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."

Comments

Short games are fine, but...

[tempmpi]

obviously not for 50-60 bucks. If you make a 2h AAA game you must be able to sell it for 10 bucks.

Re:Short games are fine, but...

[Eraesr]

The problem isn't that games are too long, it's that there's too many of them I want to play. And I'm no student with too much time on my hands anymore, so I just can't keep up with all these games. The result is that I have to cherry pick my games among them which means that some developers won't get my money because I chose other games even though I still wanted to play their game.

So in that sense it's probably true that if game developers made 2 hour games (or more realistically, something that takes about 8 - 10 hours) for 30 bucks a pop I'd be playing more games than I do now and my gaming money would be spread across more developers.

Re:Short games are fine, but...

[derGoldstein]

Well, we're assuming that the length of a game means that if you play "diligently" from the beginning it'll take you a certain amount of time to finish the game. Here are a few issues that come to mind:

1) Game environment -- e.g Portal 2. Many people treated the game as a race, or a kind of test. It took me about 12 hours to finish it. When I tell people that, those who treated the game like a test almost laugh (some say they finished in 5 hours, which I'm not even sure is technically possible), while others say they explored every nook and cranny and it took them 15 hours or more. I actually did take my time to explore, but I didn't find at least two or three very interesting hidden clues which, I learned later, I just walked by.

2) Non-linear content -- e.g The Witcher 2 (and other RPGs, but especially the Witcher 2). If you only complete the game once, then no matter what choices you took, you don't have the whole picture. Never mind that you could have taken different paths, and in doing so changed how the game progresses and ends. If you only played once then you don't know all that there is to know, and you've only "consumed" about 60% of the game. Having said that, if, once you finish the game for the first time, you don't get the itch to play it (*at least*) one more time in order to explore the "what ifs", then the game simply wasn't for you. Which if fine, but you probably should have known that about yourself when you picked a "hardcore" RPG.

3) Gaming style -- Crysis 2. I actually didn't play the game, since FPSs aren't by cup of tea, but I heard the following many times: "I used stealth a lot, and felt like by doing so I missed out on much of the gameplay". This isn't quite the same as the previous example, since in this case you *did* go through the entire rail, but you used a particular gaming style -- stealth. This time the replay value depends on whether you enjoyed the game enough to do it over and play differently, even if the game has already shown you everything it had to show you. There isn't an easy answer for this one, IMO, since if you bought the game then you *are* an FPS fan, so it really becomes a question of personal taste.

In the above 3 examples the game "contains" the production value that warrants a $50-60 price tag, but it's up to you if you actually see/consume it all, regardless of whether you've completed the game.
Finally, here's my point (well, part of my point...): What if you *could* finish the game in 2 hours, even on your first playthrough, and the rest of the game's content could only be encountered in replays? I'm not talking about Civilization or Sim games, I mean a game where you make decisions to guide a narrative. I suppose one answer would be "it depends on how good the game is", but then that's *always* the way you gauge if a game was worth the money, and you can only do so after you've finished it.

Re:Short games are fine, but...

[rainmouse]

obviously not for 50-60 bucks. If you make a 2h AAA game you must be able to sell it for 10 bucks.

Perhaps what he really means is long and fun games are being selfish because people can play them sometimes 100+ hours instead of buying dozens of shitty 2 hour long games, each for the same price. What these greedy developers don't seem to get is that there is only so much disposable income that can go on games. If a single game is played for a very long time or pirated, the money doesn't disappear it just goes into something else and if the piracy and long games ceased to happen, there is still the same amount of money to go around. No magic pot of gold will suddenly appear.

If I loose interest in a 10 hour+ game, its not because its too long, its because its a shit game.

Re:Short games are fine, but...

[hairyfeet]

I would have to agree and would also add that the reason people aren't finishing is because you games suck and quickly become boring as hell.

A good example of one sitting on my drive gathering dust is RF Guerrilla. The weapons suck so bad with you only able to carry a tiny amount of ammo and the game spans assloads of bad guys if you so much as hit a lamppost on bad guy turf, even if there isn't anyone around for miles, so the whole game ends up "Run your ass off from one vehicle to the next" and then just run over everything in the vehicle. BORING. I ended up having to put a mod that made the pistol rounds into explosives just to have some fun, but it gives ALL the characters that have pistols explosive bullets so if any AI allies (which are all dumb as rocks and will happily shoot you or run in front of you while you are shooting, dropping your morale score) have pistols you and everyone else is ragdoll city.

Compare this to something like Bioshock where there was always something new to see and do, or No One Lives Forever 1&2 where they actually spoofed the genre, or Just Cause 2 which was a crazy blast fest of insanity and mayhem. Those were FUN and I was happy to play all the way through and sad when I reached the end.

The problem is these bozos think a "cinematic experience" should be walk in a straight line, scripted battle, walk in a straight line, cinema scene, lather rinse repeat. After you have seen the second level and seen it is more of the same why bother finishing it when it will just feel like work.

If any of the devs are reading this? It is a GAME and FUN should be first and foremost, not your frustrated desire to be a director! Quit rehashing the same linear corridor crap and make your game FUN with a capital F. If people aren't finishing your game the goal shouldn't be to just give us less for our money, it should be to not make your game so damned BORING that nobody wants to finish the fucking thing!

You think we are gonna pay $50+ for less game in smaller boring bites? Screw you, quit making suckfests and give us something worth playing through! This would be like saying "Oh our crappy music isn't selling anymore, so our answer should be just make Titney Spears and all the other crap CDs only 12 minutes long for the same price! that's the ticket!". All this harebrained "idea" will do is give us more titles in the bargain bin, because most of us are felling ripped by the crapfests they are pushing out now, making it a little shit instead of a big dump isn't improving things.

Re:Short games are fine, but...

[PopeRatzo]

obviously not for 50-60 bucks. If you make a 2h AAA game you must be able to sell it for 10 bucks.

I guarantee that when the game developer decided that games are too long, the notion that they were also too expensive did not enter his brain for even a microsecond.

I don't know about this guy, but when I finish a "AAA" game lately, I'm much more inclined to say "This is too short, I feel ripped off." than "Gee, that was waaaay too long".

Here's a RULE for the genius who thinks "AAA" games are "too long":
"If it feels like's it's "too long" then it's not a "AAA" game, it's just a crap game that somebody spent too much marketing money on."

Then Why Have We Moved in the Narrative Direction?

[eldavojohn]

"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.

Yes

[Spad]

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.

Bad metric

[lyinhart]

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.

Looking at it wrong

[Aladrin]

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.

Gamers are not just one market

[Aceticon]

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!

Re:Wait... what?

[stewbee]

I think you sort of alluded to why publishers have taken this approach now, much to the disappointment of us hardcore gamers. We, as serious gamers, are not buying enough games for one reason or another. In my case, it's a matter of free time. For others it might be a matter money and $50 to $60 for a title might be too much to spend.

Marketing departments are always looking for additional revenue sources. From their standpoint, we serious gamers have no serious business growth to them, so they need to find a way to grow the company more. Enter the casual gamer. This would be their new target audience for growth. If they can create games on a smaller budget, have it be over and done with in 10 hours of game play, and create a more consistent revenue stream (meaning that they buy another game after they finish the previous game) then it's a win for them.

The optimist in me would still like to think that they would make AAA titles for us serious gamer types, but reality has usually proven me wrong.