kingdom Hearts than it would to get that 2/3rds of the way through Tomb Raider.
This person has made a conscious choice to play more games and leave them half-finished, rather than playing fewer games and finishing them. I'd certainly take a few good games (the Half-Lives, the Halos, the Final Fantasies) over many, many bad ones (the Dooms, the Quakes, Final Fantasy X-2). So, he has two related, possibly valid complaints: It's hard to actually find a really good game, so he wishes he could play more games, in order to find that one -- except that games take a long time to complete, so he can't actually beat as many as he'd like to.
That, or it's a problem of attention span. But he mentions finishing War and Peace, and a Tomb Raider game is too much?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I remember (rose-tinted glasses ahoy!) when games were FAR harder than they were now. Perhaps I was just less good at games, but it took me about a year to complete the first C&C game, and 2 months to complete Red Alert. In comparison, RA2: Yuri's Revenge was over in about three hours. The Tomb Raider series is another similar case, I spent a very long time indeed completing the second and third games, but Legend (as good as it was) was over in about a week.
As time has gone on, less effort has gone into the single player and more focus has been made on players killing other players online. Multiplayer may make the game experience last longer, but too many companies are forgetting the single player experience that kept us going for several years - Deus Ex, anyone?
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
While I might suck, you might suck, someone else might be good. The 40-hour estimate is often based around the time it would take a character to move the distance required during game play. Think of it like a video tape. There are around 40-hours of video in this tape. Or if the character can move at 1 mile per hour in the game, it would take 40 hours to walk the total distance covered by the game play.
Why be disappointed in getting more game play than you paid for. Better to get 100hrs out of a 40hr game, than 10hrs out of 40.
95% of the time games are not long enough. Take Zelda: OOT, Final Fantasy, Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid, etc. The one exception for me was Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, but I think I killed it by going to the item world too much.
Within most games (but especially FPSs) I think the main problem lies within pacing. Some people just play through games fast, others don't. When Half-life 2: Episode 1 came out, Valve said it would take 4-6 hours to play through. It took me 8 (cause I like to explore), while I heard of some people getting through their first time in ~3 hours. Not on purpose, but just because of how they play. So while the people who played through in 3 hours might feel cheated, I felt I got more than my money's worth (especially since I did a second run with commentary on).
How do you sell a game at profit, while making the customers happy?
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
What are the assumptions for a "40-hour" game?
Do they assume that you are on your own? Do they assume that you bought the strategy guide that was right next to it? Do they assume that it is 6 weeks after the game was released and there are hints/cheats/walkthroughs on the Internet?
All of these can greatly affect the total playtime.
It can even matter how you want to play a game. For example, in Neverwinter Nights, it takes a lot longer to play through the game as a wizard than as a fighter. Why? Wizards have to sleep so they can recast their spells, so after every battle you have to sit down and rest for 30 seconds. In many places, a fighter just keeps rolling along. Actually, a monk is probably the fastest way to complete the game since they move faster. Need to walk back out of a dungeon? A monk can do it in half the time of a lightly loaded character. The 2-3 minutes saved can really add up.
So, asking the "average" playing time of a game is a loaded question. It has way too many variables to give a simple answer.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
That's because you're old and you suck. I can state that with confidence because I also am old and suck. It's a young person's world, guy.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This guy is just angry that he is bad at the video games
If you are worried about how long the fun lasts pick an online game to play. I have some 6000+ HOURS of Subspace/Continuum logged. How about that? I'm literally the best player ever in that game, no matter what zone and arena!
As a former EB Games employee, I remember being frustrated at the large number of customers who would purchase the strategy guide along with the game at release, and then have the nerve to complain that the game was "too short". It's since been my opinion that the growing strategy guide market has encouraged developers to use "cheap" methods to increase the average gameplay time.
Games were much more satisfying before the popularity explosion of guides and cheats =/
I can't remember how many hours I played pacman as a kid...and I NEVER beat the last level! I'm not even sure if I ever got to the last level. It didn't matter how many times I ate Blinky, he kept coming back. Toughest boss EVAH!
Huh? He's complaining the game is too long? Hey, I understand the desire for quick fun games, which is why I still enjoy Pacman and Galaga (or even minesweeper and solitare). But complaining about something like this is asinine.
Between two kids and only having (maybe) two hours of free time from 8-10pm each day (and when I'm not spending time with the wife, reading, or just vegging out), it took me six months to complete HL2. Do I deserve a refund?
Why would you ever base on a game just on how long it is? I remember some computer games say on the back of the box says 'infinite replayability' which means they can put 'infinite hours' for the length. Does that mean it's good? It doesn't mean anything.
It seems like people approach games by quantity, not quality these days. If it lasts twice as long you're getting twice the playtime for your money! Who cares if it's not anything you'd want to be playing for twice the length of time? Longer games are only better if they are good quality for that long period of time.
So what if it takes more than 40 hours? If it takes you more than 40 hours you got more than your money's worth out of the game. The longer games are better, that way I am not looking to buy something right away. Just because you didn't complete it by some artifical time limit does not mean that it is not worth finishing.
Tomb Raider Legend is a long game. Lots of puzzles, and when you are trying to get all the rewards it takes a bit of doing to get to everything.
When the games are too short, that is when you should get upset at paying $50 for a game you finish in 6 hours like Gauntlet Seven Sorrows.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
I see a lot of people saying, effectively, that long=good but I don't think that they've missed the real problem. There are many games that simply lack a way to intuit what should be done. Things like ladders in pitch black corners have huge potential to make the game boring and even frustrating. A good game should be like a good GUI where to go and what to do next should be easy to deduce. When one has paced all the corners of the room, investigated every item and used all your ammo shooting boxes, grills and barrels one only hopes explodes and no means of exit has presented itself, it not only makes the game long, but very boring as well.
Effectively what I'm saying is that long may be good, but also, long can easily be bad.
I care less about how long the game takes than I do about whether I enjoy the game. Doom 3 was fun...for a while. I eventually finished it, but it got to be a chore. Essentially doing the same thing on virtually the same map over and over again. F.E.A.R. was short, but I enjoyed my time playing it much more than Doom 3.
Yeah, I'd like more 40 hour games. As long as they offer good, semi-non repititive gameplay.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
It took me at least two years to finish the original Unreal. That game lasted me through one if not two complete computer upgrades. (The nVidia graphics in that game didn't look nearly as good as the original Voodoo card I used to have.)
.. until about four weeks later, when I finally threw in the towel. Why? Because I couldn't get anywhere near the end. I plugged away at the game whenever I could squeeze an hour away from my day job and my family. All told, I spent far more than 40 hours -- but still only got two-thirds through.
At some point, I sadly realized I just couldn't afford any more time. I've got a life to lead: Books to read, a day job, my infant son to hang out with, other games beckoning. That's why I've collected a shockingly large mausoleum of unfinished games over the years. Kingdom Hearts II? Stopped halfway. Kameo? Three-quarters through. Enchanted Arms? Eh -- I'm this close to bailing out.
Maybe this guy's problem is he takes on too much. Or maybe that he can't finish anything. Instead of buying a new game, why not save some money, and finish one of the games he's given up on? If the box said it would take 80 hours, would he have spent the same amount of time on the game as he did on the game that said it'd take 40 hours? Double? Would he still complain? What if it said 10 hours? Would he play it for 15, fail to finish, and whine some more, or would he look at that 10 hour number, skip the game, and proceed to write a column about it, complaining about how games are too short?
Is EVERYONE a whiny bitch now?
Title says it all.
What's he complaining about? Long games = good.
This is only true if you have loads and loads of free time on your hands like a high school or college student might. Otherwise, when you get out into the real world and get a job or start dating someone, you find out that free time disappears and a game that gives lots of goodies for little effort or that can be dropped for weeks and months before being picked back up without losing you is a great thing.
Long games are good for certain people and bad for others. However, the problem isn't really that the game is giving him a lot of gameplay so much as it's making it's gameplay so hard that it's unnaturally prolonged by failure. That's another split between the hardcore and casual gamer markets.
As a fan of console RPGs, I run into this all the time. Some games keep the fun continuous. Others require a lot of old-school level grinding to wring out the rewards. Some games make it easy to pick the game up and remember where you were if work intervenes for a week or two. Others leave you feeling like you need to start over.
It should be pretty easy to guess which type I prefer.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I have a 360, and have played a few games.
Tomb raider, without even getting half of those statue things took me a week.
Prey, on the medium skill level took me a good 10 days.
Halo 2, on legendary NOW takes me maybe 8 hours...MAYBE.
It all depends on what you like, what you're good at and what I have the time and patience for. Granted, "a week" might mean 1 hour on Monday, 3 hours on Tuesday, 0 on Wed, 9 on Thurs....etc, but it's entirely dependent on the user.
The reason this guy is upset seems to be that he couldn't complete the game in the time it was claimed it would take. This seems to be the typical attitude of US games - games are like interactive movies, mildly challenging in a repetitive sort of way but ultimately you are really in it for the experience.
Tomb Raider is a British game, and British game designers seem to be more akin to Japanese designers - they make games that are challenging and which require a modicum of skill to complete. I have to confess to taking this view myself... I simply can't see the point of grinding through an easy game, especially when most games have such poor stories. I want a challenge, something I need to be good at in order to play through, something where I feel I have achived something, mastered something at the end of it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Seems like a good argument to play old arcade games. An "epic" round of Robotron can top out at 4-5 minutes (yeah, I'm not that good, but that's a fast fast game). Ms. Pac-Man can drone on for a full twenty minutes. A close friend could flip Galaga, and that was a multi-hour commitment (or maybe it was just 45 minutes). I know that the author expressly enjoys the immersive narrative plot, but I generally miss the innovation and creativity of a good, simple arcade-style game that would instantly please.
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He wouldn't have gotten so bored if he had choosen a game that wasn't the nth incarnation of the 3rd person genre.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Sort of funny you took so long. Lots of the user reviews for that game toted it as "way too short" and "only wish there was more to it".
But everyone plays at their own pace. There was a section of Half Life (the original) that my friend was telling me would take a good two hours to get past. Fifteen minutes later, I was done with that area. I was a run & gun type...he was a sneaker, always looking for the best spot to shoot from, etc.
I spent maybe 6-8 hours beating the game the first time through on normal difficulty, then played it on hard and beat it in less than 3 hours (easier when you know exactly what to do of course). I then got every secret available. I know I spent less than 20 hours on this game and I'm pretty sure most of the complaints I read on Tomb Raider forums was that the game was too short...
The only games I ever expect to take 40+ hours are RPGs.
I'm not sure sure this is completely related to the article in question, but it is somewhat similar to the comments. Fact of the matter is that for the most part, when you get older, you start having less and less time to play games. Work, workouts, relationships, responsibilities, errands, etc., all have a tendency to get in the way of sitting on your ass for a couple of hours playing games. So, I've created a pretty simple rule that I try to follow when determining my game purchases, and that is, if you can't just play it for 20-30 minutes at a time, don't buy it.
So, yeah, I pretty much can play a game of football, a few matches or a level of an FPS, a few races in a racing game, and then put it down and go back to things that are actual priorities. I've even gotten a lot more out of some Xbox Live Arcade titles (like Geometry Wars or Marble Blast Ultra) than I ever thought I might, just based on this simple principle, seeing as you can just play for ten or so minutes at a time. I tried to play Oblivion on the 360 (which is definitely a great game), but after about six months, I'd never even gotten started on the main quest, and was a mere level 9 or so, so I just gave up.
Cry some more bitch, stop buying games. The 40 hour mark usually means it takes 40 hours OR MORE to finish.... not less...
fucking baby!
step 1, try finding games that are more your style
step 2, play them
For example, Warcraft 3 in multiplayer mode. (not World of Warcraft!!) Try the free demo from Blizzard. You can have a whole game in an hour or two.
Or else, if first person killing is your thing, try playing them online. You will wonder how you were such a square not to try multiplayer.
If a game advertises "40 hours of gameplay", it doesn't make it to the checkout. If there's a certain length of how long I'm supposed to play it, I figure someone's already played it for me, and all I'm doing now is trying to retrace his footsteps until I can toss this game aside and pick up a totally different one.
Since the game advertises 40 hours, it seems quite obvious to me that there is no redeeming value in the game aside from how long I can be kept busy playing it (or they surely would have advertised said redeeming value), and I would most surely hate myself for how much of my life I would have thrown away by the time I finish the game. So I'll pass, thanks, and dust off the SNES for some Mario Kart... a game that doesn't need to reassure me about its quality.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Now if he was talking 70 or 80 hours I could see his point. Or even take something like Shim Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne which will take most around 100 hours to completely solve. Games like that take me a whole season and more to complete. That's a bit too long IMO, 50 hours or less is preffered and I actually really enjoy the 30-40 hour game about the most with so much else to play and a limited amount of time to do so. Hell I've been replaying Half Life 2, GTA:SA, and Far Cry lately and for the first time Xenosaga 1 and Company of Heroes, granted I have about 25 hours a week to play games - 3/4 of that time has been going to these PC titles and a 1/4 to Xenosaga. So it'll take me around 3 or more months to finish Xenosaga, and that's without doing all the sidequests. That's just about too long for me, but everyone's different and may devote all their time to one game at a time (although that is prob just barely the minority). A big part of how long a game get's played is the save system 70 hours on GTA:SA with a good save system would be closer to 50 or maybe 60. BTW, Rockstar needs to pull their heads out of their !@#$@ and do better ports to PC and get rid of that archaic save system.
Gaming for over 25 years
It's not saying anything. Why post complete air?
Yeah ... but as a long time Console and PC gamer I can honestly say that I would much rather have 16 hours of great gameplay than 40 (or 200) hours of mindless repetition.
That comment reminded me of Unreal 2. It was slated quite a bit by reviewers as I recall, but I really enjoyed it, yet it was one of the shortest games of it's type I've ever played because it wasn't repetitive and threw up new enemies, new weapons, new environments and provided a showcase of challenges that kept me entertained all the way through. It was slated for all of those reasons.
It took me maybe 12-14 hours where as most games take me 40 or more - typically I finish few of them - I often play about 70-90% of the way through, then come back a few months later and god mode my way through the final stages, if a game gets too difficult or is tediously repetitive early on (Rising Dead I'm looking at you) I am likely to ignore it and play something else entirely, because I just don't have that much free time that I want games to feel like 'work'.
In case of this happening 'literally', I gave up on Shenmue (one of the best games I've ever played, and I regret not finishing it now) after it got to the stage where your character gets a job and has to move crates around the dock every day to make money to get through to the next stage of the story. While it had some really innovative gameplay and I appreciate that it did add to the telling of the story (like a lull in a movie, between the high action sequences) I just lost interest because it was too tediously repetitive.
Perhaps one way to satisfy more users is to make games shorter but cheaper, with episodic content (I guess this is what Valve are trying to do now). It certainly seems a logical approach, particularly with the ability to deliver content electronically. I can see publishers not being so keen on this though as they'd have to release and promote each title separately which would eat into profits, and they'd run the risk of people spotting the turkeys more easily (I can't see many people playing the first half of Doom 3 and going "ooh I've got to get more some more of that stumbling around in the dark action!").
And you EB games employees have the nerve to PUSH the strategy guide on every customer. Talk about annoying.
I have been playing video games for as long as they have existed. Never have I timed my usage of a game, never have I looked for some magic number of hours of gameplay.
Certainly we remember the people who could run through single player Quake in 24 seconds: does that mean Quake sucked (or, was that fact WHY Quake sucked?)
I am older now, and have a stack of unfinished games like the author of the article. I have had to become more discriminating in my choice of game to purchase; I just can't invest the time or mental energy to complete a Final Fantasy anymore. I did get through Star Wars Lego with my 6 year old daughter.....
I actually don't mind the shorter time to finish a game because of my lack of free time. However, I do want the games to be cheaper and have replayability (e.g., multiplayer, randomization, mod support, etc.).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I wonder what that metric should look for a fighting game. Samurai Shodown IV, for instance, had a timer: if you beat the last boss in under 10 minutes, you got to see the special ending. So, should the box read: "15 minutes of game play!"?
:)
On the other hand, I'm a slow player by nature. My Final Fantasy VIII play time surpassed the game's internal clock, which stopped, if I remember correctly, at 99:59:59. I really like it when a game can take that much to finish. It means lots, and lots, and lots of exploration. Nowadays, the complete lack of ending in World of Warcraft is, for me, kinda Heaven on Earth.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Any kind of shooter? Including non-first-person manic shooters?
Tomb Raider Legend was made by Crystal Dynamics, located right down here in Mountain View, CA. Previous Tomb Raider games were made by Core Design in the UK, but Eidos took the franchise away after they mishandled it so poorly for the past several years (Angel of Darkness anyone?). Crystal Dynamics take on Tomb Raider was almost nothing like the Core games. The only thing in common with past games was Lara (in some ways good, in some bad). A sizeable contingent of fans complained that the game had turned into nothing but an extremely linear Prince of Persia: Sands of Time rip-off crossed with a James Bond movie. There are never branching paths. You have two guys on an earpiece that always tell you exactly what to do. How this guy could be completely stuck is beyond me.
Also, I don't know where these 40 hour claims for Tomb Raider Legend are coming from. Take a look at a few reviews and they all deride the game for being less than 10 hours long. I purchased it myself, and even getting all the secrets in the game, I only have 15 hours of game time logged. Of course that doesn't include deaths, but I certainly don't believe that those deaths added double my logged time to the final count. It'd probably be more like 20 hours.
40 hours to beat Tomb Raider Legend? I call shenanigans.
1) Saying a video game takes 40 hours is like saying an American Football game is 1 hour (4 x 15 minute quarters).
2) If the game takes too long, play it on an easier setting. If you enjoy playing the game, then you would want it to take a long time. If you don't enjoy it, then the time it takes is irrelevant. Either way, there is no reason to complain about it being too long.
3) If the game is too short, play it on a harder setting.
I find most people play games on the easy/medium settings. That always seems like a waste to me. I usually start with hard, figuring I'll get maximum gameplay out of it.
I suck at games, too. They take forever to play.
I think everyone would agree that estimated amount of game time should be taken off the boxes of games. People have their own style of playing a game. You may be really inept at solving puzzles or playing through it without any regard for side quests. When I play, I play to get everything out of the game. I didn't just spend $50 on a game just to beat it in 5 to 10 hours, I want to have fun. So I spend my time doing everything the game has to offer.
Maybe the guy was taking his time on a side quest, redoing a level to get every secret, or even being ungodly slow when it came to attaining any progress. But to complain about how long you were expecting a game to last due to a box enticement, is sort of taking the quick cop-out to blaming the way you play the game yourself.
First off, the article is about the myth of the "40 hour gamer" not the 40 hour game". The author is not complaining that the games take longer than 40 hours, but that it takes him months to find 40 hours in which to play solitary games - a problem for those games who suddenly find themselves with the trappings of what is commonly called "a life".
Most of the posts here are completely missing the point ("You suck D00D!"). As someone who's put down more than one game that I was enjoying partway through, I can tell you the main reason why: because something new comes along. Humans enjoy novelty, and many long-play games are long play because of a continual repetition of the basic game mechanic. After your fourth session sitting down doing essentially the same thing you've been doing for the last month, you get intrigued by the latest & greatest. Add to this the fact that you may have multiple irons in the fire (I'm currrently in the middle of 3 different books and 4 different single-player games)
Why is this a problem? Because there are a lot more "soft" gamers out there than hardcore ones, and they make a lot more money. As a developer, what would you prefer you market to be: 3% of the population or 30%? If you're spending tons of effort to produce a narrative game that can only be reached by 3% of the population, why are you bothering with a narrative? Hard games are fine, but perhaps they should be restricted to genres that are inherently more repetitive (e.g. classic arcade games), allowing people that bail on the title to go away feeling they had fun, as opposed to abandoning the narrative.
Ultimately, there are many more people out there that only want to commit 6 hours to some interactive entertainment as opposed to 40.
-BbT
As someone who tries to play Kings Quest V without a strategy guide, there is no way anyone will just stumble across all of the random steps required to complete many of the games required tasks. I never did finish that game and had to hear how to complete the tasks second or third hand long after the fact.
Of course, I've also gotten about 160 hours of play out of Chromehounds so far so I'm getting my money's worth there, too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Do you really think they expected this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F64VfRnmIcM
Search engine optimization. Once you get enough karma and start posting with the bonus, Slashdot stops using rel="nofollow" on your comments, and some of Slashdot's high rank value leaks into your homepage link, your signature link, and the links in your comment.
Ok everyone is gonna have their own opinions on this. Let me put this into the light of how I perceive games and time to play.
OK, figure a movie by yourself in my area is going to run you roughly $9 for a 1.5 hour movie (granted you pay the same for a 60 min or 300 min movie). Then you buy soda ($5), popcorn ($3 for a small), and maybe candy ($3) and your out another $11. So for roughtly 1.5 hours of entertainment which may or may not be good, you're willing to pay $20. All bases on my area, market, and personal tastes to spend at movies. Now add a date to that, and cost goes up roughly 2x.
So you paid $50 for a 40 hour game which, again may or may not be entertaining, typically is interactive, can be saved, and played multiple times. Add in a MMO, ranging from $5-20 a month for how ever many hours you invest in it. Figure a full time gamer addict plays 16+ hours a day for a month, they get around 480 hours (guestimation not accounting for non play days and what not). Or the gamers that are casual that get maybe 5 hours a week for about 20 hours a month.
I really don't understand how people will pay approximately $20 for a 1.5 hour entertainment that doesn't involve you directly, typically walking away happy, and yet complain about paying $50 for 40 hours of entertainment that does interact and make you part of that world.
Well thats my 2 cents.
Every time I hear that goddamn monkey sound effect in a car commercial or whatever, my heart rate goes up and I'm back on the Von Braun..
Boo Hoo, I bought a game and am getting TOO MUCH time from it. I'm unable to finish it in the exact timeframe it should take... WAAAAAAHHHHH
God, cry me a river please. In the current world of shrinking boxes, nonexistant manuals, and savepoints whenever you feel like saving, if anything games are getting too EASY. Now you want them to get even shorter... Wow...
I just look at the time to get a general idea of how long it'll take. Basically... I'd prefer if it took more than like... 5 hours to finish. I'm not too fond of games that can be beaten the same day you buy them, especially if you're just playing during 'spare time' that day.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
I suppose if you factor in all the lame time trials, the mansion tutorial and exploring every tiny little crack, it may have taken me 40 hours, but if you simply play through the game to play through the story (As I play games for the story, Ghasp! And this one was horrible) it takes far far less than 40 hours. I actually see a trend lately of publishers putting in lame stopgaps that extend game time to the expense of fun. The latest Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider have been the shortest games (that have a story) that I have played of late.
You know thats just what I think when i go to watch a movie, i sit down and can't wait for it to be over. Idiot!
I totally agree about strategy guide and current style of gaming development ruining gaming. As a huge Squaresoft freak, I remember fondly back in early to mid 90s with no internet and no strategy guides and I still found EVERYTHING in Final Fantasy III(aka VI) and Chrono Trigger. Saw all of Shadow's dreams in succession, uncursed my Paladin shield, saw Chrono turn evil etc. It was fun to figure things out yourself.
Then again you have to look at the other side of the coin; games back then "made sense." Like in Chrono Trigger for example, once you've finished it, you can figure out when a turning point in the story is and you can go back and do something differently to see a new branch in the plot. Unlike the current batch of crap that they put out like the new FFs, with X-2 being the most asnine example. Hmm, if I don't talk to this NPC after Yuna takes a nap at this point of the chapter, then I can't get my 100% to see the "good ending?" Right, cuz without this NPC muttering to Yuna about some random crap that has no bearing on anything, she'd never would've found Titus. This kind of requisite hoop jumping gameplay is just cheap and it bored me so the game is just sitting on the shelves collecting dust.
It seems some of the companies nowadays, in particular Square-Enix, are making games overtly complicated just so they can sell some guides, albeit some very nice ones if you can get some Ultimanias from Japan.
I play FPS games (Doom III, Quake IV, etc) and find that I usually play the game through once w/o cheating, but on Easy/Novice mode. That lets me solve the game in a minimum amount of time, with a minimum amount of frustration.
Then, I reply the game again, in the hardest/insane mode, but this time cheating in "God" mode (all weapons, no loss of health.) That lets me see all the levels again, explore areas that I might have missed, and get right up into the bad-guy's faces, check out detail, see the 'eye candy' etc.
This is only true if you have loads and loads of free time on your hands like a high school or college student might.
:-) Console games are typically terrible for erratic schedules. Though one easy way to track progress in a console RPG is to get the walkthrough and bookmark where you left off. Reading the preceding section or two is typically enough help remember where you are without the need to write down very much. And there's no saying you have to read ahead.
It's not about game length so much as the minimum session time required to enjoy the game. Console games, for example, often have save points, which imposes a necessary minimum on the time investment necessary to make any progress. Many MMORPGs are the same way as the time
required to complete a mission is often measured in hours.
Enjoyment can be correlated to reward as well. MMORPGs often target hardcore gamers when designing character progression rates and quest rewards, so the games can often require a significant commitment for players to feel any sense of achievement.
Most single-player PC games tend not to have these problems however. Game state can typically be saved at any point, and most PC games offer decent feedback on player progress. So casual gamers should be able to play as time allows and get back on their feet within a few minutes of loading a saved game by reviewing quest logs or other state tracking features.
As a fan of console RPGs, I run into this all the time. Some games keep the fun continuous. Others require a lot of old-school level grinding to wring out the rewards. Some games make it easy to pick the game up and remember where you were if work intervenes for a week or two. Others leave you feeling like you need to start over.
See above
Quoting "time to complete" on a game is nonsense, and always has been.
No, it's not. It's an attempt to measure the expected time investment of the game, and that's always been important; and yes, it dates back to the days of board games. It's often the single most important reasons to play a game.
People usually don't sit down to play an entire game of Risk(TM) or Monopoly(TM) over their lunch break. They *will* play a few hands of cards, though. The time investment on playing a single hand of cards is so low that it's almost certain that they'll finish the hand; the time investment in Risk is so great that it's almost certain that they'll have to put the game away before the break is over.
I've played games with my friends that I didn't really like. Why? The games were *short*, so we could get through several of them, and play everyone's favourite *short* game. We weren't bogged down playing Chess, or Risk, or worst of all, Mega Supremacy (8 people; 3 turns; 2 hours, the time I tried to learn to play. I surrendered on Turn 3 -- so I could go home and sleep).
Expected time investment is the difference between a game that's worth playing, and one that isn't. It's the difference between sitting down to watch a nice 1/2 hr sit-com on TV, and sitting through the entire nine days of opera that is Wagner's Ring. Most people just won't sit through all that. More is NOT always better....
I don't know how you managed to play more than 40hours on this game. The principal feedback I have about it is that is was wayyyy too short comparing to other games (and I play lots of games). Don't know about 40hours but I guess I did it under 20 (2-3 days of free time, which I don't have soo much).
He is complaining that a game has too MUCH content?? This reeks of either stupidity or astroturf. "I paid $50 and I can't beat the game in a week. It's too looooooonnnnng. Boo hoo. Please charge me the same price for less content!" Seriously, WTF?
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
and this guy is complaining? WORST.GAMER.EVER.
Kameo was the first console game I played since I sold my Genesis and I managed to beat it very easily. If this guy was beaten by Kameo then he has no opinion on the topic of gaming that is worth reading.
The problem isn't that the game has given him MORE time than the box listed. The problem is he doesn't have 40 hours to devote to the game.
However on the other hand the 40 hours game claim are almost always wrong. I now work in the game industry but still found a way to play 40 hours into disgaea. I have about 24 hours in Samurai warriors (only been out a week).
I believe the real myth is "40 hours" games or games like Xenosaga that promise 100 hours where they hardly deliver half to people who ACTUALLY play the game. If you pick it up and drop it over and over and keep dying then yeah 100 hours is possible. However if a game can be completed 100 percent in 20 hours by knowing what to do in it, then it's a 20 hour game.
What the industry needs is games like Katamari damacy, or multiple non-forced (suikoden 3 way? bad) story lines. Imagine if you could change your character, and get a different story. Imagine playing through games that have "good" and "evil" story lines. They might be 20 hour games that you play through once, but if it's fun the first time and good the second time that's fine. Kotor started on this path but how you acted never really effected future gameplay too much until you get to the final temple. This allows the "hard core" gamer to get two unique experiences, and the casual gamer to get one solid experience that they decide.
Some game companies are making "40 hour games" by making the game so obscure you won't know what to do in it for the first 30 hours, or giving you puzzles that will make you work on them 5 hours to find a little dot. I'm all for hard games, or difficult achievements but pretending obscurity makes your game longer is a joke.
I've put at least 100 hours into FFX when I was able to devote that time to it just because I loved the level grid/capture system. But it's not a 100 hour game. It's a 30-40 hour game which a few people could put 100 hours in.
The problem we are running into is game companies who won't or can't make scaleable games. Lego Star wars 2 has a good start, on the 360 there's the regular game, and then "never die" achievements which is quite hard for the player. They are completely optional but everyone is willing to try for them. If more games used "achievements" systems like the 360 to give optional quests like so it would enhance the length of most games.
I shoved it into my PS2, dual-wielded the pistols and began playing ... until about four weeks later, when I finally threw in the towel. Why? Because I couldn't get anywhere near the end. I plugged away at the game whenever I could squeeze an hour away from my day job and my family.
Last time I checked, an hour a day for four weeks is only 28 hours.
...about the game taking MORE than 40 hours? WTF is wrong with people nowadays?
maybe this guy just sucks at this game. although I am sure he thinks he's a gaming god.
What can a L60 do in Wow?
Rep grind with various factions.
Battlegrounds -- faction rep, PvP rank/honour.
Raid instances.
Crafting professions (aka "The Auction House game").
I read this as:
Grind for faction points (which can get you cheaper/special loot).
Grind for honor (which can be traded for loot).
Grind for loot.
Grind for crafting materials (whch can be turned into loot).
It's really no wonder that WoW is far and away the most popular MMORPG ever created. Purple items--gotta catch 'em all!
Unless you're a really hardcore 3dfx fanboy, you never had a Voodoo 5 with four processors. The Voodoo 4 4500 had one processor (I bought one just after 3dfx collapsed for damn cheap and put it in a K6/2 400 machine, did the job just fine. Hell, it did a half-decent job in my Athlon 2000, before I finally drank the nVidia kool-aid...). The Voodoo 5 5500 had two. The Voodoo 5 6500 had four, and didn't just need its own PSU connection, it needed its own PSU. They appear on eBay from time to time, having been passed around enthusiasts in the years since techs leaving 3dfx labs took the prototypes and demo units with them.
I gather those beasts get awesome FPS in glQuake ;-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
His problem, which I share, is that he wants both the puzzle/action/gameplay and the narrative. A narrative without an end is unsatisfying (Robert Jordan I'm looking at you), but if you don't give a flying fuck for narrative then of course this won't matter.
Not everyone plays with an eye for narrative, but if you do, it's really frustrating to never be able to finish the story just because some stupid game mechanic forces you into a corner everytime you have an hour or so to devote to the game.
l4h
Dude, if it took you that long to finish Tomb Raider: Legend, then you just suck. That was like a 6-to-8 hour game, generously. (At least the main story portion.) And if you didn't finish..it's not like you're actually missing anything.
nobody gives a damn about this story. it is the biggest waste of /. real estate I have ever witnessed.
If He Can Stay Awake That Long After His Cocoa.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I think the 40 hour figure could safely be assumed to be an average. Sure, like so many posts here have stated, there are some folks (usually those who play a lot of games) who will finish in 10 or 20 hours. There's probably alot more folks who are going to take longer than 40 to beat it.
The other dynamic that I didn't see mentioned is how much time it takes to replay portions of the game after you die or get stuck. Sure you may have a segment that is supposed to take 20 minutes to complete, but if you die and have to play it over again 3 or 4 times, all of a sudden you're looking at an hour and a half to get to the next segment. Do this a few times and 40 hrs becomes 150 hours really quickly.
Author should own up to his mistake and buy a game that will keep his attention during however long it takes to play. Good games are always too short ('cept maybe Deus Ex). From the article, it seems like he's just itching to move on to those "other games beckoning".
Quit your job, abandon your family, and beat that game!
From an experienced gamer: The hours are just an estimate.
And, you don't have to wear the tight khaki shorts and the holsters. It's just a game. They don't improve your gameplay at all.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Final Fantasy II (US) was advertised as requiring 40 hours to beat, and I did it in ~22, with no cheats, and no, I'm not trying to brag about this. And then for FF III(US) it was hyped as OMG, you NEED like 70-80 hours to beat this. Actual: 43.
It's 60 hours+ if you bother to go save the lil' boy's father from the whatever-it-is-in-the-forest and whatnot.
And it's worth it, sometimes, to take your time: When I was playing RE, everyone was surprised it took me so long, I was surprised they had such crappy endings.
You can't take the sky from me...
I'm up to
1. f3 e5 ...
2. g4
Then the damn thing keeps killing me instantly, before I can make another move. Why do they make the bosses battles so hard this early in the game?
When I saw this heading, I thought it was going to be about how games are too short. Seriously. I got maybe 25 hours out of Legend (a superb game, might I add). And I did the Mansion level, as well as about 2/3 of the time trials, in those 25 hours.
I am sorry, but this guy must really suck at gaming. I finishing Tomb Raider: Legend on 'normal' setting and it only took me around 6 or 7 hours, so it was one of the shortest games I have played in while and also one of the easier ones. Adding the mansion level, which isn't part of the main game and the treasure hunting I could boost it to 20h total for getting 100% in the game. If I wouldn't have used a walkthrough for the treasures, it might have taken me 30h, but there is no way to boost it to 40h for the main game alone without dieing maybe a hundred times between checkpoints, of which there are also plenty.
To make it short, his complaint is totally the wrong way around. If he would have complained about dieing a hundred times or about lack of an extra-noob difficulty setting or whatever I could have understand, but Tomb Raider simply isn't a lengthy game, by absolutly no definition of the word and neither is it a hard one. If he sucks so much, maybe he should turn down the difficulty and use a walkthrough, any serious gamer should be able to beat the game with those help in a matter of maybe around three hours.
That said, I can understand his problems with games, I just can't understand his problems with Tomb Raider, since most other games around are long and harder. There of course are plenty of games around that take more time then they are worth (Final Fantasy, ...). And when people don't play regularly many games simply become unbeatable because you forget how they are played after a while (what combos are there, which button does what, etc.) and many games simply don't provide a proper tracking of the quests. If a puzzle requires you to find item A, then you get interrupted don't play the game for two weeks and then load your save you might have totally forgotten about that item A and run aimlessly around in the gameworld for hours. This even happened to me quite often, I never finished Banjo on the N64, not because its impossible to beat, but simply because I have no idea how to continue that game, I simply can't find the entrance to the next level and walking around for an hour on the worldmap just isn't any fun, so I always ended up quitting before I found out how to continue.
I consider myself a pretty hardcore gamer mostly with consoles but I did get a bad case of "WarCrack" this year and squeezed well over 1K hours onto that as well. Either way I find the opposite is true about the 40 hour game, whenever I pick-up a new game to play and expect it to last me a week or 2 I find myself putting the game down completed 10 or so hours later. I think it's a shame how easy most games are today, there are some nice challenges though still with games like Ninja Gaiden & Halo on Legendary which took a bit of time to complete. I've expected this though since it video games continue to get more and more mainstream the difficulty level will continue to fall in order to accommodate to newbie gamers.
It also really depends on your playing style. Some people like to go straight through the game and get the win. Others (and I fall into this category) like to explore the entire map before going to the next level, not wanting to miss any "treasure" as I like to call it.
Most people would probably fall somewhere in between, giving up halfway through exploring and going to the next level.
HD Trailers
I beat Legend in an afternoon..
Common sense is not so common.
In the main article here, the author is describing a 40 hour game being too long. I can think of several games off the top of my head that took a good bit more than 40 hours to complete but never lost my attention.
:)
Its because they're GOOD GAMES. Good stories keep attention.
Xenogears took me over 60 hours to beat all the way through and the many sidequests the first time through. Why? I wasnt using a hint manual the first time; except for labeling all the sidequests and giving me a hook to find them with. I still find Xenogears to be one of the best games of all time. FFVII is another... All of the extra content took me over 70 hours to finish (beating the Ruby and Emerald weapons, etc).
I think my point is, an "overly-long" game can't be defined concretely as a matter of time. It needs to be more abstract as you mentioned; "not bloated, repetitive, or tedious". Most games have some kind of these characteristics. Random battle scenes are an example in Xenogears... but there are factors that will make it worthwhile. For me its all about the story.
Chrono-trigger was a good example of a game that wasnt overly-long and still closed everything great. Took me about 15? hours to beat the first time. Wish there were more modern games like this. I hope FFXII does well... and they don't turn it into some stupid transvestite's heaven like FFX: part 2 was. The whole guys enjoying playing a woman character is kinda creepy; maybe its just me
And after all this time I thought I was bad at video games. I still haven't beaten Everquest yet! 40 hours a week over 5 years and just as I'm ready to beat the game, they add another expansion and another final encounter! [Shakes fist at Sony] Damn you! Damn you to hell!
"Keep at least 3-6 full bottles of hard alcohol on hand, a 2 week resignation notice,..." - Poetmatt
Who is this guy? When they say 40 hours of gameplay, they mean the average time that the average player will need to get through the game, as long as they play straight through. Now, if you suck, keep dying and have to replay the same levels over and over or you can't figure out the puzzles in the game and spend a lot of your time back tracking, then yes the game will be longer. Maybe your skills as a gamer just aren't that good. And who has the time to actually record how much time they spend gaming? I wish my life was that dull. Maybe tomorrow I will start recording how many brushings I can get out of my tube of toothpaste.
I played Tomb Raider Legend over the past two weeks, not more than 2 hours a day, I didn't play anything for the whole summer, I'm not an hardcore gamer, I do have work to do, and yet I completed the game easily. i think the dude is just a bad player, that's all.
ANSWER: twice the length from the middle to one end.
My complaint is similar (but opposite). I hate games that are too short, and in fact, with Tomb Raider Legend I ended up beating that game in probably 20 hours. It seems like almost every game out there now is so short... the ones that give you challenge modes and stuff when you beat it (Ninja Gaiden Black for example) are the best. I spent quite a while beating Ninja Gaiden, but to have countless hours worth of challenge mode games opened up after that made it even better.
I make it through about any game that I play, but, depending on the difficulty, I can do it in around 20 or so hours. That's an hour here, maybe two there. On a good Saturday, maybe I can get in up to 6 hours. Of course you can get much further faster if you can play in large blocks of time, but I have a family, several jobs, and a life. This is without cheats. My kids get a few hours into it, and then they're looking for the cheats. Most FPS go much faster when you have infinite ammo and health.
My personal beef with video games are the ones that attempt to be "hard" by making the screen black. If I wanted that, I'd just turn down the screen brightness or put on a blindfold. Making it difficult to see I think is a lazy way for games to make it more difficult.
you suck?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What I wouldn't give to get back the hours I've sunk into World of Warcraft. Damn Blizzard should have TOLD me I'd play for more than 40 hours... bastards!
> I seem to recall shredding my hand on some sports game which needed a fast back-and-forth operation.
That would be Activision's Decathlon. The 1500-meter dash is probably a contributing factor in many of today's carpal tunnel sufferers.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Damn, this sounds wonderful. Why is this author complaining? The only games that I've played in the last few years that I haven't managed to beat in 8 hours or less were the GTA games. I did also finally play all the way through Deus Ex, and that took me at least 20 hours that was logged on Xfire, and probably several more hours where I wasn't logged into Xfire, so it didn't tally my runtime.
Gun, Sin Ep 1, Prey, HL2, HL2 Ep 1, Doom 3, Quake 4, Land of the Dead, all under 8 hours run time.. oops, there was that half-assed Mexico-themed GTA like game that took a bit longer than 8 hours, but that was due to absolutely awful bugs, and the only reason I ever completed it was because I actually wanted to find out the end of the story.
This reminds me, I did pull out Unreal 1 to see if I could ever get through it, and I've been stuck on like the 5th or 6th major area for months.
I'd LOVE to see a game that could keep me going for more than 8 hours.. Maybe I do need to invest in a console.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Seriously, what was the point of that? I'm upset because I'm grown up, too. I miss the days that I was home by 3 and, if I was so inclined, I could play games all night long. Things change, yeah, but I still don't understand the argument. So the game is 60 hours, you can play for an hour a day, you're saving tons of money on video games. So maybe you don't get to experience as many of the games, but I don't see where the real problem is that he's complaining about. What's the proposed alternative? It's not like there aren't plenty of games that you can put in 20-30 minutes and have some fun. Yeah, sure, for most of these longer games, you don't get in the "zone," so maybe it takes you longer. But basically, what I derived from this is that some guy is mad that the rest of us, who can find time for gaming still, will never be out of a worthwhile game to play....
Annyong!
"Those time estimates are totally bogus anyway. Who even looks at them?"
;). On the other end of the time scale, I probably wouldn't want to buy a game that takes 40+ hours to beat since I don't have that much time to commit to it. BTW, I finish games pretty close to review estimates. ie Resi Evil 4, approx 20 hrs, which is a nice number I find for single player games.
I do actually. I'm not going to pay $60 to play a game that lasts 5-6 hrs with no multiplayer, no matter how good that game may be. Half Life 2 only took about 13 hours to beat, but it has a fairly popular multiplayer mode
i though it was a decent enough game tbh. But all in all i had completed it in 2 days (including break for uni and work) and was dissapointed that it didnt last longer :/ I remember back to the older Tombraider games that i sat for hours working out even the most simple puzzles! Maybe it was just too predictable, but the 40 hour expected gameplay would seem about right... ...then again maybe im just a complete nerd :D
I'm not suprised that people can't complete a 40-hour game. Most give up on a Sin Episodes: Emergance, although it could be dismissed as people not submitting stats after winning the game.
In my opinion, games should take around ~10-15 hours to complete properly for at least one of the good endings (best ending can take any amount of time), perhaps ~5-10 on a low difficulty level.
However, endings that require grinding to acquire tend to kill interest in the game very quickly. Long battle-sequences qualify, especially when you have a tactic that is guarenteed to take out anything (but each hit-point sponge takes 3 minutes to destroy even when inflicting maximum damage per second.)
not because the game is in some way flawed. I 100%'d the game in well under 40 hours, I found the game short if anything finding some of the golden idols is a bitch, but aside that the time trials are straight forward enough and the levels are still fairly linear (hint: if there's only one way to leave the room you entered, apart from the entrance, that's probably the way you're supposed to go, even if the room is large and full of objects - if there is no way to leave the room, look for the shiniest object and interact with it). Without a doubt it's the best Tomb Raider game to come out in a long time, memories of 1/2 were definitely evoked, but what are you really complaining about? I think my total play time was something goofy like 13 hours, the longest level takes like 30 minutes to beat? Assuming you had trouble with it's time trial (think that's the Kazikstan mission, which is fairly painful because of the long pre-amble before possibly the toughest fight in the game) the whole time you took 26 tries at the same level without beating it?
Maybe the solution is for you to start considering your opponent when your not playing, think about why you just can't manage to get the action cut scenes right on that speeding train (hint: they don't change, you can memorize them, they're only ever 3-4 button seqeuences anyways, back in the side-scrolling arcade fighter days we'd remember multiple 20 point combos but you can't get your head around Down, Left, Up, Left (that's the kazikstan train sequence off the top of my head after not playing the game in the past 4 months by the way ).
One more thing, the fact that the game says 40 hour completion time doesn't mean you can only play it for 40 hours, if you are only 2/3rds through go back and take 60 hours to complete it - the people who should be allowed to bitch about things like this are the people like me who beat it more than 4 times faster than you will (projected) and you don't see me moaning - on the contrary I accept the fact I only get such short play time out of games as a function of my awesome l33t skillz. I'll sing the praises of that game till the day I die for all the right things it finally did to the series, even though I spent less than half a day in completely beating it in every aspect (Gotta get that last bikini!)
That's his point.
"I don't think it would've taken him any longer to actually finish Kingdom Hearts than it would to get that 2/3rds of the way through Tomb Raider."
Maybe if you're chugging straight through in a groove. But I'd say it's a pretty true statement that the first half of any game is significantly easier than the second half. So it's going to be a lot easier to go halfway through two games than it is to go all the way through one.
It's made worse if you're constantly getting interrupted, and having to come back to it later--you lose the "feel" of the game and have to play for a little while to get it back. So as you progress in the game in fits and starts (squeezed in around real life), you die progressively more and more often for a given increment of advancement toward the completion. At some point it just gets too frustrating to spend you first (and often only) hour of gaming getting your ass kicked continuously. So you pop in a new game, and bingo--instantly much more gratifying.
Does that make a person a quitter? Yeah, I guess you could look at it that way. To me it's better framed as a question of priorities.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
n00b!
"damnit, trolley I want in your signature." - Elburrito
Game developers should feel no obligation to make their games beatable by everyone, and I think the author of the article does a diservice to gamers as a whole by complaining about a game being too long. The general trend I've seen is that games are getting too short and too easy.
I'm not a hardcore gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but I remember the days when I'd play a game, get a few levels in, and just not be able to go any further. But if it was fun, you'd better believe I'd keep trying. Some games I'd be able to gradually get farther as I got better at it. Others, not so much. But if 1) it was fun, and 2) I felt like there were still parts of the game I hadn't seen, I'd generally keep playing.
In summary, if I play a game and beat it shortly after starting, I feel ripped off. If I play a game and get an engaging experience from the time I invested in it, I feel I got my money's worth whether I beat it or not. I think most gamers would agree this is the message game developers need to be getting. Don't coddle us, just give us something fun and challenging. Thank you.
Perhaps the way they rate the time is based on the distance you need to travel around and not how long the user takes to work it out. If you have 10 people in a room on the same level and all of them know what the goal is and how to attain it its very likely that they are faster than 10 people who dont know the goal. Try it a second time and see if your closer to the timeline and feel free to use the following walkthrough so you are in a similar boat to how the people who rated the timings were paddling. http://www.tombraiderchronicles.com/tr7/walkthroug h/index.html
I'm not saying the writer was not capable of the task merely that the task was not layed out in the same way as the testers were given.
WTF - Speak in acronyms already, i can't figure out what you mean otherwise boss
There's always time. When you've been busy for consecutive weekends and your friends plans a last minute Vegas trip, wouldn't you take it? I'm sure I would. Heck, I did that during finals week on 2 occasions (I still came back on time to take the tests mind you).
No time because of kids and work. Sleep less. That's what I do. I work 8am - 5pm, workout at 24hr from 5pm-630pm, each 7-730pm and then hang out with my girlfriend the rest of the night if I decide to visit her apartment or game all night at my apartment. Around 3am, I would wake up and play an hour session from my Gameboy Advance or DS and go back to sleep at 4am if I was staying at her place.
There's always time to play. Just sacrifice and/or re-prioritize other time slots.
It's kind of like getting the PS3. You have to work harder and/or sacrifice some things in order to get it.
One feature many people neglect, to thier own disatisfaction is the difficulty settings. Play a game on easy and often you can finish it significantly faster.
You could always tell when a wall was going to recess into the ceiling... typically you are in a dead end area and take a long hallway with lots of 'columns' (which actually are framing a wall) and the lighting 1) doesn't match up 2) is just black.
And the spawn areas... any room that was relatively open and devoid of monsters when you first enter it.
Of course, you can always find a way to make it more interesting.
What I like to do is 'F5' before entering a large space. Then run in and try to trigger as many spawns or aggro as many hidden enemies as possible. Do your best to off them, and check your health/ammo.
Then F9 and try again. This time, try to get off without a scratch (or just enough to be covered by health/shards you passed earlier).
It's like a dance. Boom, jump, headshot, pump, duck, headshot. 'F5'
I was starting every map with 125/100 all the way up until Hell on Veteran.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
God of War was the perfect game in terms of length. I'm a dad with two very young daughters, and I work in the videogames industry so I do rather long hours. Like the author, after work & family I do not have much time for games.
So God of War was awesome. I always felt like the game was moving forward. The story was intense yet I spent most of my time playing and not watching cut scenes. At normal difficulty, it felt hard enough but not crazy hard. The puzzles were not ridiculous. And most importantly, I was able to finish it without spending too much time on it, which left me hungry for more but not frustrated.
ICO was another such game, although arguably very easy and a bit short. But I'm not complaining.
And as much as I love the Grand Theft Auto games, I didn't finish GTA3, barely finished Vice City and am *nowhere* near finishing San Andreas despite pouring significant time (compared to my other games) in it, to the point that I'm dropping it. (too many bad quality non-optional mini-games like flying the plane, the helicopter, etc, that can't compare with the quality of the core game).
P.S: I hope the GoW 2 runs at 60 fps
I can't quite agree that this game is too long I think it is acceptable length for the genre. The time it took has nothing to do with age I am 30 and I beat this game in 3 days in the sence I completed the entire story. All 3 days were work days that I had no more that 6 hrs or so to play. I did hit the game hard though on those days and completed it. Now if this game had been beatable in a shorter time it would have felt like a rip off as I do not find the game so enjoyable to warrent a replay(Figuring out the puzzles is half the point) or even care about the time challenges (glad it was a rental).
I realize life and responisbilities can definatly make it take longer to beat a game. With all the talks of episodic content the game market is starting to cater to those needs and at a reasonable price for reasonable content. I personally want lots of meaningful content for my 60 dollar purchase. This can be either attained with a long rich story line or tons of replayablilty such as online play(or a mixture of both). There are also tons of games on the market already that dont require dedication and are very fufilling. Most FPS's, Racing games, Music Games, Puzzle Games, Fighting Games, and Retro Arcade Games. Many of these games you may find yourself spending hundreds of hours on but in 1 hr increments. You still have time to mow the lawn and go to the kids ball game.
In closing if a game takes 4 weeks to beat and one does not enjoying it enough to press on is it really a good game or that persons type of game. If Tomb Raider is too long I would definatly stay far away for Oblivian or any RPG for that matter.
I have this problem - I work long hours and have a pretty busy life outside of that, so I struggle to find time to play games even though I love them. I tend to pick up a game for a few hours but then have to leave it for weeks at a time. It's especially hard in games like Civilization IV and Deus Ex (or System Shock II and Freespace 2, which I'm trying to play through at the moment), in other words, games which either present an extremely high level of complexity or a very detailed storyline.
I have always thought it would be super-cool if such games provided a sort of "last week, in Civilization IV" recap option when you load your game. For instance, Civ could give you a little potted history of the last hundred years or so - "After the Greek attack on the Germans, Japan and Russia entered into a mutual protection pact, while the Americans began stockpiling arms..." and so on. It could even be presented as a history lecture or news bulletin to fit into the game world. A game like Deus Ex could give you a more story-driven update - "You've just returned to Hell's Kitchen, and your brother Paul is nowhere to be found..."
I can't imagine this would be hard to implement.
Read Pynchon.
I am failing to see the logic, it would seem to me that $50 spread over the course of 40+ hours is a pretty good return on investment.
I wish my cellphone company counted my free-of-charge hours the same way...
Anybody remember the par times for each level in games like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D? I think if I actually got par or under the game wouldn't even last 40 minutes.
Treat every day like it's your last; delete your browser cache before going to bed.
I really enjoyed Tomb Raider Legends, and I wish it would have taken that long to finish. Instead for me it took 7 hours on the hardest difficulty on the first run through the game. Those were a fun seven hours, but I was sure glad I rented it because for $60 (Xbox 360 version) I expect more than seven hours of game-play.
If anything this shows how incredibly difficult it is for a developer to evaluate the length of time a game will take to finish. It's entirely dependant on the player's skill. In some games this can be accounted for by increasing the difficulty so that a range of players get a decent amount of time out of the game, but in Tomb Raider case this strategy was ineffective. Even on the hardest difficulty there were few enemy encounters that provided any significant challenge. There is also no method to scale the difficulty of the platform puzzles in the game either, and since this makes up a majority of the game-play an adept gamer can blow through the game really quickly.
What is a developer to do in this case? The best they can do is try to make the game appeal to the largest audience possible. It's going to be impossible to satisify everyone. Even though I did not buy the game and instead rented it, I thought Edios did a great job in that regard.
I've played lots of games that took longer than expected to finish, but Tomb Raider: Legends was not one of them. I finished that game in 2 days, 8 hours each day. It was actually one of the shortest games I've played in a long time.
It was an excellent game though. Good enough that I played it from beginning to end multiple times at different difficulty levels in my "40 hours", and explored every nook and crannie of the game's beautiful 3D environments.
I don't mean to be showing off here, because I know I'm not alone. A great many reviewers complained about that game being too short.
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot
fp!
I zipped through tomb raiders legends in two 6 hour sittings on tomb raider difficulty. I think this articles a sham. Games are getting wwwwaaaaayyy to easy. I beat NFS: Most Wanted 100% complete with one car (supra) no repaints or bodykits with ful wanted level the entire time and never once got caught by the police. I don't know how many platformers I went through with one life except for the button timing or die parts.
I'm still stuck in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. You insensitive clod.
A little off-topic perhaps, to mention ETP (Estimated Playing Time) of board games, but some similarities to multiplayer PC-games there are.
After having played many board strategy games like Axis & Allies, and usually ended up with 12h+ long games, and same story with Diplomacy,
RISK 2210AD (which has a fixed number of rounds) and even The Settlers from Catan (which is supposed to have a exponential curve towards winning enough points to win),
I sometimes wonder if the EPT printed on the box, or stated by the game vendor, isn't the TOTAL playing time, but EPT PER PLAYER!
It is difficult to state even roughly estimated playing times, since it would heavily depend upon the playing style and the mood of the players.
Guess the same is valid for many multiplayer PC games too.
In my experience, a "40-hour game" just means that the playtesters were paid by the hour.
Games are entertainment. I really can't see how you can complain about getting, say, 60 hours of entertainment for the price of 40 hours.
Perhaps the packages could make the point a little clearer: "This game should provide you with at least 40 hours of entertainment."
Of course, if the game takes you 60 hours to complete because it's badly designed, then you can legitimately complain about the game. But the problem there isn't the 60 hours, it's the design.
man, thats nothing i have been trying to beat world of warcraft for like 2 years now, i think i might be half way there... maybe...
I have a full-time job and a relationship, so i don't always have time to play.
I still manage to get a couple of hours of gaming each day if I want to.
How?
Just talked it over with my gf.
She's not at home on Tuesday and Friday evenings, so I can play those evenings.
Furtermore, most of the time I can play about 1 - 1.5 hours on other evenings, right after dinner.
When I am really hooked, I get up early in the weekend and play a couple of hours until my gf gets awake (My alarm clock rings at 5:30 on weekdays, so getting out early is not a problem).
Only thing that the game needs for me are short levels or frequent save possibilities.
The only game I play right now is a online game (not WoW).
When I have little time, I just start helping others on short missions.
When I have loads of time, I try new missions/quests or help others on the harder/longer missions.
The other games I played are mostly FPS, so (unless playing on hardest difficulty) you have oppertunity to save.
And best of all, my gf also does game (other kind of games, except Unreal Tournament), so we can sit togetter when playing and inform about progression and stuff.
You're lucky it was shorter than two days.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
i play counterstrike far more than hl2. i can play cs for an hour and be done with it. but with longer single player games i just don't tolerate much fustration anymore. game endings are rarely satisfying i've learned. so i've stopped caring. i've become a rather poor game customer since i rarely buy much or play much anymore, just don't have the time. and there are games i know i will never finish, so i don't bother. but yes, as a teen you live to game, everything else falls away. as you get older the time vs enrichment doesn't seem as worth it. its really better to watch a film or read a book than spend endless hours leveling up, essentially repetitive monkey work type stuff.
Seriously, though: I keep seeing "jive" used wherever "jibe" oughtta be in a sentence -- and it's driving me nuts.
Are they talking realtime or CPU time? 5 minutes real time could just be 1 or 2 seconds of CPU time.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Cheats are ubiquitous these days. So if he finds a certain puzzle maddening, why not get the solution online and move on? It doesn't make him a loser or anything, as long as he is doing most of the game on his own.
Whenever I play a game, there are usually one or two things I just don't get, usually due to having an overly realistic point of view regarding RPG realities (if Lara dives into that icy water just wearing her Daisy Dukes and a skimpy tee-shirt, she'll be incapacitated in 90 seconds and dead in 20 minutes!) Rather than get bent out of shape on those, I just look them up and move along. I end up solving at least 90% of the puzzles myself, and I don't get all wired and crazy with frustration.
The guy should just get a life and move on. We're talking about stupid video games here.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
wow dude.
I have a bit of a fetish for girls in costumes, so that wasn't a turn-off for me.
My other first post is car post.