Can games be too long?

[Shamikebab]

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.

 

[Shamikebab]

People who lose interest in a game is because that game is not as good as it is.

Games are far from being long. most games are really short! like 6 hours long! OP has it the other way round!

Did you actually read my original post or are you as informed about games as you are about football?

 

[Shamikebab]

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

Where did I say anything about average game length? That isn't the topic for discussion at all.

 

[Shamikebab]

You're still missing the point. Skyrim is single player only. MW3 is (pretty much) multiplayer only. They take similar amounts of time to complete and they cost the same. This seems fair enough to me.

I could say "they should reduce the price of skyrim because it doesn't have any multiplayer", equivalent to what you're saying about CoD. Do you think Skyrim should be cheaper? No.

Hopefully you now see my point.

No.

Skyrim has no multiplayer at all therefore it is aimed solely at single player gamers.

COD has single player and multiplayer components therefore it is aimed at both. If you want single player but not multiplayer then you are getting a 5-6 hour game for 40-45 quid.

 

[Shamikebab]

Unfortunately, the cost of making a game is irrelevant to length of game when it comes to multi-player vs single player. (Obviously if you pour more money in, it can be longer).

10 (or so) multi-player maps in cod will take less time to make than a set of single player campaign environments. The SP campaign will also incur costs regarding voice acting, story writing, making the cut-scenes, etc. Multiplayer is a good way to get lots of hours of content into a game cheaply, and getting the user to do the same thing over and over means you have less to develop (Skyrim does this well, most the quests are variations on the same).

In a perfect world, you'd have publishers selling the SP and MP separately and splitting the cost of them. You really think they're going to do that though?

Yeah I realise that sadly, I wonder how many sales they lose by people just renting the game for the single player. In the case of COD I doubt they'll care with the amount of sales they have but for lower profile games it could make a big difference.