Over the years we had been assuming that how good a game was is totally unrelated to how long it was, and we thought that the world would agree with us. But that was not the case as we have learned from various articles and review scores, and simply people we knew, that their decision of purchasing a game, and the worth of their purchase, is directly proportional to the hours they get out of it. We didn’t understand why. We still can’t fully, but today we are here to explore our point of view – A game should only be as long as, and no longer than, it has meaningful content.
Nobody really critic a movie based on how long it is, but what was told within that time, whether the pacing was tight, whether the narrative was doing its job within the confines of that time. You wouldn’t base the purchase decision of a novel on how long it is — a novel ranges anywhere from 150 to 800 pages or more, sometimes being too long actually has a negative impact, that you’d rather read 3 books that are around 200 pages long rather than 1 book that occupies too much of your time. So why are games any different, which is the issue that baffles us. Gamers seem to want to buy a game that will give them 80 hours of content, as opposed to 15 hours of content. But shouldn’t a gamer’s pure objective is to play as many excellent games as possible? Lets assume you have 80 free hours a week you could spend on a game, what is more attractive to you? That you would spend all 80 hours on 1 game, or how about spending 45 hours on 3 different 15 hour-long games, and for the remaining 35 hours — read a book, spend time with your girlfriend, go to the mall, talk to your friends, spend time with your family, eat at an exotic restaurant, go to a foreign country or something… the possibilities are limitless. Isn’t life more fulfilling that way? You won’t believe how many gamers actually disagree with us.
Braid was about 10 hours long, give or take, provided you weren’t horrible at games, and it costs 15 dollars, and everyone thought that was a pretty good price for that kind of content. Now a gamer goes shopping for a game that retails for 60 dollars, it is 4 times the price of Braid, now he questions his decision based on whether he thinks that retail game will provide 4 times the entertainment value, meaning will it be at least 40 hours long? Now, you have to know, it isn’t bad for a game to be 40 hours long — as a matter of fact some of our favorite games were 50 hours long, like Dragon Age, Xenogears, Ultima: Lazarus. Dragon Age had almost 60 hours of content just on the first run, provided you played it on the easy setting and breezed through the combat, and skipped most of the non-plot-related side quests. It just has that much content, and that is impressive to us, but that doesn’t make it a better game than something that was half as long. The importance is within that 60 hours, how that narrative has represented the story it wanted to tell, and how the actual gameplay is factored into that pacing, that is vital to us game critics (at least the ones with real conscience, not swayed by monetary needs).
On average, games that are not overly verbose are 10 – 15 hours long, like most Resident Evils, Prince of Persia, Ico and Shadow of Colossus. Those games tell adequate stories without unnecessarily prolonging gameplay, well maybe not Resident Evil. Most adventure games are only 3 to 10 hours long discounting the time you get totally stuck and trying to pull you hair out for a solution, because that’s the kind of medium it is, most Episodic adventure games will take about 3 hours, and the longest ones, like the Longest Journey and Gabriel Knight 2, maybe 10 hours or more.
The point is when a gamer pays 50 bucks, or 60 bucks, what does he expect out of a game, does he expect the game to eat away 80 hours of his time, and if anything less, it would not be a good game? That really is the kind of of thinking that get gamers the disrespect from fans of the other mediums, that games have not transcended into art. The only thing he should expect from the game, is getting a fulfilling experience, no matter how long the game is. Because we have never treated a 100-page novel differently from a 1000-page novel, except a writer would have to pull the virtuoso of his lifetime to be able to tell a good story in 100 pages; and a 1000-page novel, it would have to be a damn good book to get me to carry around that piece of leather-bound colossus around. We shouldn’t be treating games any differently.
Having said that, these are the 10 common annoying tricks developers pull on us just to prolong gameplay:
1) Unnecessarily Backtracking — a lot of games suffer from these, making you backtrack all the way to the beginning to grab an item. Sometimes this is integrated nicely, sometimes not, the better examples are Metrovania type of games like Symphony of the Night, or Shadow Complex, but not all the time, it depends how the in-game world is setup (better if it’s a hub that spiders out to the location you need to go), and whether there are interesting things to discover even when you backtrack. One of the worst examples are Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, having you go through the same maze over and over again, yes I know there are shortcuts which you can find with your new-found ability, and it seemed like awesome game design for like 2 sec, until you got so sick of the Temple of the Ocean King you wanted to throw the DS halfway across the room.
2) Excessive Grinding Required – countless Jrpgs are victims to this mechanic, which I am not even going to name names here. The player should not be forced to spend 5 hours walking around the first town and level up their character so they can progress. Grinding isn’t fun, period. Smart game design is about the player always just a breathe short of making it, if only he could be stronger, or a little smarter, to get to the next checkpoint. Half-Minute Hero makes fun of this by making grinding painless and fleeting, and games like Dragon Age paces the game expertly so you never had to go out the way to do so, and games like Demon’s Souls, punishes you in a way that you know no amount of grinding will help you get through the game.
3) Lack of Save Points — I want to be able to save the game everywhere, this is a must. And IF there were save points, I want them frequent. They need to be before bosses, especially that. And if there weren’t frequent save points, I especially do not want to lose everything when I die. There’s no reason for me not to keep my experience points or give me a way to retrieve it after I die. Most of the older Jrpgs break this rule, and combined with excessive grinding needed, you will find yourself spending hours getting nowhere.
4) Inability to Skip Cut-scenes — once I have watched it, I want to skip it, enough said. And if I have to replay boss fights, don’t make me watch the damn thing again. And don’t forget that pause function during cut-scenes, because when I am halfway through a 30 minute cut-scene and the house is burning I am going to get get pretty pissed off when I have to re-watch that earlier 15 minute. And don’t ever show me those insanely cool Final Fantasy summoning scenes during battle more than once, without giving me the ability to skip it.
5) Distracting side-plots that gets in the way — GTA 4 is a prime example of this, while your companions call you incessantly and bug you to go out on dates with them, which is distracting and completely not fun.
6) Long loading sequences and mini-games that don’t have anything to do with the game at all — in Bioshock, when you pick a lock, hack a console, you play Pipe-Dream, which is so out of context that the suspension of disbelief goes out the window. Fallout 3 does this right by making hacking and lock-picking actually interesting and believable. Mass Effect, even though a great game by itself, makes the mistake of long elevator loading sequences and a dance dance revolution like hacking sequence that, well, ] fits better than pipe-dream, but still out of context and unnecessarily makes the game longer than it is. We would have been happy if hacking and lock-picking was pure stat-based, you click on it, and you either could hack it or not, that’s all we needed.
7) Spend 100 hours on this game and you will get an unlimited continue – it is ok for old-style arcade games to be insanely difficult, like Ikaruga, one of our all-time favorites. Difficulty IS the point of the game, but then, we paid for this game on XBLA, we want to see all the stages even if we suck at the game. We want to get the simulated experience that we are standing in front of the arcade cabinet and we have a bag full of unlimited quarters to be used for the coin slot. There is no reason that it should make us spend 8 hours playing the game (not even letting it run by itself works) before getting enough credits for us to see the end of the game. If we could suffer through 8 hours of Ikaruga we wouldn’t need unlimited continues, would we?
8) Simply recycled content — making you play the game twice before the real final boss shows up, or having a game’s later levels be the exact same stages as the previous levels with just more difficult enemies, is just one one of the worst mistakes that developers make to shroud us in the illusion that the game is longer than it should be, except not a very elaborate illusion that is, for we know we are getting tricked.
9) Repetitive mission structure – Assassin’s Creed comes to mind. There are only 3 types of missions in the entire game, and you are forced to do them over and over again until you get to the supposed revelation / twist that unveils the plot. Now this would have been ok if they were optional (like in Brutal Legend), but most of them are not. Thank God the game is still relatively short, even after all that repetition, but we would have liked it to be a lot shorter.
10) Choices that don’t mean jack and claiming that replaying the entire game is a new experience — games like Infamous and Bioshock offer choices that don’t mean anything. In Bioshock you can save the little sisters or not, and at the end you will get a different ending, but the choices don’t make any impact at all because you are selecting a choice instead of actually doing something physical with impact (we would have loved to bash those heads), and the benefits you get out of being evil or good hardly makes a difference. As excellent as Infamous was, the game suffers from that same symptom –whether you choose to be good or bad only dictates the color of lightning the hero wielded. While both are considered one of the best games of this generation, they really shouldn’t be advertising to players of their replay value because of the different choices they offer. We don’t want to be choosing between saving the farmer’s daughter without rewards, and saving the farmer’s daughter with a bag of gold. We want to rape and pillage and destroy and have every decision ripples through the game so events spiral out of order — yes so we actually have an excuse to replay a game and see how events unfold differently. Games that has actually taken a step towards the right direction – Dragon Age, and the Witcher.
The conclusion — Developers, don’t make games longer than they have to be. We have a life outside of games, and if we didn’t have a life, we had other games to play. A game only needs to be as long as it has something to say.
