Are games too long?

Are games too long?


  • Total voters
    45
Dragon Age is an amazing game and if time permitted I would love to replay it with a different class as well as making different choices in some key points in the game. My gripe was that I've been playing it for a long time and I still haven't finished even one playthrough of the whole game! :(



Exactly, losing track of what's going on is the main thing that puts me off a game. I tend to like a game if you can finish the bulk of it in a weekend. So 30 hours tends to be the sweet spot for me, more if the game is really good.

I played some capaign's in one go :D

10+ hours on the chair xD


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Gaming in general is actually getting shorter. 5+ years ago and no one would complain about a 24Hr+ game because that was the norm. Now a game that approaches that length becomes an issue and is an object of derision
 
Gaming in general is actually getting shorter. 5+ years ago and no one would complain about a 24Hr+ game because that was the norm. Now a game that approaches that length becomes an issue and is an object of derision

Lol, next year we will be bitching about games being to short again.
 
No, no, no, no and no. I'm a HUGE JRPG fan so I love my 70hr+ games :love:

That being said I think that games should take as long as they need to to tell an interesting story. I'd rather have a fantastic 6hr campaign that a 12hr drawn out borefest and vice versa, I'd rather have a 12hr fantastic game than a 6hr mess that's had half it's content cut.
 
Lol, next year we will be bitching about games being to short again.

Lol, it would be interesting to see if the nature of gaming length is cyclical and operates on a 5-year cycle. Perhaps the new consoles will allow more capacity as to fit more content into gaming which in turn usually results in a longer game.


No, no, no, no and no. I'm a HUGE JRPG fan so I love my 70hr+ games :love:

That being said I think that games should take as long as they need to to tell an interesting story. I'd rather have a fantastic 6hr campaign that a 12hr drawn out borefest and vice versa, I'd rather have a 12hr fantastic game than a 6hr mess that's had half it's content cut.

A short story can indeed be very powerful and emotive; however why not let CD Projekt REd and Square Enix collaborate to make every single game thus getting both :p
 
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i also feel that a game you pay a couple of hundred rand for should at least keep you busy a couple of hours, the longer the better. Have about 400 hrs on Skyrim ps without any DLC. I enjoyed every hour of it. I hate these games that takes longer to download than it does to complete.
 
Definitely not, if games get boring / repetitive stop playing and move on.

I'd hate to see epic games become shorter, but the price remain the same, because some people feel games are too long.
 
i also feel that a game you pay a couple of hundred rand for should at least keep you busy a couple of hours, the longer the better. Have about 400 hrs on Skyrim ps without any DLC. I enjoyed every hour of it. I hate these games that takes longer to download than it does to complete.
I agree I sometimes make short games longer by playing them on the hardest difficulty there is a argument to make against certain Fps not having single player because the campaigns are so weak (Battlefield4) rather put extra time in the multiplayer and make sure it works lol.
 
A short story can indeed be very powerful and emotive; however why not let CD Projekt REd and Square Enix collaborate to make every single game thus getting both :p

Oh man that would be a dream come true :love:

Have you seen Bravely Default? God I want that game so bad!!
 
i also feel that a game you pay a couple of hundred rand for should at least keep you busy a couple of hours, the longer the better. Have about 400 hrs on Skyrim ps without any DLC. I enjoyed every hour of it. I hate these games that takes longer to download than it does to complete.

I have to agree with this too. I like games that can be played for an insane amount of time by providing additional things for you to do (i.e. all of the side quests in Skyrim) or finished off in a lot shorter time if you just want to play through the game as quickly as possible or if you just maybe don't really care about the side-quests. Also having so many extra activities included and making the game fun to just mess around in (like the GTA games) is also something that I appreciate.

Of course on the flip side I guess some games would be pushing the boundary a little if they were designed to tell their story in a different way and they were just trying to pad things so I guess it all really depends on the game.

Games that I did come across that felt a little too long were games like Alice: Madness Returns (I still thoroughly enjoyed it however I felt it could have been just a bit shorter). Then there are games like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs which was far too short (aside from the other problem I felt it had of not really being much of a game to start off with so maybe it's short length is actually a blessing in this case).
 
I have to agree with this too. I like games that can be played for an insane amount of time by providing additional things for you to do (i.e. all of the side quests in Skyrim) or finished off in a lot shorter time if you just want to play through the game as quickly as possible or if you just maybe don't really care about the side-quests. Also having so many extra activities included and making the game fun to just mess around in (like the GTA games) is also something that I appreciate.

Of course on the flip side I guess some games would be pushing the boundary a little if they were designed to tell their story in a different way and they were just trying to pad things so I guess it all really depends on the game.

Games that I did come across that felt a little too long were games like Alice: Madness Returns (I still thoroughly enjoyed it however I felt it could have been just a bit shorter). Then there are games like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs which was far too short (aside from the other problem I felt it had of not really being much of a game to start off with so maybe it's short length is actually a blessing in this case).

Good examples there with which I definitely agree. I think the problem with Alice was that the gameplay became very repetitive after a while which contributed to how long it began to feel. If a game is going to be so lengthy developers definitely need to include gameplay elements later in the game to switch things up a bit.
 
The longer the game the better - what's key in keeping me interested is drawing me into the experience. Unnecessary fetch-quests and lore-building chitter-chatter gets to me. More slaying and less talking.

Skyrim does it right, Witcher 2 does it wrong. - What exactly, I'm not too sure of.
 
The longer the game the better - what's key in keeping me interested is drawing me into the experience. Unnecessary fetch-quests and lore-building chitter-chatter gets to me. More slaying and less talking.

Skyrim does it right, Witcher 2 does it wrong. - What exactly, I'm not too sure of.

Yeah the constant chit-chat in Diablo 3 is what ended up making completing the game a real chore for me. If it were interesting animated cutscenes, it may have been another story. But simply standing there listening to the people talk endlessly was so incredibly boring.
 
I like both long and short games. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a 4-6 hour game that I know I can finish on a cool rainy day.

However, I try to think of it in terms of hourly rate. A game should not cost more than R10 per hour. So if I bought a R600 game and didn't get at least 60 hours [of fun] from it I got ripped off.
 
i think game devs these days are too obsessed with adding hours to a game, just to please the masses. how often have you seen games that are about 2 hours too long? unnecessary extra levels just padded in there to meet some daft metric.

personally, i wish games were around 6 hours, max 10. I have played Fallout, New Vegas and Skyrim for hundreds of hours, but in hindsight, just think how much MORE gaming i could have done and how many other games i could have experienced in those hours?

I played Gone Home in about 2 hours and i LOVED it! perfect one night session. i wish more games were like that. it would certainly help me clear out my obscene backlog
 
An example of a good length campaign is BF4...

Finished in one sitting over the course of the whole day xD

If it were a SP game I would have been disappointed, but because it's a MP game and the SP is more of a stopgap than anything else I was okay with the length of BF4's campaign.

Normally I prefer campaigns to last between 10 and 20 hours.
 
Oh man that would be a dream come true :love:

Have you seen Bravely Default? God I want that game so bad!!

I have not . What's it about?


i think game devs these days are too obsessed with adding hours to a game, just to please the masses. how often have you seen games that are about 2 hours too long? unnecessary extra levels just padded in there to meet some daft metric.

personally, i wish games were around 6 hours, max 10. I have played Fallout, New Vegas and Skyrim for hundreds of hours, but in hindsight, just think how much MORE gaming i could have done and how many other games i could have experienced in those hours?

I played Gone Home in about 2 hours and i LOVED it! perfect one night session. i wish more games were like that. it would certainly help me clear out my obscene backlog

I think that it matters more that they tell the story they wanted to tell in an as efficient a manner as possible. Some games need 20+ hours do so others do not. For every game I've played that was 2 hours too long there was one 2 hours too short. So devs must just find that perfect blend of time-to-impact ratio
 
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I have not . What's it about?

It's a legit JRPG from Square Enix for the 3DS, it's seriously looks and sounds awesome! You should read the preview Gamespot did on it just a few days ago.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/every-final-fantasy-fan-should-play-bravely-default/1100-6417331/

As someone said in the comments below, Square develop some of the best JRPG's when they're not working on FF. Now I really liked FF13 but I have to agree, I would like a tad bit more Japanese in FF. Anywho, check it out :D!
 
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