Can games be too long?

Shamikebab

Shamikebab

Shamikebab

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Inspired by recent articles about Kingdoms of Amalur's speed run being over 200 hours long.

Personally I don't have as much time to game now as I did, I've played 88 hours of Skyrim and I still feel like I've barely scraped the surface. Does anyone else feel that some games are getting too long?

I'd much rather have a 20-30 hour game that had finely crafted story/quests throughout rather than a 200-300 hour game that is around 75% copy and paste quests or immense repetition for levelling.
 
i love playing Risk Factions and games can last hours, we had a stalemate situation in one once and it got ridiculous long, until one of the guys had to leave to go to work and attacked me mainly and another player slightly then quit.

there was a 4th player who went unharmed and he ended up winning.
 
Ultimately it depends on the style and quality of the game. Big 'blockbusteresque' games like Uncharted fit the 10-20 hour time bracket (on first playthrough) nicely, any shorter than that and I feel cheated, any longer and it loses that sense of pace and excitement a little.

Open world game should be just that; open world. There should be a huge amount of things to do outside of the main quest and as a result 100hr+ gamesaves should be very possible without getting bored.

RPGs i generally feel should be 40-60 hours to complete the storyline. For me RPGs are all about story and character development, the above time bracket is roughly what the best titles have taken for me to complete the main storyline. It just feels like a decent amount of time to really flesh out the characters without the storyline beginning to drag. Obviously in most cases you can add on 20-40 hours of sidequests etc which fall outside of said storyline.
 
RPG games have always been long. The Witcher was a good length, #2 not so long as I would have liked.

Although I do get your point, sometimes playing Fallout 3 it does seem like it'll never end. I still don't know if I've finished it or not.
 
Depends on whether they can keep the story consistent through out, Or in the way Final Fantasy games often get better the longer you play, as the story goes to great places.

It's all dependant on the story.

Although I suppose a good story can be damaged by gameplay that is too repetitive. As its hard to carry on through the story if there's no variety in what you're doing. Crysis for example
 
6-8 hours is the target for game makers as they know people lose interest after that. Personally myself I like 12ish hours in a normal SP game.

RPGs don't interest me and I got bored of mass effect after about 8 hours. I just do not ever get games where you level up and every thing levels up anyway ;)
 
6-8 hours?

That's too short, you'd lose interest in the game if you played it for long periods but if you space it out it keeps it's excitement.
 
I don't disagree with you, but they know from the achievement system that in general people don't finish a game longer than 6-8 hours long.

Obviously this forum isn't a good guage of that because most of the people here are game nuts :D

Just the same as they know only 3% of people finished gears 3 on insane. I guess they have excellent access to that sort of information these days and can model games accordingly. Why bother making a game 20 hours long if most people won't finish it. :)
 
Games can be too long.

FPS games like COD and BF are suited to last about 6-8hrs.
Then games like Arkham City can be completed in say 10-12hrs, but have lots of additional side quests to take the 100% completion to maybe 20-25hrs.

I just started Skyrim last night after it being in my pile since before Christmas, the reason I hadnt started it before now whas the thought of being overwhelmed by the size of the game.

I do think Crysis 2 is the only FPS recently that I thought was too long.
 
dannyjo22 said:
I don't disagree with you, but they know from the achievement system that in general people don't finish a game longer than 6-8 hours long.
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Oh right just re-read your post sorry :)

Well it's understandable but disappointing for me as I like games being just a bit longer than 8h.

I mean I could play on harder levels of difficulty but it's not the length of time of the levels that will make it fun but the amount of content/story.

However I did find Crysis 2 quite long as jamesy505 says.

Bioshock 1 and 2 were a decent length for RPG's.
CoD4,5 and 6 were also good lengths IMO. Haven't played the latest ones though so I dunno about those.
 
for me it is:
~8 hours for a good FPS story (Crysis/Crysis 2)
~10 for a good action adventure (Batman/Uncharted)
~30 for an RPG/GTA type game (Deus EX:HR, Mass Effect 2 etc)

I don't have time to play ridiculous amounts of games that are super long, I don't have the time. DA Origins + Awakening took me 60 hours to do the main story + some quests, I loved it but I'm not willing to spend that kind of time on a lot of games
 
I found myself looking at the games i had got for xmas and those i hadnt managed to start before xmas and thinking, can i really be arsed to start any of these games, as they were all huge open world games. I find that, If i dont have a lot of time, it makes it quite hard to get into them properly and i try to rush them which is pointless and can ruin them.

Luckily I managed to play most of them in the end and im glad i did, i decided to stick to doing the main story missions and skipped many of the side quests(that made games like Skyrim about the right length for me) . It seems a shame but a lot of games you get sick of after a while anyway, as they get repetitive.

Heres what i had over the last 6 months:

Dark Souls (played a lot but drew a line under it as i had enough of the stress ;) )
Dead island (also played a lot but i had enough near the end, partly down to time pressure though)
Batman Arkham city (finished the story and a lot of the side stuff, i loved Batman)
Skyrim (Finished the story and did a reasonable amount of the side stuff)

Kingdoms of Amalur(Released on friday, played a couple of days on this so far, only because the wifes away :) )

Saints Row 3 (not started)
Assassins creed brotherhood (not started)
Assassins creed Revelations (not started)

If youre time poor, sometimes its just better to play something short and sweet(SP) like Uncharted, GOW3, BF3 and COD.
 
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I finished all of the factions and the main story in amalur in about 25 hours, so there is either a ton of post/endgame content or the numbers may have been inflated a little.

I think (and some other) games really suffer from having a lot of sub par content to inflate them -- like excessive backtracking and fetch quests etc.

Edit

Around the 24 hour mark feels pretty good to me for a singleplayer RPG, The Witcher 2 was 24 hours dead on and that felt solid.
 
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Shamikebab said:
Did you actually read my original post or are you as informed about games as you are about football?
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Yea and you mentioned one game skyrim that is long and i am saying most games are not as long as skyrim.

COD, BF, uncharted, Halo's etc are all short games.

You cant expect most RPG to be only 10-20 hours long. RPG;s are games that tend to be long epic ones. think all the way back to the early final fantasy games.

FF7 came with 4 disks mate and the last BOSS literately took some people 4-5 hours to beat him
 
jonneymendoza said:
FF7 came with 4 disks mate and the last BOSS literately took some people 4-5 hours to beat him
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Three disks, not that that's a good measure of game length. Just size of content.

I don't remember Jenova/Sephiroth taking 4-5 hours either. Unless you mean Ruby Weapon instead? Even then... :confused:



As for the topic. I think a game can be too long, but it's down to the individuals tastes. I know as a kid I could happily sink hundreds of hours into a title, now anything between fifteen and thirty for a story is the sweet spot for me (depending on the type..). Games with re-playability or no defined end are exempt obviously.
 
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