Kotaku Article: Shorter games =good?

Read it here.

Funny, I feel like a number games these days tend to be a bit too short. Or rather, they're short and lack replaybility

edited 24th Aug '12 12:16:42 PM by Vertigo_High

frankly I think it depends on the game and how it handles rewarding the player. A game like Skyrim is better when longer. The first Assassin's creed, by contrast, was much too long, with a lot of filler like the entire map of Kingdom and the flag collecting. All of the experimentation is finished by half-way through the game.

True, but a lot of Skyrim Go-fetch quests were rather boring and repetitive. I would've gladly swapped a chunk of terrain for some mission variety, at least like in Fallout.

Yeah, it depends on the game, I think. I wouldn't hold a 40-hour game that wears thin at 20 or 30 hours in as high of a regard as one that lasts only 15 hours, but is a blast the whole way through. It's not necessarily shorter is good straight up, but shorter means that a game is less likely to wear out its welcome.

Guess that's why journalists go nuts over Ninja Theory.

Spec Ops The Line is probably a good example. You can beat it in roughly 6-8 hours, but that fairly short timeframe packs a lot into it.

The fact is that most gamers will hit a point where they don't have the time or the attention span to finish incredibly long games. Ironically game journalists themselves often have this problem as they need to play a larger percentage of a game they review to produce better content and they can't really do that with 100+ hour games.

I think it really depends on just how fun the game makers manage to make the game. I've logged over 600 hours in Disgaea 2 without progressing past halfway through the plot, for example, and I still have a lot of fun at it.

No. In fact, Fuck No.

Why do these people write articles again?

edited 24th Aug '12 3:28:20 PM by Thorn14

Depends. No one likes Fake Longevity, but some games legitimately benefit from a condensed experience.

It's a case-by-case basis. Length is really just a tool, not a requirement.

edited 24th Aug '12 3:28:46 PM by Alucard

I can see their point, really. I mean, I could finish Analogue A Hate Story in three hours, but it made a pretty darn big impact nonetheless.

It's all a matter of artistic decisions, I suppose. How long can a given game keep going without overstaying it's welcome?

You know, this article annoyed me because it didn't seem like they were talking about a game overstaying its welcome or anything so much as it felt like they ware saying they didn't have the time or attention-span for anything too long and then implied this was true for everybody and so everything should really short.

edited 24th Aug '12 8:44:11 PM by KuroBaraHime

I do think that longer-length games should still exist, even if it ends up being for a small demographic.

It depends really. Most of the time I prefer to have longer games to sink time into over a long period (Deus Ex, Fallout), but sometimes I just want a short game to play over the weekend. The real sticking point is price. If you've got a game that lasts four hours and you're selling it for $60, that's not good value. I get most of my games from Steam's ridiculous sales anyway, so if a game is short, but I only paid five dollars, I'm usually happy. Long and short games both have an important place in the gaming world.

edited 24th Aug '12 4:00:34 PM by cfive

Shorter games =/= good.

Games not being padded out to fill some arbitrary length = good.

QFT

Sooooooooo, is there ANYONE saying anything different on this matter, or are we just being a big echo chamber?

Apologising and coming up with weak defences for many of the terrible trends in gaming is pretty much a staple of all hack games journalist sites.

Just go to a better site like Gather your Party or Gamebanshee or something.

I wouldn't mind if games started practicing more subtractive design if needed and if reviewers would stop docking games for being short like that's a flaw by itself.

But her comparison to You Tube videos is pretty dumb; there's a big difference between free online videos and something you have to pay upfront for.

5 dollars for 10 minutes, even if it's worth it, is a big risk that a lot of people don't want to take. There's probably better ways to monetize super-short games, like (hopefully non-intrusive) advertisements or packaging them with bigger games (like Portal with The Orange Box) would be a smarter idea.

I prefer shorter games honestly. When games go on too long I just get bored.

Depends on how they're designed.

As long as the game stays interesting I'll finish it. If it takes long I won't play any other games outside of multiplayer with friends until its done(ex.Metroid Prime)

Most of the time I won't finish a game either because its not that interesting enough to me or because I'm not good enough to finish it. Animal Crossing, Need For Speed Under Ground 2, The Splinter Cell I played, I got bored with. Kid Icarus, Ultimate Ghosts And Goblins and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat are probably short if you're good at them but I've never finished them. Geometry War Galaxies I may eventually finish the way I eventually finished Zelda 2.

It depends on one's definition of "finished" too. If 100% completion just means finishing all the levels in a Mario Platformer I'll do it. If it involves every last fetch quest in an overworld I probably won't.(Zelda 2 and Metroid Prime still aren't finished by some people's standards.)

Length has nothing to do with the quality. Of course, games with bigger quality are better, but if they are good AND lengthy without being repetitive, it's MUCH better.

See also: Portal 2 compared to Portal

I'd argue that Portal 2 suffered from having large environments that took too long find where to put your Portal.

I'm not arguing it's not a great game despite that, but it could have done with little trimming.