• 12Jul 07

  Short and sweet....or sometimes not so sweet, but still short....

  Short games. Lets face it, games ARE getting shorter. How long did it take you to complete Return to Castle Wolfenstein? It took me quite a while, what about Max Payne? That was a fair but fun trawl, bullet time, bullet cam for sniper shots, interesting environments, deep gritty story etc etc. But thats not what I'm talking about here, my point is, its a fairly long game.
  Think about Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9 (though it was a little shorter I believe), Legend of Dragoon anyone? One of my favourites that was. They were all about 70+ hours in length, most were 80+. EIGHTY HOURS of epic adventure. Wow.

  Fast forward now, to say....hmmm.....Half Life 2:episode one, ok, I know its only a measly episode, but six hours or so takes the biscuit. And Gears of War, dear old Gears....You had a life not much longer than that, six to eight hours. What you did, you were good at, but you left me wanting still, some parts were noticeably shallow, particularly the story, which was just one very long mission, half the time I forgot what the objective actually was...which could be seen as a good or bad thing*. You could have at least made it all up to me in length, I mean, the multiplayer wasn't THAT good, and we didn't even get to fight the sodding Brumak. And there was like, one Corpser in the whole game, which hardly made me feel threatened. Anyway, I digress, Ill put all this crap in a Gears Review soon. What Im saying is, it was horribly short and did little to make up for it! Even RPG type games (previously 70+ hours of entertainment) are now down to around 50 hours (Suikoden 4/5, anyone?). The truth is, games are getting shorter, yet development budgets are getting ever higher. Games of the past were able to provide a prolonged experience with great entertainment value. But now developers are trying to push for replay value by having short games with (mostly pointless, uninteresting) unlockables, which can then only be opened by completing some (usually) insane challenge like; "Pull off 50 headshots in 3 minutes" or some bull like that.

  One of the most recent games that has had a prolonged lifespan with me is Supreme Commander. Ive been playing since February - The longest Ive spent with a single game in quite some time - and to extend my experience, I have just tonight downloaded around 20 mods (Try Strategyinformer.net - they have loads). So kudos to GPG and one of the Big names of the game; Chris Taylor.

  So I say....devs....designers....think QUANTITY...AS WELL AS QUALITY....it used to be achievable, but with ever bigger development budgets, still should be. And to go one step further, even more achievable than it ever was. There really is no excuse for the ridiculously short games we've been seeing as of late, and even worse, the poor attempts at prolonging them. Not everyone is multiplayer driven Im afraid.

  • Posted Jul 12, 2007 2:52 pm GMT
  • Category: Rant
  • 1 Comment
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