Length of Games
There is an ongoing debate in games in general, and now more specifically. How long should games be? And even considering that different genres should have different lengths, how long should each genre be?
It starts with the usual complaint by gamers that games are too short and too expensive. I usually tend to agree with the latter but debating the former is difficult. Every game I play, I really try to make it to the end. Even when I know a game is not that great, I have to know how it ends. And, like books or movies, I pride myself on being able to say that I can count on one hand the ones that I started and didn’t finish. And I do consider it a great insult to a book if even I started and couldn’t finish (It’s even weirder when one of those books is lauded, but this is not the subject here). But if you ask around, or if you look at some Steam games achievement lists, you can see how people drop off the game by the percentage that complete story achievements. And it’s sad to say but most games don’t do much better than a 20% completion rate. And that could be really depressing. Especially for developers.
And what exactly is the problem? Besides the fact that gaming is a new venture, only a few decades old, and things still need to be learned.
Today, most AAA games, especially first person shooters and the like, clock at around 8-10 hours. I don’t remember how much Doom or Heretic took to complete but I’m pretty sure it was longer. Star Control 2 was one of the best games I’ve ever played and it took me quite a while. I don’t think I’ll be exaggerating if I said Starcraft comes in at 15-20 hours, not including mission restarts or reloads. And I didn’t feel like they were too long. I think Starcraft was too short, which required Broodwar.
Looking at today’s games, you can pretty much calculate length by genre. FPS games are short at 6 hours or long at 12. Third Person Action RPGs are short at 30 hours and long at 60. But playing Mass Effect or The Witcher and watching the clock going over 45 hours towards the end, I don’t feel like it was too long. In fact, when I played Crysis 2 and saw that towards the end I was only at 8 hours, I was a bit disappointed. And the only thing that lessened the disappointment when I realised I finished Portal in about 6 hours was the fact that it was one hell of a ride.
But games can be too long. I’m talking about you, Need for Speed: Underground. Both of you. Both of these games started really lagging a bit past the middle (I guess). With the first I arrived at the point where I just couldn’t complete the race well enough to continue and I got bored. With the second, I just didn’t know what to do and by the time I figured it out I was too bored to care.
I think it’s all about originality and variety. Let’s start from the beginning of the post.
AAA shooters, which are the bulk of games coming out today, are, even when done extremely well and with an awesome story are repetitive, of themselves if not of others. I’ll even take Crysis 2 (not Crysis) for example, a game I really liked. Towards the end you start to feel like you’ve done this before, a few hundred times. Yes, you’ve gained a power and there’s a different set of aliens in a different location but you’re doing it all over again. Crysis, which I take aside, was different with the more open world approach meaning that the island was almost entierly open for your exploration and the story was dripped in slowly and mysteriously enough for you to really be excited about what was about to come next even though you were plowing through the umpteenth wave of Koreans and then aliens.
Portal is different because Portal is a puzzle and it works like a puzzle. Every “chapter”, you get a new element and then 5-6 different configurations for that new element with older elements and then moving on to the next chapter. It never lets off enough to get bored. Although I do have some qualms about the difficulty ratcheting up in the two final segments, it’s very well constructed.
Starcraft also played on story. Yes, it’s the same old RTS. With a new and interesting army balance but the same RTS. But every mission was part of a story and every mission advanced that story in some ways. Even if it was a side-glance exploration. And again, that slow drip of story, leading up to a climactic conclusion, was what made the length consideration fade away into the non-existence.
Star Control 2 also works the same way, it’s a story-driven adventure. It includes starship melee combat and resource gathering and exploration and diplomacy but down to it, it’s an adventure. And like every space opera, the magnificence of the world and nearness of the story were awesome driving forces keeping you ever interested even when you had to fight off the 30th Kzer-Za grouping that wouldn’t let you out of Ur-Quan space. But that is also what’s great about Star Control 2. You need to farm resources but you don’t need to do it a lot. You need to have ship battles but you can avoid most of them. You need to gather intelligence but it’s ok if you don’t. The choices given allow you to vary your play style as you go along and also give you a way to come back for more.
Deus Ex does the same thing. You can kill, you can hack, you can tranquilize, you can bribe, you can talk, you can break in, you can… pick the way you handle any situation. And since any situation facilitates 3-4 of the above and other given options, the game never gets dull. Yes, annoyingly, like every FPS, there are boss fights that you need to be ready for – and it’s a freaking shame they mostly don’t facilitate those options – but the rest is up to you.
The Witcher and Mass Effect are massively long and are laden with many many fight scenes but they are well interspersed between exploration and investigation and diplomacy and sometimes even farming (for stuff, not just wheat) and the games change it up ever so often, keeping dullness away. That is how you manage to slug through a 40-45 hour campaign and still feel like there’s something more.
Need for Speed on the other hand is just driving after driving after driving and even though going 200 kph on a tight street is fun, the exhilaration wears off after a while and with no more modification to the mechanics than a better configured car that lets you catch up to the villain that is only winning by cheating, the first thrills don’t last through a whole campaign, even if it is less than 10 hours long.
I guess my point and bottom line is that certain games need to be a certain length, especially if they cost a certain amount. They don’t need to be longer than they should be but just long enough.
Change it up. Send me through jungles to the ship yard, over water, up a hill, give me a tank, send in the RPG troopers, switch up the bad guys, give me new powers, give them new powers, sit me down for a completely different mini-game, have me resolve a judicial dispute, make me think about which goblet to choose, then tell me some beast bit the power line and I have to wade through muck in total darkness to reroute emergency generators.
And when ever you can’t do that, when ever you find that this is the fourth or fifth level with exactly the same monsters, exactly the same weapons, exactly the same setting, same mechanics, same boosters, same… and you’re just rearranging them differently, this is the point to end the game and roll the credits.
Posted in Gaming, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with 2 comments.
I feel that a vary impotent game is left out here: Half Life (the original).
when you get to where you were sent in the beginning, you have spent about as much time as a normal FPS, but then you discover that where you were sent was not nearly the end point of the story. This happens about 5 times, which is awesome, as the game is awesome. It never gets boring. You get new weapons, new bad guys and new environments. Each of these elements requires you to play differently. Fighting electricity shooting aliens is not at all the same as fighting tanks, bringing down helicopters of using an artillery installation to kill an alien the size of a house. And all through the excellent game experience is an weird and complex plot that you really want to get to the end of (and maybe, just maybe find out who is the mysteries G-man who keeps on showing).
It makes for a long game, but that hasn’t stopped me from playing it 5 separate times (and enjoys each one).
I can’t mention every game, not even every good example. But do you want three other great examples? Privateer, Freelancer and Darkstar One.
Both are pretty much the same and the basic function is the same: Space faring, ship upgrading and dog fights. But every mission is different. There are small fighters, capital ships, escorts and patrols. And the Zealots fight differently than the pirates which are different from the Kilrathi, the Confed and especially the Drone. You can even shoot merchants.
But what they both do awesomely, Privateer more freely and Darkstar One (being simpler) more forcefully, is offer you a story but let you sit it out.
Privateer and Freelancer basically say: “To engage with story, go to here.” And Darkstar One changes it up a bit with: “Here is story! Story, story, story, story… Now occupy yourself for a bit while I look for the rest of it.”
The ability to say, “Let’s play the story!” or at anytime just “Nevermind this, I’m gonna go exploring for a bit, see you later” is what keep these games going.
And frankly, all of them are just long enough. Privateer might even be too short. But I’d rather have a too short game and then beg for a sequel or an expansion than have one which is too long.