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Developer Panel Asks Whether AAA Games Are Too Long
Gamespot reports on a discussion at the Develop 2011 conference in which a panel of game designers debated whether recent big-budget releases like Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire were too long for a typical gamer's taste. Quoting:
"'Gamers are losing patience,' said [Alexis Kennedy of Failbetter Games], when asked about his own experiences with Heavy Rain, 'so many people don't reach the end and lose the full impact of the story.' He wasn't complimentary of its narrative either, questioning the benefit of basing a game on long-form narrative such as film, resulting in a 'bastardized' storyline that doesn't quite work. ... The likes of social and casual games, particularly the cheap games available on mobile, have changed the expectations of gamers, the panel concluded. Since gamers are paying less money, there's less need to create 10-hour-plus gaming experiences, because consumers no longer feel shortchanged."
obviously not for 50-60 bucks. If you make a 2h AAA game you must be able to sell it for 10 bucks.
Jan
but you'll never be better than commander Shepherd....
"There are people who role-play zero percent; they're dull f***ers. The people who role-play 100 percent; they're mental." Alexis Kennedy on how role-playing can influence a player's experience of narrative.
Hopefully the conversation then shifted to that middle range of 0%<X<100% role-playing where 99% of their paying customers exist. It's not really a binary feature ... I'm not talking like an idiot but every now and then it's fun to pretend in my mind just to get away from the real world for a few hours. Like watching a movie or reading a book, I'm not dressing up like the characters but I do enjoy reading books and imagining the story in my mind.
I think length is much less of a problem than the forced narrative. My own anecdote causes me to wonder just how much the market of gaming has shift since I was a kid. I played Gauntlet endlessly and it had little to no story arc and was nearly impossible to finish yet provided me endless entertainment. Even games that had a story arc -- like Final Fantasy -- allowed me to explore and dick around for as long as I wanted to. What I cannot comprehend is why games now have moved away from that to a relative straight jacket and lack of freedom. The most recent Final Fantasy (13) was a real eye opener for me. They simply don't make my kind of games anymore. I just figured that the market for people who like these forced story-lined games must be far larger than the market I exist in. Or maybe game developers are just lazy and a forced storyline is far easier to code and debug than an open world.
If you wonder why World of Warcraft has such a large and loyal player base, it's probably because there's not a lot of other games to satisfy the explore and dick around urges that were once filled by console or even offline single player PC games. You can have your long-form narratives but I know myself and many of my friends will just stick to games like Oblivion and Diablo.
I'll admit my enjoyment of video games seems unconventional. I could spend hours making blaster schematics and roping people into setting up buildings for me in Star Wars Galaxies and then flooding the markets with cheap blasters bearing my character's name. I didn't really make anything off of this, I just loved the concept. When you open games up to achieve some sort of tangential enjoyment like that, I think you provide more originality than any murder mystery with a surprise twist could provide for me.
My work here is dung.
0'_0'
It seems to me this is a pretty poor way to conduct a market research.
If they wish to make the most mainstream game possible, they might consider to change it. Some silly flash games or farmville are probably their examples then.
But there is a market for different games as well.
In the same way that Youtube has meant that people no longer want to watch feature-length movies any more.
I know this is a crazy statement to make but there is actually room in the market for more than one kind of thing. You can have 5 minute long iPhone games and pointless 1-click "social" games as well as, you know, games that have some depth and character to them.
Personally, I like long games that have time to build a decent plot and develop the characters.
that consumers are identical. If a consumer now likes casual games, the consumer must not like long storylines any more.
There's a hidden assumption that there's one model customer and that everybody who plays games is a duplicate of that one model customer. That just plain isn't true.
Length is a pretty dumb metric for value in video games any way. I find that games these days take many hours to complete, but there's little to no desire to going through them again. Dumb things like unlockables and achievements artificially add replay value, but don't make the game any more fun to play multiple times.
I think the success of games like Angry Birds are showing developers that they don't need to make an overbudget game that takes 20 hours to complete. Even games that can be played through in an hour or less can have great longevity on multiple playthroughs. Look at the Cave shooters - deep scoring systems and challenging mechanics keep players coming back for more. And linearity and repetition have nothing to do with it either - every game (even real life sports) has both, what's important is that the game is fun to play over and over.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
... when 40h+ gameplay was considered good, and anything less a bit short.
If anything, they're too short. Gamers might have lost patience, but this is not a situation that should be remedied by creating shorter games. In my (humble) opinion, gamers that don't have the patience to play through even a 15 hour experience (which is a lot nowadays, unfortunately) should get it together and either play different games, or get used to playing long games. To me, it feels like the panel that came to this conclusion has made an erroneous assumption: They likely assumed that because short, quick games are so popular today, long games must not be. But, dear panel-members, the world is not that black-and-white! Yes, short games might be extremely popular today, but long games are still very much loved as well. Perhaps not by as broad an audience as short games, but the difference in audience is only due to non-gamers ('casuals') playing these shorter games.
I'm not entirely sure why they're skewing this around the desires of mobile gamers. Mobile games need to be quick to pick up, quick to put down. Length doesn't really factor into it, as long as it's enough fun to justify its costs (including abusive advertising).
I'd argue that games are too short. The annual Call of Duty saps us of £20-40 (depending on when you buy it) and takes 6-10 hours to blast through. Some people don't play the SP game and some people don't play the MP game so, naturally, people's mileage varies. The best games I've ever played have been epics (40-120 hours) with strong stories. In the case of Neverwinter Nights or KotOR, I've both bought and played them through multiple times. That, to me, is what those sorts of games should be aiming for.
Games whose format is supposed to be short-and-sweet or mobile can be as short as the market will support.
If anything, Heavy Rain was too short... the story could be completed in about 15 hours (if not less). The experience was very good, but it left you eager for more, not for less. I wonder who did not reach the end of this game. Of course, the slightly branching story enhanced the replayability - but most of the story was still the same whatever choices you made.
This is why I don't buy games anymore. 10 hours too long? You've got to be freaking kidding me.
Back in the day, games like Heroes of Might and Magic, Civilization, Simcity 2000, etc. ate up days and days... and it was considered good value! Now that's too long?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I finished L.A. Noire in a week. IMHO games nowadays are just too short. You pay £40-50 for a game like L.A. Noire and it only lasts you 10-20ish hours of gameplay! Whereas i can buy a game on the App store in my iPhone for 50p and it might last me months. Why should i pay £50 for something that i'll finish within a week and then never play again? Seriously developers, what the hell are you thinking saying they're too long?
AAA games are too long? My experience with the latest so-called AAA games is that they are too short. It looks like the developers spend most of their time crafting magnificent graphics and then the rest of the game is an after-thought that you can finish in 10 hours or less. There are so many different things you can do to a game to add replay value, why on earth would you want to shorten a game people are shelling out $50 or $60 for?
Maybe I'm spoiled, but all of the old games I used to play I could play for weeks, maybe months, and still come back a year or two later and pick it back up. I am skeptical of the "gamers are losing patience" line; casual gamers, by their very nature, never had the patience to begin with and you can't really lump them in with the rest of us. Figure out your target market and make your game based on that, don't try to shoehorn your game into a market that doesn't want it.
£1 per hour of average game time. if it's less than that i wait till the price falls to that ratio.
only expetions are arcady games e.g. Star Soldier R (back at wiiware release)
Indie games have never done me wrong.
Videogames are videogames, and don't need to have a defined "lenght". You play then as much is fun. Think chess. You don't finish chess.
Videogames that deliver a "movielike" experience, like FMV games, or games designed like Modern Warfare 2 or LA Noire, are highly scripted and linear, and must have a end, because the production cost are very high. But I think is a economical problem. Gamers would enjoy a historyline as long as The Wire or Babylon 5. But is to expensive to produce so much hours of enteirnament... and whold need to produce more than one "finale" to feel good.
The other problem is how some console gamers consume games. Play a game, and sell it, to buy the next, in very quick succession. Theres also the dude that don't really have time to play videogames, so want super-short videogames to be able to see the end. If you are making videogames for this public, you must make short games. Not everyone is like that, but a big enough group of people is like that, so is influential, and spawn this type of discussion from some Game Devs (mostly these making FMV type of experiences, the people making videogames for that people).
-Woof woof woof!
When I think of a game that's too long, I think of Zelda. One can easily put 40 or 50 hours in one of those games and still haven't finished it. I have a hard time finishing a game that long. But about half of the length of a Zelda game (say 30 hours or so) is perfect, as far as I'm concerned. 10 hours is way too short, I feel ripped off when I finish a game in such a short time.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I didnt think 13 was too much of a detour from the formula used in 7 thru 10 & 12.
They all had a large component of get through the main plot and unlock the world map so you can focus on grinding and reaming the hard monsters (thus rendering the final boss almost insignificant).
I quite liked 13 - felt 12 was a bigger disappointment. I hadn't even ground and on my first final boss run through pasted it immediately.
All that aside though, and back to the point - 10 hours too much? you could easily rack up 100+ on the FF series...
Invaders must die
Plenty of recent games like that. Grand Theft Auto, Just Cause and Saints Row to name just a few, all on console and/or PC. All open world and all allow you to mess around endlessly in the game world.
They're looking at it the wrong way. If someone quits before the end of the game, you've failed to make the game compelling enough to finish.
Most FPSs fall into that category for me. They start out with some amount of story, but quickly devolve into just shooting people in new locations over and over. The few FPSs that I've finished have either been really short, or had a compelling story that I wanted to see the end of.
Even most new RPGs are in that category for me. There's so much bland same-old-same-old fighting in the middle that I just can't care about the plot.
On the other hand, when I'm actively engaged, I can play for a long, long time. Oblivion - 250+ hours. Fallout3 - 250+ hours. Fallout New Vegas - 200+ hours and counting.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
There's not much to say other than that. I still enjoy getting my money's worth out of a game, and if it's only a couple of hours long I'm not buying it. If the trend keeps up, I'm going to back to reading and playing cards in my free time. The major advantage of games at a $60 price point is I know I'm going to get some kind of continued enjoyment out of them. If I'm done with a game after 10 hours, it's not worth my time.
Are you serious? Zelda games at the longest point have been like 10 hours long, and have been getting shorter in recent times. Hell, WW and TP would have been like 4 hours each if not for the cheap, play extending triforce hunting and wolf segments.
Videogames are not books or films; they are a different medium altogether. Consequently, videogame developers should be focusing on the interactive aspects of videogame play that are unique, not trying to imitate the linear aspects of other media. Never mind that the videogame stories are inevitably dreadful imitations of book and movie plotlines that have been done before by legitimate storytellers.
And you videogame players that are vocally insistent that developers focus more on story and less on multiplayer and other uniquely interactive aspects of their craft: Stop! Go read a book. You don't attend a ballet and then complain that none of the performers sang; stop complaining about lack of story in your videogames.
Less than 10 hours is a bit short for me, especially for games like Heavy Rain. You don't have to always finish a game... really... if you don't have sufficient time to play or to explore more.
I once spent several days playing through Nonterraqueous on the Spectrum, with brother and father on standby to take over, as we tried to a) complete it for the first time and b) map it as we went. No reloads, no checkpoints, no "saves".
It took forever, and the largest piece of graph paper you've ever seen in your life, and still we only just managed to complete it and huge areas of the map were blank. The next week, someone else published the first ever map of the game in a games magazine, so it took them just as long to do so, if not longer.
10 hours? It's okay. A bit short. It means a "new" game would last me about a week or so of casual play. I can get 100's of hours out of games that cost far less. As far as I'm concerned, it's the money/time ratio that's important and AAA titles always fail on that (e.g. £50 for 10 hours is £5 per hour - some people don't even earn that, let alone can blow it on entertainment). I'd expect the ratio to be less than 1 for any title, and a lot less than half for anything decent.
Which probably explains why I haven't bought a full-price game in years, don't pre-order and don't pay more than about £10 for anything any more (but will happily spend £50 in the Steam summer sale, etc.). Back in the Spectrum days, I completed exactly ONE video game and exactly ONE arcade game (Final Fight). My Steam list? 350 games, and pretty much anything I installed that lasted an hour without getting deleted has been completed.
Are we really counting things like "get all the achievements" or "do it on stupidly-impossibly-unfair difficulty" in order to "complete" a game, because even some huge AAA titles only took me a handful of hours to complete.
When HL2:Ep3 comes out, I will be setting aside 5 hours and £30. If it's worse value than that, I will really have to consider whether it's worth completing my "set" of HL games just to recognise good game authorship. And that's my most eagerly anticipated title yet.
The longer the game, the better, as far as I'm concerned. Just thinking about spending £40 on a game like MW2 that has a 10 hour campaign makes my blood boil. All of my favourite games are long, all the Zeldas, GTAs, Elder Scrolls etc. This is what games should be like, and I will always buy them and never pirate them. Any game that's what I consider to be too short I will grab a bittorrent of, as I refuse to line the pockets of lazy-ass developers.
Anti Aircraft Artillery?
American Automobile Association
LR03 1.5v batteries ?
Amateur Athletics Association ?
Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm ?
and so on.
I remember playing games based on the first of those (Ack Ack gunner) about 30 years ago
Find the people on this panel... and shoot them. THEN find the people they're aiming these "social and casual" games toward, and shoot them too. While we're on this rampent killing spree, find the marketers pushing DLC "content"... and eviscerate them.
Does anyone remember the games of time gone by where your closest "checkpoint" or save was... the begining of the level... and if you switched off in a rage, you had to start all over again?
Do you also remember going straight back to that game the day after... simply because it was good?
These people ruined that.
Sovereign: "Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, you touch my -- my tra-la-la..."
Really, i mean 10 hrs next it will be 5 hrs with DLC's
Most gamers don't finish games because they are BORING repetitive heaps of junk that aren't even worth the money you pay for them. kill this guy do some crappy jump / pipe puzzle kill a boss, end game, or some railroad cod clone where you don't even need to fire a shot to win. Usually after the first 1 or 2 levels you don't need to finish the game, the end is usually obvious and offers you nothing new other then more enemies in a different location. i personally like long games, hell i spent 3500 hrs on 1 game over 5-6 years before i finally grew bored of it.
Thinking that "gamers" are just one market with one mind and one set of tastes show an incredible lack of business and consumer awareness.
Is somebody said "The recent explosion in take-away, fast-food outlets shows that restaurant-goers are not interested in sitting down and having a long meal in a pleasant environment. The likes of cheap takeaway sandwich sellers have changed the expectations of restaurant-goers. Since restaurant-goers are paying less money, there is less need to create nice-evening-meal-in-the-restaurant experiences because consumers no longer feel shortchanged" you would think them to be morons and yet that's what this "panel" said about games.
To put things bluntly:
- The production values of the cheap crap you can play on your own on your mobile when riding the subway to work have absolutely nothing to do with the expected production values for a game you play at home in the evening or during the weekend, on a dedicated game machine connected to a big screen, probably with friends, just like the quality of the food and service from the local sandwich vendor from where I pick-up my lunch when at work has absolutly nothing to do with the quality of the food and service I expect from a good restaurant where I go to in the evening or weekend with my friends, family or someone special.
They're different markets!
I would be happy with gradually paying for a game if i keep enjoying it. In the same way i can buy or rent a single episode of a tv series or buy a whole season set, this option should exist for games.
If every book was a sequel with little to no difference between the previous title and its competitors then people would likely claim books are too long but that's not the case. Perhaps gamers just give up after they realise it's the same old rubbish and isn't worth pushing onwards.
How does he know if "gamers" are losing patience? Did he do any survey, or is he extrapolating from own opinion?
Gamers have grown up. They're in their late 30's now. They have more disposable income, but less time. I know that occasionally I don't finish a game unless I get really invested in it. It becomes difficult to revisit a game after you've put it down for a length of time.
They didn't think that maybe people didn't finish Heavy Rain because it turned a lot of people off with the screwy controls, rather then that it was too long?
There's a fairly large segment of the people who buy any game that won't finish it because it turns out they don't like it very much.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Lots of people seem to be of the opinion that the "length" of a game from start to finish should somehow stack up against the price. I disagree. I think the amount of time spent playing is more important. Unreal Tournament: length of a single "game" is less than ten minutes. I've played this game for many many hours. Civilization 4: length of a single "game" is longer (depending on settings too), from a few hours to 20 hours for a marathon game. Again, I've played this game for countless days.
The length "problem" is a problem only if replay value is bad. This can have several causes: very linear game play with no options - why would you play it again? Or non-linear game play, but long dull segments you cannot avoid - it's not enough fun to play again. I personally do not like a lot of "long" games (games that take a long time for a single play-through). I did not get through Zelda: Twilight Princess, bailed on the Baldur's Gate PC RPGs half way through, etc., because at a certain point I had seen all the gameplay and it no longer captured my interest. I played 10 minutes of a Final Fantasy demo one time, and it already bored me to tears with its gameplay, and nothing could entice me to keep going just for the story. If I want a great story, I'll read a great book instead - because nearly all of the time those stories are much better than even the best in computer games.
This just in: casual gamers prefer casual games.
Here's Thom with the weather.
Without a story you might as well be playing farmville. I think there's a fine balance. What I've found is developers are getting too heavy into trying to make a game look good they're leaving out the story and possible arcs from it. Story is an important element, but it's different then a book, it has to be interactive. It can be linear, but I don't want to be forced into following it until I've had a chance to explore an area.
That was the problem with FFXIII was it was cut scene, run down hall, fight, cut scene, run down hall, fight, with no option to go back. Pretty much until you're over 3/4 of the way through the game, then there's one area you can run around in for a while, then back to cut scene, run down hall, fight. I did beat it pretty easily, but I was disappointed and most likely won't pick it up again for sometime.
FFXII was an awesome game, which I've played four times and never beat because I keep getting tied up in side quests, which I like. The story line is great, but I'm not forced into it and I can do all the exploring and grinding I feel like and move easily back to area's I've already been in to make sure I didn't miss anything.
"satisfy the explore and dick around urges that were once filled by console or even offline single player PC games"
I'd say playing outside with friends and roaming the neighborhood, but that's just me.
I'm commander HAKdragon, and this is my favorite comment on slashdot.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
That was a dumb analogy. If you're going to use ballet, then you should say "don't complain when they don't break dance in the middle of Swan Lake."
Games can be interactive AND tell a story. A video game isn't defined as 'interactive button mashing repeatedly doing the same thing over and over, ad nauseum, for hours on end." If a game doesn't have a story to push it forward, or at least some type of goal, then it really isn't worth playing.
Sure, Portal would've been fun without a story. But with that little extra bit of story added in, it went from something mediocre to something fantastic. All because of STORY.
There's a good deal of sandbox style games, but I think I know what you're getting at. The problem most people have with games like the old Final Fantasy's is that there is sometimes too much choice, since you can often wander around without finding the character you're supposed to. These days, games tend to follow a constant reward system, where the player is constantly making progress, or is given a proverbial carrot to follow. There's really no more of the "wander the F* around until you find something useful", because it doesn't play on human psychology in the same way. The short, easy reward
games are more addicting and more immediately rewarding (Though certainly not necessarily better).
There's games like Oblivion and Morrowind(Though thats probably considered a classic by now), which kinda have the free-roaminess of certain classic RPGs, but in Oblivion especially, you're always given an easy, surefire way to track someone down.
However, for the most part, I think game designers have noticed the psychological reward system sells games because its so addictive. You're constantly getting positive feedback for completing challenges that are just hard enough to not be boring.
Let's just add more grind like we always do when we're clueless.
O_O
Dude, you need to see a doctor immediately. I'm fairly certain you're having seizures on a regular basis and aren't aware of it or have some kind of tumor pressing on your brain.
FF13 was, from a very very very high birds eye view the same formula as the rest of the FF games. The rest is where it became crap. There WAS NO COMBAT SYSTEM. I could tape a quarter down on my controller and walk away then come back when I heard a cutscene happening.
The voiceacting was meh, the only decent part was the graphics. While FF12 wasn't exactly the cream of the crop for FF games it was leagues beyond FF13. FF13 was just a really long FF movie that you had to hold down the "play" button for.
It's a matter of value. It always was about that too.
Designing a game requires a basic set of resources. Programming, art, and content.
No matter how long your game is, you have to program the mechanics. That's essentially a fixed-cost.
Content is what determines the length of the game - the number of levels, the number of puzzles, the scripted scenes, etc.
Art investment is roughly linear in proportion to content. You don't necessarily need to generate new art for every scene, but you also can't make (much of) a game with one character in one room with nothing ever new.
Therefore the costs to develop a game have some floors.
Your customers' willingness to invest falls off as you increase price or decrease length (perceived value). $50 for a 50 hour game seems to be an acceptable price point for many, so lets call the commercially viable curve $1/hour (all the while aware that this may not be a consistent relationship over the length of the curve, but let's go with it). So a 10 hour game would sell at $10.
Can an AAA title be developed - including the 'floor' costs of basic programming and art - and generate per-unit revenue at this price point? Arguably, there's SOME market (essentially DLC is trying this out already - we'll sell you some more content with a small amount of new art and no new programming - for $10). But that's usually for a game that they've already sold successfully, so there's already a consumer market 'primed' to like it.
Otherwise, buying games are a risk, like buying a book or movie. There's no way to tell if you'll like it. So gamers may be more willing to drop $10 for a 10 hour game just because the absolute risk of loss is less than the $50 for the full game.
Right now, the paradigm is to give away 15min-1hour of content as a 'demo' (free) to allow potential consumers to test the game and see if they like it. While the content is substantially longer, there's the possibility that consumers would still see the 10-hour game for $10 as 'trying to sell the demo'.
-Styopa
How much plot or how much length isn't as important to me as how immersive the game is. What I think makes Valve the king of all videogame companies is how immersive their games are. Consider how plot is communicated to you in games like halflife and portal. There's rarely any cutscenes - you NEVER leave your character's point of view, and most of the time you have control while the plot is happening. The games leave it up to the player to discover things too ("the cake is a lie", glados' consoles printing cake recipe, etc.) To me, this style of game takes the medium far closer to its potential
What? Since when did film start being considered a long form of narrative?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Let's be honest here. I am NOT going to pay 50+ bucks for a game that I put away no later than 2 hours after starting it. I would definitely feel ripped off. If this is an attempt to rationalize why you do not want to produce quality anymore and still charge 50+ bucks for it, you failed. Nobody will fall for the "less is more" spiel. How am I supposed to understand that? "Oh, we shortened the game for your convenience so you can get the complete experience because we feel like you would put it away after 3 hours and not see the end, and this would frustrate you, so we cut it short, but we'll still charge the full price for it".
Sorry, no sale.
If you feel that way, put in a storyline that takes just 3 hours but include side quests worth the money. Then we can talk. But just charging more for less content is certainly not going to work out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Videogames are not books or films; they are a different medium altogether.
First of all "videogames" is now a synonym for "FPS". We are not allowed to talk about non-FPS video games, other than to make fun of them and call them casual. How a tactical hex wargame that takes 150 hours to play is "casual" is a mystery we are not allowed to think about. video game = shooting thousands of people and thats all it is allowed to be, and is all we are allowed to think. This is /. and we do not tolerate thoughtcrime here, get your mind closed and think what the PR people told you to think. Other forms of entertainment involving a computer hooked do not exist (other than pr0n, but that's more a lifestyle than an entertainment).
Given that, videogames are mostly vacations. Not stories. Not role playing. Vacations complete with stereotypical "ugly american" behavior, combined with all the heroic levels of ethical and moral behavior you'd expect while anonymously re-enacting the mai lai massacre as per the game designers orders.
Maybe there's a little "historical re-enactor" going on. One zillion SCA guys go in a field and "sword" each other. One zillion "Civil War"/"War of Northern Aggression" reenactors go out in a field and shoot each other. One zillion WWII reenactors hit the FPS video games, maybe its just that simple. Thirty years ago they would have been wearing gray uniforms, hauling cannons thru fields, and talking with fake southern accents as they re-enact the War of Northern Aggression.
Or in summary, video games have to be stereotypical and boring because they have to be FPS and it is not possible inside a FPS to shoot thousands of people in unique ways.
If you carefully and methodically fold yourself into a tiny boring little cardboard box, don't act all insightful at the observation a decade or two later that you're now really bored and surrounded by tasteless cardboard.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
My problem isn't that the story is 60 hours or however long. It's that the story is paced assuming I've made a commitment to play it through to the end. So they don't see a problem in having hours of introduction/exposition/tutorial before you're playing the real game. I don't have hours and hours to play at a time, so knowing that I have to slog through an hour of bad voice acting and no meaningful control, and then probably two to ten more hours where most of the selling points of the game have yet to be unlocked before I can play the real game just isn't attractive.
I tried Mass Effect, but it was talking talking talking - never me doing, so i quickly dropped that.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I go to a cinema and I buy a ticket, I get one experience of the work, and it costs me around £7 for 2 hours entertainment.
As most AAA games cost £35 for the PC now, I expect 5x as much entertainment for that price. If I don't get 10 hours enjoyment from your AAA title game minimum, you failed to produce a good AAA title. It has nothing to do with me being impatient, it has to do with repetitive gameplay, shallow plot, broken gameplay mechanics, buggy code, and value for money.
I will gladly pay for AAA titles which give me a great gameplay experience, and I would very much enjoy them to last well over 10 hours (I don't have New Vegas yet, but if it's anything like Fallout 3, I'll be losing days playing it, not hours).
By the way; £FIX£ £UNICODE£ £SUPPORT£ £FOR£ £STERLING£ £SYMBOL.£
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
The cynic in me says the real question would've been: "Can we sell games that last for an hour for $60 and save lots of $$$ on development costs?"
The gaming industry has really killed itself with its own success.
Don't watch Mandalore's Sovereign-Disturbia remix then or you might die of laughter...
If you wonder why World of Warcraft has such a large and loyal player base, it's probably because there's not a lot of other games to satisfy the explore and dick around urges that were once filled by console or even offline single player PC games.
I found the reason World of Warcraft has such a strong following is not because it is good, but because it has perfected the addiction formula of the MMO genre. It says "look at all of this content we have", when the content consists of doing very nearly the exact same thing over and over, until you get the slight improved reward. I don't call that content so much as addiction. Especially with WOW. I couldn't make it past 70 in that game because i had realized all that i had done and all i was doing were the same damn thing, repeat ad nauseam.
A GOOD videogame gives you an objective to complete, and when finished you can move onto something else.
Er.. Aren't open world games pretty much the defacto standard for AAA Titles now? Oblivion, Fallout games, GTA (and all it's clones), hell even FPS's now like Borderlands are open world, go-whereever-you-like sorts of games.
Two games for me stand out: (1) Demon Souls and (2) Ratchet & Clank (the last two killed R&C for me) all others ....
Place in time DukeNuke, HalfLife, Unreal, Wolfenstein, RedFaction (a few others) were very good.
Game play in any of the above mentioned games did not cause nausea, irritate me, or instantly bore me.
I have played many games over many years. The game length is of slight consideration. The best take me three to seven days to run through an kill the big boss. I suspect I have another decade or two of gaming remaining in me. The retro-gamettes for tablets/smartphones... have never held my interest beyond a few hours.
Good graphics and path transition continuity keep me interested (I like to look at the scenery sometimes). Start...End the path should have options (the overly obvious path hints of pointers and magic lines are for kids games only) be discernible (not blatantly flashing obvious), and require player-choice. I like character a/o avatar selection with personalization options, weapons/abilities that mature according to player-choices of skill and interest.
At the local GameStop store the young folks said Demon Souls (DS) was very hard. I started DS on release, and I (Z21 or X21) am still playing DS (R&C was the same until the last two games). The flexibility of play is exceptional and scaring, hacking, bumping... a RedPhantoms off a deadly high point is still fun, and the chase with a back stab is fun. DS BluePhantoms always get an "S" from me, the Summoners get an "S" unless "D" they are part of a RedPhantom ambush for easy points.
!HAVEFUN!
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Others may not agree, but to me Portal 2 is AAA. I watched my brother playing through the single player (on PS3) and thought that the length of the game was spot on.
We then started on the split-screen co-op (which plays really nice!). I was expecting it to last maybe 2 hours or so, over just a handful of levels. How very wrong. The game seems never ending! Every time I believe we've gotten to the end, GLADOS opens up yet another set of missions to play.
I guess the real measure of things is this: how long is a piece of string? As long as it needs to be. A game, movie, book, etc. should be as long as they need to be to fulfill their purpose.
If a shooter is 4 hours long, but gives you one hell of a ride that would have been ruined at additional padding, then it's served its purpose. If its 30 hours long and gives you a deep, engaging experience, filled with memories and interesting experiences, then that's good, too.
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Wow, what crawled up your butt and pushed your "Slashdot Cliche" button?
I'll log 40+ hours in a game if I like it, and lose interest if I don't.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm pretty sure taping the controller didn't work for any of the missions around about 50+ mark (and for quite a few of them before that depending on how much you had levelled...) maybe i just played it differently. *shrugs*
Invaders must die
Back in my day, if you wanted to get through a game quickly all you had to do was get a strategy guide. Most of the time spent on a game is figuring out how to beat it. Once you know how (thanks to the guide) it's just a matter of following directions.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Too Short?
Are they mad?
Looking at most of the AAA games and they are way too short. COD with a 5 hour campaign and no re-playability.
The problem with so called AAA games is not that they are too short or too long is that they are simply too boring, same-y well, just plain unoriginal. Why bother improving COD 117 when you're getting ready to can sell COD 118 next month (and 3 DLC hats in the mean time).
In larger games (LA Noire) the problem is not so much making things for the player to do but making interesting things for the player to do. Here is where a much hyped about concept is creating problems, procedural generation. Now to game developers and publishers this seems like a good thing(TM) because dynamically creating things to do rather then manually frees up developer time for other things such as cut scene rendering or DRM implementation, they consider it a godsend but to the player it results in something quite horrible. You end up doing the same thing over and over again in the same looking places.
I'm going to use two games that use procedural generation for examples. Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3. Fallout 3 is a game that had a lot of reuse (how many times did we see the same textures in the tunnels/subways) and randomly (procedural) generated both combat encounters (the odd goul, merc or super mutant) but also scripted encounters Fallout 3 by and large was considered a very good game. Far Cry 2 was a game that would randomly spawn enemies almost everywhere without any consideration for the player, in effect the player had to stop what they were doing, kill some random dudes, fix your radiator and move on. Far Cry 2 was by and large considered a very bad game.
So what is the difference, Fallout 3, for all the texture reuse was a game that had a lot of original sequences (mostly scripted) but had a lot of replayability due to several factors not the least of which was the fact that the scripted sequences could be played differently each time. In Far Cry 2, the procedural generation basically was the game, you would do four things, 1) kill enemies (on the road or in guard posts), 2) fix your radiator 3) fix your health/malaria 4) get told to do 1 by guys with baad saaf ifrican iccents china. Once you did 1 and 2 for an hour or so, you got sick of it.
TL:DR huh?
The idea that game content for a AAA game can be generated, rather then created is absurd and only results in the all the missions/levels being minor variations of the same level. Thus it becomes an exercise in tedious repetition to the player as opposed to the relaxing entertainment that they hoped for.
So Dev's and Publishers, pull some people off the DRM infestation and e-peen shining teams to work on some actual scripting and level design. Thank you and goodnight.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I'm not sure if you guys have had the opportunity to try Heavy Rain, but it's a blast of an experience. I was glued to the screen during the five or so sessions I played the game in. Never once did I think it was too long, it felt just right.
L.A. Noire on the other hand did drag through the middle of the game. It was just too repetitive after a while. They should have shaved about five hours out of its midsection.
No, we're serious. What does AAA mean in this context? I'm completely lost here, and it isn't explained anywhere. I could assume that people are just using it like ACME (the pinnacle of a brand; the BEST), but it seems awkward to use it in this context. People seem to be latching onto it like it has been established as the brand name for this "genre" of games, but I was apparently left out of that discussion.
There are all sorts of niches for games. Angry Birds is great and got me through many a class in high school, simply because it could be played on my phone (the fact that it is free for Android is great). But when it comes down to it, when I'm buying a game for my computer I expect to be entertained. Games like Mass Effect (1&2), Oblivion, Fallout 3 (and New Vegas) all have had tremendous replay value. I've easily logged several hundred hours of Oblivion just playing different characters, but what is really great about the game is the fact that I'll occasionally have the desire to pick the game back up after a long hiatus from it. Those kinds of games are the ones that will always have value to me. Games that I've recently purchased like Homefront, for instance, which had a four-five hour campaign that I found significantly less than satisfying, will always be pure garbage in my eyes.
Honestly, I don't see why so many people feel the need to tell every developer that doesn't cater to their particular tastes (or do things like they do it) that they're "doing it wrong". Yes, short, cheap games are popular. I don't personally care for them myself, but I'm not going to jump all over someone for playing Plants Vs Zombies or Angry Birds because they're not playing the right type of game.
They're playing what they like, and that's fine. Is it too much to ask for them to recognize that some people ALSO like big, long-assed narrative based games? If I can't get a decent story and at least 20 hours of gameplay out of a game (30+ is preferable) then I probably am not going to bother playing it. That doesn't mean that EVERY game has to fit that description, but don't jump on the few that DO.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
... is that this guy considers 10 hours long for a game.
Story tacked on where it doesn't belong can ruin a gain. What kind of story would enchance Chess? Story in games is most obnoxious when it forces the gameplay to change to support the story.
However, for the most part, I think game designers have noticed the psychological reward system sells games because its so addictive. You're constantly getting positive feedback for completing challenges that are just hard enough to not be boring.
I would be happier if those people would stick to slot machines and free up the game developers to develop games.
And more for this point of a good story. A game like Half-Life has a decent story line, but you are roped into following a defined path. You're at A, you need to get to B (the actual path between these points may have several different lines). However, Valve does a good job at the mix between story telling and letting you be the character. A good story line will allow developers to create tangential story lines as one off games while the next "book" in the series is being created (HL: Blue Shift, et al).
I think a good role playing game should allow a more free flow gameplay, but still need a decent story to engage the player. The Elder Scrolls series, Morrowind and Oblivion, are good examples. I've heard Neverwinter Nights 2 was far better than the first (I'm just bummed I missed it at $6.99 during the Steam Summer Sale). And, certainly, MMOs allow all sorts of freedom to do whatever - in that, there really doesn't need to be much of a story because the character player can create their own. And, yet, there is still a storyline in most MMOs.
Heck, even a game like Need for Speed 2: Underground roped you into a story-line that one didn't necessarily have to follow (okay, I'm stretching there). Granted, you need to follow the story enough to unlock the better parts and cars, but sometimes I'll just kick on that game to have a wreckless dash around the city at high rates of speed through heavy traffic that I know would be burning up gas faster than a wallet could handle.
As an avid gamer, and a long time one at that, I'm less interested in the length of the overall game and I am more interested in the games replayability. Take Medal Of Honor Allied Assault for instance, yeah I know it's very old and dated, but also look at the longevity the game had. The mp servers were always full well into it's 8th year. Never since have I seen a title (that I play regularly) enjoy the same run.
As far as fps shooters go, I think it was partly due to the games modability. Which titles today are sadly lacking, read CODBO (Treyarch if you are listening having us pay for DLC is a shit business model, you will shoot yourself in the foot.) So for that title I am waiting for it to end up like MW2 and broken out of Steam.
Game companies are just like any other company, they never listen to what the consumer want, it's a business at they end of the day, they have to show something for their effort.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
First of all "videogames" is now a synonym for "FPS".
...
If you carefully and methodically fold yourself into a tiny boring little cardboard box, don't act all insightful at the observation a decade or two later that you're now really bored and surrounded by tasteless cardboard.
Um, yeah, about that cardboard box. I'm a computer gamer, so my range of "videogames" is far larger than FPS, which include RTS, MMO RTS, RPG, MMO RPG, MMO FPS, action games, sports games, simulator games (Ars Technica had a good article series on this recently), and a bunch of other genre and cross genre types.
But even if you take a look at the console system and the landscape of games there that would be considered by a majority of people as "videogames", sure you have a lot of FPS titles, but I also see games like Oblivion (RPG), World of Warcraft (MMO RPG), Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto, racing games, flight games, sports games, etc. To say that "videogames" is synonymous for "FPS" paints you into the box, or you need to get out and find more friends and acquaintances. Heck, to me, a FPS like Team Fortress 2 is a casual game, because I can pick it up for an hour and put it down again
I'd like to present the AAA title Portal. The game took an average of 3 to 4 hours to complete and was initially sold at retail for $20. Your argument has already been made and proven correct almost 4 years ago.
Granted all the games can't fit into this time frame, but truth be told, devs should be telling a story and ending the game when the story is done. Strip out all the padding, but sell it for a reasonable amount.
The way I see it, we really have 3 completely separate types of entertainment under the "games" umbrella:
I think the sooner the "Game" Industry realizes that there are really 3 distinct types of games, each catering to different types of gamers who have different wants and needs, the better off they'll be.
The problem is they're assuming the market for someone buying Angry Birds is the same as the market for someone buying Heavy Rain... That's like saying Movies should be shorter because a lot of people play blackjack and a game of black jack takes less time and cards are cheap.
Maybe if they separated out these ideas we'd no longer get stupid puzzles and mini-games in the middle of our iterative narratives. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it's appropriate, other times it's just bizarre that I'm required to play a round of pipe-dream while I'm in the middle of trying to figure out the societal implications of my antihero's actions.
Another Problem is that they assume because Call of Duty's Multiplayer is so successful that all games should have multiplayer components so they start shoe-horning that into titles where it doesn't belong (Like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed). Honestly it's puzzling why each Call of Duty release isn't two completely separate games. The Single Player Narrative should be one game and the Multiplayer should be another. Granted the online portion of most FPSs was born from the fact that they already had the assets and game engine developed so they could add replay value by simply throwing a bunch of players together in the same room and letting them have fun with it. But the multiplayer component has become so dominant in the market that they actually have completely separate development teams for the campaign and multiplayer portions, and for some games they don't even use the same engine... Really that's just bundling two separate games together that just happen to have the same name and visual style.
Collector's Edition
Lol, I definitely don't agree with the way you said that, but I agree with the fact that FPS has become the standard, and it's boring as all get out. I've tried, I really have, to enjoy modern games.. but it's just so boring.
That being said, there are some non-fps that have captivated me recently:
C&C 3 (not 4)
Minecraft
Batman Arkham Asylum
I wouldn't call any of these casual per se, but they definitely break the mold of FPS (batman a bit less than the other two, but since you don't get a gun, I feel there's at least a little change up in the game play).
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Yeah, really, there's a reason why those choose your own adventure movie games of the 90s are more or less completely extinct at this point. Sure it was kind of a cool idea back then, but really it makes more sense with respect to books. And even in book form they're largely extinct as well.
Which is a good thing, it's demoralizing to be playing a game like Zelda II and have to find a very specific tile in order to continue the game. And where said tile doesn't have any sort of clue that it's where you're supposed to be or to even know that there is a tile you need to visit to continue on your quest.
More than that, it's a cheap way of adding longevity to the play experience.
He can say what he wants. I just bought Oblivion 5 year edition and a bunch of DLC. I also will hit Skyrim HARD. I like games I can get 'lost' in. However, I do drop out of games that piss me off.
(SPOILER ALERT for DA2)
I quit Dragon Age 2 at the very end because my only healer did something very naughty and I had to either keep him (and be able to beat the final battles) or leave him (as I would prefer to do) and have no healer and no hope of making it through. The game basically let me choose between winning and keeping my morals. I kept my morals, screw the game. I don't need to beat it.
I do security
I agree, I stopped playing the final fantasy games after final fantasy X which forced you down a specific path. there was no world to explore, only small areas and as the newer counterparts were released, the narrower the path seemed. I remember when, if you didn't pay attention to the directions that were given (Go west) you'd get lost stumble into a high level area die then try and find directions. When I played World of Warcraft, I probably spent the first twenty levels, off the beaten paths, spelunking in caves, fishing in every weird looking body of water and selling every piece of garbage I could find at the auction house. Red Dead Redemption also satisfied the explorer urge by making the environment big and not forcing you to follow the path. a player could run around dragging people behind their horses, tying women up and putting them on the train tracks or even helping people if your so inclined, before returning to the story line. I like having freedom in a game and think it's important but at the same time it needs a good story line and while the two examples I gave have lots of freedom, the story seems a little weak (just my opinion).
I suppose one could argue that a game that has everything would take up a lot of space and it's true, but how much space does World of Warcraft take up? cut that game in half, add a story and single player content and you could have a pretty good RPG.
We don't get a lot of games like this anymore, instead we get re-releases of old games, while I do think it's important that the newer generations have a chance to play these classics, I also think that the half inch pixels on a screen with a black border around it hardly fits the bill.
Whoever did this study must not been a real gamer(s). If someone would make a good game with 10 hours of actual gameplay I would completely endorse them. I own both ME1 and ME2 and have pre-ordered ME3, these games are single player and I have gone thru ME2 including all the DLC at least twice. I also love Fable, currently replaying Fable III for the second time. And don't even get me started on classics like Zelda, Final Fantasy Series, or any of the or Guild Wars. On the other hand some friends and I play the hell out of ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead. My big issue and what most gamers have said is that the current crop of games just SUCK!
What they should have said was that some people prefer short games. Why those people pay $50+ for a short game that really isn't fun is beyond me. But each person has their own opinion.
Some people never learn...no matter how many times something happens to them.
Just going to throw this out there:
I would assume the reason that most people don't finish Heavy Rain has less to do with it being too long, and more to do with it not being a great deal of fun to sit down and play. It's a different sort of experience.
It scares me that a study like this could be so far off base. Yes, the rise of mini-games for a new type of gamer are based around short addictive fun. You know how many smartphone games I have in that variety that I've actually had to pay for... about 2 and that was because I was bored out of my mind in an airport with no internet connection. The people that play AAA titles are not the same people that play mobile. For me at least, it is all about the experience of the game. I want a long unwinding storyline that I can play through. Unless the storyline is crap or the game is unplayable, I finish almost every AAA title I start. The better ones I will play multiple times. I don't give a crap about most competitive multiplayer and hate AAA titles that only provide 3 to 4 hours of content to play through. I rarely find them to have any replay value, but games with good solid stories that can take a day or two to get through, I will regularly play through multiple times. Also, co-op capability is a huge plus.
AJ Henderson
Long games make financial sense for developers because of the enormous cost to 'start' one. You've got the engine and the assets... now what are going going to do with them? Once you have the tools in order, making the rest of the game is easy by comparison. So why not make long games? People complain that players have no patience, which has a grain of truth but not the entire story. Players don't have that much TIME. If you allowed a granular save feature (save wherever) and a system of play that rewards a jump-in/jump-out style, you'd have people hooked just like Diablo 2 back in the day.
As a casual gamer (formerly a "real" gamer), I have to say, don't make $60 games aimed at me. I have plenty of games on my shelf that I have not finished, and my only disappointment, if any, is that I don't have time to just sit around and play games like when I was a teenager. Making the game shorter so that I can see the ending is like skipping to the last page in a murder mystery. It isn't going to help anything.
After my son was born, I once spent four hours watching "Sean of the Dead". Why did it take four hours? Because I was constantly pausing it for one reason or another. It's hard to find 90 minutes of uninterrupted free time when you're working full time and you're a parent. Does that mean that the movie should have been shortened? Of course not.
Besides, I'm not paying $60 for these games. I'm waiting until I find them dirt cheap at some used game store. No improvement is going to change that, so don't lower the bar on my account*.
* With that having been said, Nintendo does a great job of making games aimed at casual gamers. All I'm saying is that serious games shouldn't be shortened in an attempt to appease casual gamers or ADD gamers.
There are other styles of games besides CoD and halo fragfests, which some people suprisingly enjoy for some absurd reason. Storyline and gameplay are not mutually exclusive. take a look at dragon age or mass effect. both have excellent gameplay (except for some bad party ai in ME), yet still have a story that blows away the storylines from most movies. I end up putting down most games without a storyline after 2-3 hours unless it has some awesome replayability factor (multiplayer, multiple character playstyles, etc), while even if a game has horrible gameplay, I still usually end up finishing for the story.
I liked LA Noire for about the first two thirds.
After a point though everything gets to be the same just with different characters, then I got bored and went back to fragging in Team Fortress 2 or exploring more stuff in Fallout: New Vegas.
New Vegas keeps me engaged just like Fallout 3 did, I still haven't played all the content yet and there are still parts on my map I've never been to (not counting DLC). TF2 is a twitch game I can pick up and play for an hour.
LA Noire kinda wedges in the middle, I like investigating / chasing / shooting idea and I like the context / story but damn, it's like one of those films where there is no pacing and my interest just falls out midway through.
I guess that's the down side to story-driven stuff, if there is no pacing it's gonna fall flat. Likewise with Portal 2 (loved it but) once you've been through the story there's not much point playing it again, moreso than Portal because in the original it seemed like the puzzles were a little more flexible in that you could solve them in more creative ways. I don't know why this seems to be, but it is.
crazy dynamite monkey
Films are a passive medium with the narrative densely packed whithin 2 hours, often less. Games depend on player interaction and a standard AAA game is expected to have 10+ hour gameplay. While movies are usually finished in one sitting, games have to stay engaging so that the player will come back as many times is needed to finish it. They are very different media.
I would say games are more like TV series, but likening it to any non-interactive medium would be putting aside games' most important difference: the ability to act and make choices. Unfortunately, many games put this aside. While it doesn't stop the game from being engaging, it misses the point of delivering the narrative through a game. And that's not the only problem of narrative in games.
Separating chunks of gameplay from chunks of narrative, something that is often done, it's the worst possible way to create an engaging experience. Those interested only in the gameplay will skip cutscenes or be forced to watch them. Those interested only in the narrative will force themselves through the gameplay. Only those in the middle ground will enjoy it, as long as the game is compelling overall.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
With all the success of open world games, it's been baffling to me that the FF series hasn't gone back in that direction. Well, outside the MMO ones. I always had a vision of an Elder Scrolls type sandbox where you go into ATB style battles when encountering enemies.
tying women up and putting them on the train tracks
I did that simply because it's such an old western trope. When the achievement popped up I just about died laughing. Ranks up there with Bioshock's "Irony" achievement.
They are assuming that because there ARE casual gamers, that those of us in for the long-haul don't exist. Honestly, I, and I'm sure many others, don't consider Casual Gamers to be Gamers. I the only thing you play is Wii sports or $1 i-whatever apps, then you aren't a gamer, just someone looking to waste a few minutes of time.
Non-gamers / casual gamers might outnumber hardcore gamers by quite a bit, that doesn't mean there are any less hardcore gamers. This is just another attempt to ignore the people who made the industry a success.
In all honesty, if a game provides 10 hours of gameplay, I'll be highly disappointed. I don't care if it cost $1, I'll still be disappointed.
Particularly due to having small children, I appreciate a good and proper PAUSE button
Agreed.
which multiplayer games generally won't have.
Every version of Super Smash Bros., a 4-player platform fighting game series for Nintendo consoles, has had pause mapped to the Start button. Once your small children become old enough to hold a controller and play beside you, your pause button will still be there.
You are a young boy, forced into a chess competition to save your family from being murdered. Since you are a gifted child, the chess matches should be cake... except you are playing chess against other gifted children who also had their families held for ransom. It's a fight to the death and you are but a pawn in a greater underground chess tournament. Mortal Chessbat!
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
when I got a real job I no longer had the time to devote to a game where I could get as good as the 14 year olds who dont do anything all day but play video games.
Then play games that don't have shitty online matchmaking. For example, while Tetris DS was running it had matchmaking based on a rating calculated almost the same way as an Elo rating in chess (except with a 5000 center instead of 1600). People whose ratings fell below the median would get matched with other casual players, and the kind of expert Tetris players who hang out on Tetris Concept or Hard Drop would be matched with other experts.
Or play local multiplayer with your real life friends.
Diablo 2 killed itself with replaying. The bugfixes and balance changes were welcome, but meant that you now HAD to play online. A Necromancer would die quick since the PI monsters would splash his army no problem. The FI/LI/MSLE boss would nerf the paladin unless he stoked up on Lightning resistance and then he'd be killed off by the cold using critters or the boss multitudinous helpers.
Your merc couldn't do the work because they get an eightfold hit by the bosses, meaning dead.
And the grading level (e.g. the strength of the opponents and their abilities) were graded as if you were playing online and able to mule and trade some cheap low-level stuff to make your life easier.
Meaning you had a hell of a time (and, frankly, crap drops) on single player.
The 20th time you've had your barbarian at 30th level drop a stick that gives a sorceress +1 to fireball you get REALLY pissed off.
Borderlands filled a niche. I wouldn't call it FPS as much as I'd call it a mix of FPS and Diablo.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Make them shorter so nobody will play long enough to notice how crappy and not engaging the gameplay is.
In ten years AAA games will be shiny, useless objects of desire. Buy it, launch it once or twice to see the breath-taking graphics, stuff the box on your shelf. Now you can stare at your precious shrine made of game-boxes. Don't play it, just own it.
No one played to the 50+ mark. Thats the point. Most players quit that game at the 10 hour mark. It would of been a good game if they took the interesting battle situations they spread out over 80 hours and edited the game down to 10 hours. It would not have been an RPG anymore. But it would have been fun.
What normally happens with the story though is something more like this though:
You are a young boy, forced into a chess competition to save your family from being murdered. Since you are a gifted child, the chess matches should be cake...
The game makes the kings pawn available to move forward 2 squares.
except you are playing chess against other gifted children who also had their families held for ransom.
The games allows you to move the bishop... You didn't move the bishop fast enough, go back to the savepoint and try and move the bishop faster.
It's a fight to the death and you are but a pawn in a greater underground chess tournament
Your 10 hours are up, pay $x for the next version.
Mortal Chessbat!
What book or movie is Infocom's Trinity or A Mind Forever Voyaging derived from?
10 hours is now the expectation for game play for a full retail 60 dollar game? I hadn't realized that it had gotten so short.
They make the mistake of thinking about 'typical gamers'. That's not a useful term anymore, gamers are far too diversified.
It's not really wise to clump people who play pop cap games in with people who play LA Noire.
Neither one is good or bad, just different. And when you try to make soup to please everyone, it becomes a bland 'meh' of a soup.
You need to think in market segments. Is this market segment big enough for this type of game?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's sad that a professional game developer has misread this so badly. If people aren't finishing a 15 hour action game, it's because it probably isn't very *fun*... It took me probably 100 hours to complete Baldur's Gate 2, and I never once thought about complaining about it being "too long".
I've been gaming since video games have been out.
Been playing computer games since the beginning also. I can understand them saying this back in the days of 8bit machines, when it took months to finish games like the TSR AD&D games and other stuff. At the very least, games took days to finish, many hours. Not less then 24 usually.
Today? Fuck, I get homefront and 4 hours later it's over. WTF?
Bad Company 2? same.
In fact, most games are way the fuck too short. You want me to pay $40-$60 for a game, that take me less then 8 hours to finish? I don't even get paid that much an hour, so fuck you.
I have a good idea, why don't you Dev's start making decent shit, quit with this bullshit "Hollywood" of the games industries and get back to making good games that are fun to play, instead of big ass Triple AAA titles, that takes millions to billions of dollars to make, and has less then 8 hours play time.
Seriously.
Be seeing you...
10 hours is a "long format" game? Seriously?
I'm sorry, but the kind of game I enjoy starts at 10 hours. KotOR and derivatives, Max Payne (which is actually more of a 5 hour game, and on the short side, but it made up for it by being awesome), Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Warcraft 2... the list goes on. Short story games are a huge disappointment if there's any story to speak of at all. You haven't got the time to develop anything meaningful.
What's next, NYT bestseller's list having Peanuts and Garfield?
Personally, I'm going to pick up these two OP games. I've not heard of them (kinda too busy to pay much attention) and I'm tired of crap games. Hell, even Deus Ex 3, which claims to hail back to the original, has been "consoled", and looks like it's going to suck on the "depth of story" department.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Reading the article, it sounded like the developers were whining because it was too much effort to make a good game. Instead, they want to churn out quick as possible drivel and make as much money as quickly as possible. The programmers certainly don't feel this way - and in most cases, have to leave massive amounts of work out of the finished product because some pinhead doesn't understand.
GTA 3 (any of the series). How long did that take? 20+ hours. Best of the series was San Andreas, and it was 40+ hours. If you just did the missions and didn't go stealing and looting too much.
Deus Ex. 20+ hours the first time through.
Vampire Bloodlines: 20+ hours. Mostly because like Deus Ex, you had to sneak around a lot.
More modern games:
KOTOR 30+ hours. More if you do the side missions.
Persona 3 or 4. 60+ hours, if not more. (my son has 120 hours on one of the Persona titles - ouch...)
Final Fantasy. 50+ hours for most of them.
Star Ocean. 50+ hours.
I could go on and on. The biggest, most epic games that shaped the industry and that are considered classics are also very long. (btw, longest FPS I ever played was Unreal, at 55 *long* levels including the expansion pack - worth downloading on Steam) The idea that 10 hours is too long is just the project manager and marketing pinheads thinking of it as a product-of-the-month that they are selling and not as true entertainment.
Shouldn't you be doing your homework? You know your mom will take away your xbawks if your grades start slipping again...
Twilight Princess took you 4 hours!?!?!?!?! I have 25 hours invested on my Wii and still havnt finished it.
Also think Ocarina of Time. WAY more than 15 hours of game play.
If you think FF13 was terribly different from other FF games on disc media, you and I must be playing very different FF games.
The amount of freedom in the disc FFs is preeeetty limited in the early part of the game. For a couple dozen hours. 7 gave you freedom after .. what .. 20-25 hours? (Oh look. I'm in Midgaard. Lets go.... the ONLY WAY I CAN GO! yay! I'm out of Midgaard.. lets go THE ONLY WAY I CAN GO!) 8 was a bit earlier than that. 9, you could get to disc 4 relatively quickly.. but if you were playing the game, rather than the clock, you got freedom in about the same time frame.
As far as not having a combat system.. lolwut? Sure 13 has lots of battles you can zip through. But then.. every FF since 4 has had that. Not all level-appropriate encounters are really lethal in FF anymore. But there is no fucking way you went through FF with the "play" button down. In the first, most encounters are going to take you 4x as long if they're winnable. In the second, there's enough encounters along the way that need different paradigms
I won't argue that the sentinel job was pretty useless for basically everything but the toughest encounters in the game. But the other 5, not the same story. You really do need to flip between them during combat to make shit work.
One of the main things I look for in games in playtime and re-playability.
People are just looking for excuses to shortchange the customer and not provide value.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Of course, that's assuming that they don't kill whichever server you're attempting to connect to.
Server? Why would you need a server? Plug in four gamepads and a big monitor, and you can have multiplayer right in your own living room.
too many games, not enough interest.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
the single-player campaign takes about 15 minutes to complete
Which is true of any fighting game as well. That's why you're supposed to go back and replay it with all the other characters. In fact, some games have several different single-player campaigns, one "episode" for each playable character.
Yeah, everybody seems to be playing FPS these days.
Except me. I haven't played one in about 10 years, but I play games regularly. FPS are boring. Kill some people, kill some more.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
One of the biggest negatives that can be given in a game review is it being too short if it is anything more than a puzzle or simple adventure game. Almost every review for games includes mention of how long it took the reviewer to beat the game. If it is only a couple hours and the game is full price, then it is almost always listed as a negative. And I agree with that assessment 100%. If I pay $50-60 for a game, I better get at least 20 hours of gameplay out of it. Otherwise it was not worth the $ to me. And that is why I rarely actually purchase games when they first come out anymore unless they are a big name RPG and there has been pre-release information on how long the game is. I don't think I've bought a non-RPG title for at least the last 10 years on this stipulation. Skyrim? Already pre-ordered, since they are saying it easily has over 100 hours of gameplay, with some estimates approaching 300+ hours. Now THAT is getting your money worth. Fallout? Dragon Age? Mass Effect? Bought em all for the PC. Any other game I wait until there is a collectors edition or "game of the year" so that I only have to pay $20 for it.
These morons think that just because all the moms and dads and sheeple out there play crappy facebook games for 5 minutes a day means that everyone else doesn't expect AT LEAST 10 hours of gameplay from a $50-60 game? Or that just because people don't finish a game means they should make it shorter? Guess I won't be buying any of their games anytime soon either! When someone doesn't finish a game that lasts longer than a few hours, it's either because the developer failed to keep it interesting past the first few hours (linear level design with waves of bad-AI enemies anyone? sound familiar?) or the person just didn't have the time. It has nothing to do with anyone saying "WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't BELIEVE this game is longer than 5 hours!!!! I refuse to play this when I could be playing FARMVILLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
I can't freakin' wait for Skyrim and its purported 300+ hours of gameplay!
A 10-hour game can suck it.
Never mind that the videogame stories are inevitably dreadful imitations of book and movie plotlines that have been done before by legitimate storytellers.
Yes because books and movies lately have been bastions of new story ideas.
No good game is too long, no bad game is too short.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
I almost made a post about Unreal. I recall it taking me about 2 years to finish that game and it was a rather epic experience at the time.
To say that "videogames" is synonymous for "FPS" paints you into the box, or you need to get out and find more friends and acquaintances.
Can you give us some tips on how to start doing the latter?
One might imagine that slot machine makers have switched to video games as a way of avoiding federal and state interference in the gambling market.
I believe there is a MAJOR difference between a mobile gamer and a console or computer gamer. Mobile gamers are playing the game to pass time or because they are on the go and it's an affordable option for them. Those of us that play games on a console or computer are taking the time to sit back and relax to enjoy the game. I think it's unfair to judge how future games should be made based solely on the fact that some people are complaining that games are too long. Something just seems wrong about this if game producers are judging how long a game should be based complaints of mobile gamers.
You don't see authors writing shorter books because readers using a Kindle or iPad complaining that books are too long. At least, I haven't heard of any ridiculous complaints of that nature, yet.
But as we all know, games are routinely killing 4 player and even 2 player local multiplayer
Not all games are. Super Smash Bros. Brawl still supports four players on one machine, and I imagine the sequel for Wii U won't be any different even though the console is said to support only one touch-screen controller (and several Wii Remotes). Vote with your dollars/euros/etc for games that allow local multiplayer.
Oh how I wish the days of Goldeneye were back.
I just searched for goldeneye wii 4-player on YouTube. You might try the same.
The problem with *everything* is how it's marketed.
No, "That" type of game may be too long. We cant compare detective games with all RPG games Like the infamous Final Fantasy Series. If i bought a FF game that was under 50 hrs i wouldn't buy it. i was pissed to find out the new Witcher game was under 40 hrs,i like gaining strength,spells and so on And i want them in single player format. :}
Jack of all trades,master of none
Gamers are losing patience? Maybe it's because the games coming out nowadays overall aren't as enthralling as older ones. I hope I'm proven wrong at some point in the near future.
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
Games in general are too short, not too long. The problem is, I sit down to play a "AAA" title, and by the 5-6 hour mark can feel the game starting to wind towards the climax/finish, I STOP. This is because mentally, I cringe at the idea of blowing a $50-60 purchase in 7-10 hours. So I stop and leave it alone for a while to "consume" it in more sittings, and the problem I have is that I don't go back.
Because games are too short, I don't want to finish them because I feel cheated. The funny thing is, I beat Dragon Age: Origins in 2 sittings (would probably have been one If I didn't pass out). The game was 40+ hours of content (especially the first time), I never felt the game was going to end too soon, I never felt the need to protect my investment. I just flat out played it. I absolutely loved this game, and could enjoy every moment of it because I wasn't constantly wondering when it was going to end, and was my $50 worth it?
I've clocked > 100 hours in other games like the Final Fantasy Games. I've re-played "shorter" (shorter games of old are still longer than long games of present) games like Half-Life / Quake II / Etc many times because they were fun.
The bottom line, Games are getting more expensive, shorter, and of less quality. This is BAD, now someone wants to justify shorter games (at the same prices no less). Imho, only very few games can fit that bill. (Portal, which was free prettmuch was 3 of the best gaming hours of my life. Portal 2 was well written and delivered on so many different levels, it was worth the $50 to me).
Anyway, my 2c
No, this is just another magical void where they're trying to wring more out of consumers for less money. Even IF you cannot explore all parts of the game or there is more content there then you could possibly take care of, the point is, there are choices and that much content you COULD explore. Not everyone is going to explore every little tiny spot, but some people do. Being able to have the ability to do that makes the world feel much more open and alive, rather then just a typical shooter on rails. I think developers are worrying too much about players seeing very specific content that they put time into, then making a overall engrossing and GOOD game.
...but they DON'T, it just goes into a magical black hole. They never give more content for resources they take away. There is no reallocation, it just doesn't happen. It's like giving someone who is really terrible at managing money more money, it just disappears. Just the same as they somehow rationalized how they don't need better graphics anymore because a majority of players use ancient console level hardware (self-serving in and of itself), players don't use lan support because it only affects a couple players, players don't need certain game types, players don't need modding tools, or want long term support for their games.
Perhaps maybe they just can't think on a scale that makes it seem like an amazing game without focusing exclusively on small and unimportant details?
Taking this from the direction of 'lets make a rational point to reduce content in our games to make them cheaper so we can produce more shitty clones'. See I don't understand this. Somehow people seem to have this notion and developers seem to be spewing this BS that they have a finite amount of resources they magically shift around between different things in the game. Like how they don't want to invest in graphics anymore because thats time and manpower they'll spend on something else...
There are MODS (fan made content that was at no cost to developers and those fans never got money for it) that are better then actual games. Mechwarrior Living Legends, Dystopia, Insurgency, and tons of other ones I don't actually remember at this moment.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So, I just went to the store and dropped $30 on the Oblivion Platinum Edition with the two expansions, expressly for the purpose of knocking around aimlessly. I'd purchased Oblivion years ago when it came out, and it had fallen by the wayside for one reason or another. I went to the store to take a look at new games, and Oblivion won hands-down. I say your comments are entirely accurate. I paid $30 for a 5 year old game to avoid the gaming-as-a-movie feeling that is all too common now. The gaming industry today reminds me in some ways of the software industry years ago when the MBAs arrived and started managing, only now it's the movie-style production managers taking over with "let's give them an immersive experience". Guess, what? Games are about the experience I CREATE, not the one you try to give me. Games are best when they give you the elements necessary to create a story, not when the designer gives you a story. Books are for that. You don't play Chess so someone can tell you, "You're going to win with mate in 5 after 43 movies, unless you take the Knight at move 21--then you win in 48 movies. Get to it!" I don't play games for that experience either.
:-)
I remember sunny Sunday afternoons playing FF VII on the deck for hours and hours. Ahh. I'd spend another $30 RIGHT NOW for that.
I've been playing games scince the early '80s and one thing I have noticed is that games get more and more beautiful, more and more realistic. Better physics, sounds, etc.... all to the detriment of actual fun.
When I play a game, I play it to have FUN. Beatiful graphics, sounds and ultrarealistic physics or a supercool storyline can't beet plain, simple FUN.
So, what they should be doing is making their games more fun. Funny, isn't it?
I sank well over 200 hours into it (and have logs to prove it). A replay. Sure, it's been a long time, but really, ten hours is too long? I fucking played one of the modules (Kingmaker) longer than that. It's was similar with Arcanum before it. And gods help my schedule if I decide I need to replay Baldur's Gate II this decade as well.
The Point Not Explicited Above:
Start making better games, asshole.
This sounds like them trying to rationalize making shorter games which means they get to spend less money. Of course they wont pass on these savings to the customer. They'll likely expect to charge $50-$60 for a 2 hour game.
If playing Unreal isn't an Epic experience, then you have probably bought the wrong thing.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Actually, most Zelda games are in the 20-30 hour range if you just focus on completing the main story. Side quests can certainly add a bit to the time, but it's entirely optional.
A game that's too long would be something like, say, Dragon Quest VII. 100 hours just to see the credits roll, ignoring all optional quests? You can argue the forced length adds value to a game, but 3 hours every day on the same game for a month can be a bit much if there isn't any variety in the challenges (and killing the same enemy over and over again until you gain 20 levels and can progress is a bit monotonous).
What I cannot comprehend is why games now have moved away from that to a relative straight jacket and lack of freedom.
Things started going to shit when 3D came along. At first it was ok, but then the studios realized that people will pay more for Eye Candy than Content. Combined with the increased space and development time for a 3D world, the result was inevitable.
Then to add insult to injury, the studios decided that what people want is not a video game, but an interactive movie. Yes, I'm looking at you Square-Enix. So in addition to removing most of the gameplay in favor of cutscenes, they took most of the plot out of the gameplay as well.
I want to play long video games, not watch them.
None of that "you must play until you get to a savepoint or else lose all your work".
Is that worse than "the game saves continuously in the background, but your character must survive or else you lose all your work" as seen in NetHack and the like?
spiderweb software is a sort of one person shop
Can a one-person shop develop a video game designed for multiple gamepads?
Interesting... Personally I found most games are far too short for the money. Ten hours is not enough for my $50, especially when most are not worth playing again.
One of the top complaints of many gamers today is that games are getting shorter. The problem here is that increasingly, the focus of the gaming industry is shifting to the casual gamers, the ones who just want something fun to do while they're on the bus or chatting with their friends online. Most of the hardcore gamers want longer games, along with many other elements that aren't usually present in short, casual games. Unfortunately, the number of casual gamers is much larger than the number of hardcore gamers. However, the gaming industry would be retarded to ignore the gaming community in the same way that the Syfy channel would be retarded to ignore sci fi fans. There may be less of them, but they're the most valuable customers the industry has.
Case in point, I'm a hardcore Elder Scrolls fan and have played those games for hundreds of hours. I own two copies of Morrowind, four copies of Oblivion, all purchased new, and I've pre-ordered Skyrim. I buy the Collector's Editions and all the DLC's. So tell me, is Bethesda stupid for spending years making each game as rich and epic as possible? Should they shift their focus to the casual gamers? It could be more profitable in the short run, but they'd be losing out in other ways - and they know it. People will still be playing Elder Scrolls games long after Farmville has died and the casual gamers have moved on to the next new thing.
"All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in another sense."
If I pay $50 - $60 for a AAA game and it lasts me a mere 10 hrs to complete, I feel ripped off. So the guy asking the question is wrong right off the bat. $20-$30 for 10 hrs... mmm ok maybe.