Anybody else thinks modern games are too long?

Cerberus87

Cerberus87

Mega Houndoom, baby!
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    I have this feeling, and this stops me from playing games sometimes because I'm not sure if I enjoy doing all the stuff in the games (especially sandbox ones).

    CoD gets criticism for having short campaigns, for example. Of course, the meat of the series is the multiplayer, but not everyone has the skill to succeed and have fun there. But there's no consensus on how long a game should be.

    Classic games weren't long. Their length stemmed from difficulty and repetition. You could beat SMB3 in one sitting, but it was hard towards the end of the game.

    Sometimes I feel modern games are too long. Like Assassin's Creed 2, for example. That took me 42(!) hours to fully beat. As a comparison, the first game took me less than half that. I enjoyed every bit of AC2, but 42 hours is too much to invest in a game when there's tons of stuff to play nowadays and a large chunk of gamers are adult people with little spare time.

    What do you think?

    Side note: Pokémon usually takes me 24 hours to beat.
     
    While I do agree that some games (especially Square/soft/enix RPGs) are too lengthy for their own good, there should still be a moderate amount of length to a story if I'm going to be paying full price for it. If a game isn't so lengthy then I shall wait till it gets a discounted price from age, or if it's a fighting game in which the meat of the game is its multiplayer.
     
    Honestly, I like a long story as long as it's good. If I'm buying a game, I want to know that the $60 that I just spent actually was spent good. In games like Skyrim, I wouldn't have spent $60 on it if I could beat it in under a day, thats a waste of money.
     
    Personally, if I'm gonna pay $60 for a new game of this generation, I'd hope it's long. $60 for, say, something the length of Super Mario Bros, that wouldn't fly at all. Although it's hard for me to keep my patience with a long game sometimes, I'd rather it be long, especially if I'm really into it. Plus, one could argue that playing a series you're good at or replaying a game will always make it short-lived. If you're really good at Pokemon, know the formula, and aren't a beginner, you can generally finish within a couple of days. So using a series you know very well isn't a good example as far as game length goes. (Hell, XY could have been longer now that I think about it...that post game, man.)

    Alfieri said:
    While I do agree that some games (especially Square/soft/enix RPGs) are too lengthy for their own good, there should still be a moderate amount of length to a story if I'm going to be paying full price for it. If a game isn't so lengthy then I shall wait till it gets a discounted price from age, or if it's a fighting game in which the meat of the game is its multiplayer.
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    I thought Chrono Trigger was too short, honestly. I finished it a lot quicker than I thought I was thinking I would. When it was time to face the final boss for real, I was like "What really? Now?" There were some sidequests to do, but still. And I guess one could argue that there being so many endings makes up for it, but it was still pretty short. Everything else they do, yeah, those are long. lmao I feel like I'm still in the beginning of Final Fantasy IV.
     
    Games with lengthy story-line has their own advantages, I believe. First thing is, this allows them to go more in-depth into their plot, giving them chance to explain things more clearly so that we would be able to understand better and generally feel more engaged. In certain games, story is portrayed as a make-or-break thing; if writers and develops manage to nail that, it leads to positive and flourishing results. If not, well... they might be lead to direction they're not precisely expecting, such as an overwhelming amount of criticism from fans. While criticism could help them see through what they've done wrong and what they need to work on improving, which is great, these things could also discourage fans from buying said game, which I'm sure they wouldn't quite enjoy, aha.

    As for me, I usually find myself being more into video games if they have longer story. When they're short, things could sometimes wind up to be a bit disappointing for me, especially when I'm enjoying playing too much and don't wish the game to end.
     
    Hmmm, I guess the price thing is a valid argument. Especially when games are much more expensive than books, for example.

    A game could be short, if it offered tons of replay value. A fighting game is short (MK games notwithstanding), but you get to try different characters, which leads to a wholly different experience.
     
    The problem's often less about length, and more about the content of the game. I don't care if a game takes 90 hours to beat if it manages to stay fresh and fun to play throughout. The problem is, when a game wants to last longer, which many do in order to increase sales, they normally would rather send you off looking for a key somewhere in a boss fight's lair than come up with something new.
     
    As long as the games aren't monontonus repetive BS to make the game feel longer - I'm looking right at you Destiny - I'm okay with games being long. If the game is fun then it really shouldnt matter how long the game actually is.
     
    El Héroe Oscuro said:
    As long as the games aren't monontonus repetive BS to make the game feel longer - I'm looking right at you Destiny - I'm okay with games being long. If the game is fun then it really shouldnt matter how long the game actually is.
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    I agree with this.

    All in all, I really enjoy long games. I have easily accumulated 300 hours on Skyrim and haven't completely beaten it yet.
     
    I'm with the 3 above me. It's more about the content when evaluating if a game is too long or not. When developers make you grind or do repetitive tasks to progress then it takes away the fun and a long game becomes torture (I usually bail and never finish these games).

    I spent over 100 hours playing Skyrim because it was fun, but I wouldn't be able to spend that much time playing some other games.
     
    I want to get my money's worth out of my games, so I prefer my games to be longer, but sometimes feel that I get through them too quickly still. Though when I say long, I suppose I really mean that I can keep playing this thing for a long time whether it be through multiple playthroughs or the game just has an assload to do or has a multiplayer/competitive aspect I can get into.

    Of course, you then get the occasional game where the devs make it long just for the sake of making it long to appease the strange people who only value length in video games. I like my games long, yes, but I want them to be good first.

    Like Bravely Default. While it had some really good points, I kid you not when almost half the game is padding, and it really hurts the game imo.

    On a side note, the game that I've cleared the fastest was Metroid Prime, in about 11 hours. Or was it CoD: Modern Warfare 2's campaign? I don't remember.
     
    It's strange you would say that, because I've been hearing complaints from gamers on other sites that modern games are too short, because it took them only a few days to complete rather than weeks. I would rather play a short game, so I could spend more time chatting with friends on the internet, with the exception of multiplayer-based games like Smash Bros. and Pokemon.
     
    If I'm gonna pay $60 for a new game then I don't expect it to be short. I can't stand it when a game is short, hell even 8 hours long is short to me. I prefer games that are gonna take me a week or two to beat playing an hour or few a day. I played the **** out of GTA V when it came out and it still took me a week to beat it and that's the way I like it. Not because I died alot (I only died like 3-4 times) but because I like going crazy on that game. By the time I was done with the storyline multiplayer was up meaning the game never ends.
    I do have an exception for shorter games tho, like DBZ. Wont buy them new but I'll cop a copy when the price drops to half price or in the 20's.
     
    I think that length of a game really comes down to what game is being made. Not all modern games are long, just look at The Binding of Isaac. Most runs will only be about 30 minutes, about an hour if you win, give or take depending on curses, but to fully beat the game 100% takes about 200 hours of gameplay. So for people who like having more to do there's a lot, and for people who want a quick experience every once in a while it's there.

    @people who complain about couple day games not being couple week games: don't play your games so fast lol. Far as I can tell, if the campaign is 6+ hours then it's worth my 60 bucks. 10 dollars an hour is reasonable.
     
    I would prefer it if games were longer. I don't like spending 60 bucks on a game that I can beat in a day. It really rustles my jimmies when I spend a ton of money on basically a pretty multiplayer flash game. Like most final fantasy games and RPGs in general are a pretty decent length, it should take you at least 100+ hours to beat them. And you can fit more emotion into 100 hours than you can 6 - 10 hours which is one of the reasons that I buy games. I'd rather buy a game that has no multiplayer capability and a deep encompassing storyline over a game that does have multiplayer but doesn't put much of any effort into a storyline. And games have been giving up on storyline for so long now that a lot of people don't even play the story anymore and it's just disheartening. A lot of people I went to school with would only play storyline stuff if they had to play it to unlock online or something in online.
     
    Wilhelm said:
    I think that length of a game really comes down to what game is being made. Not all modern games are long, just look at The Binding of Isaac. Most runs will only be about 30 minutes, about an hour if you win, give or take depending on curses, but to fully beat the game 100% takes about 200 hours of gameplay. So for people who like having more to do there's a lot, and for people who want a quick experience every once in a while it's there.

    @people who complain about couple day games not being couple week games: don't play your games so fast lol. Far as I can tell, if the campaign is 6+ hours then it's worth my 60 bucks. 10 dollars an hour is reasonable.
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    Man, what is it with you and Isaac. {XD}

    Ehh.. not entirely reasonable to me. I can understand where you're coming from, but frankly, I'd still get a bit upset if the game's story is only 6 hours long and I paid $60 for it. That's a lot of money to blow on a quarter of your day. I want a roller coaster ride to come with that. :v
    Even Bioshock Infinite was hard for me to justify buying at full price; not only is it a series I love and adore, but that campaign lasts a good 12-13 hours.

    Maybe it's because I'm so used to the steep discounts of PC games, or maybe it's because I've been playing a lot of really lengthy games lately.. Like Warlock. I've been obsessively attached to Warlock 2 for the past couple weeks; I paid $1.25 or something for it (it was $6 on sale, +credits) and it's given me three campaigns over the course of 40 hours. (If you're not familiar, Warlock is basically the magical/mythological counterpart of Civ.)

    I prefer to think of games in $1:1 hr when I can, or at the most $5/hr. Paying $10 for a single hour of entertainment is just too steep for my blood.

    Maybe not just the main campaign itself.. As Sonata pointed out, most games these days don't have much of a story to them. But at least taking into account side missions/bonus features and any chances of that campaign having replayability, too. Fallout 3 and NV were justifiable, for example, but I've put hundreds of hours into them, sometimes even in a single run.
     
    RPGs may be long, but I wouldn't say too long. Everything else is too short. I think roughly at least $1 per hour should be the value proposition. The longer, or the more replay value at a minimum, the better
     
    It may just be me, but with today's technology, as opposed to that of gaming consoles that were made in the 80's and 90's, game designers may be wanting to flesh out as much content as they can. I mean you look at most of Nintendo and Sega's earlier output, and then come back to something from today, most of the former were short due to software limitations more than likely.
     
    No, games aren't to long in my opinion. In fact a lot of older games are a lot longer then the new ones. Vagrant Story, for example, could take as long as 60 hours to complete. But that kind of length is not a bad thing. Really long keep you invested longer, and you get the $60 you paid out of it. This is only a bad thing if the game has a terrible storyline, or isn't fun to play. If a game can be beat quickly then that is can bad thing, unless the game course focuses on replay value instead of length, like the classics such as Super Mario Bros 3.
     
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