"No game should be longer than 12 hours"

Caracus2k

Caracus2k

Caracus2k

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metro.co.uk

No video game should be longer than 12 hours - Reader's Feature

A reader suggests making all single-player games shorter will not only help with budgets but ensure people aren’t put off from playing them.
metro.co.uk metro.co.uk

Usual click bait nonsence or do many people agree?

Quick accessible games have their place but I have multiple games where Steam indicates playtime running into the hundreds of hours. And some of these are definitely amongst my all time favorites.

Some quite old titles that I've returned to every now and then like the Fallout series, Oblivion, Skyrim, Civilisation series (I still occasionally load up Alpha Centauri from circa 1996), Elite etc.

I know there's concern about the balloning budgets of some of the newer games but thoose budgets don't always corrlelate with replayability/ longevity of a title.
 
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Because of work, kids and general life I struggle to put a lot of game time in so struggle getting many hours in games. However, as a result of this I buy fewer games and stick with these so I'd be a bit annoyed if I spent £50 on a new game and it was over in 12 hours or less. I'd say a good time would be 30 hours because personally I quit most games around that.
 
Interesting question. On one hand, when I was younger I could probably finish a 12 hour game in 2 sittings. Now, with a lot less time to play games that 12 hour game could end up taking me weeks/months to complete.
You'd think with less time I'd enjoy the shorter games but it's probably the opposite. I like having a game I can get stuck into.

Though if they want to make 12 hour games, price them accordingly.
 
Everyone wants to get their money’s worth but why are Assassin’s Creed, and Zelda, and Starfield, and games like that so filled with trivial, repetitive tasks and missions? Why can nothing just tell a straightforward story within, say, 12 hours and then just end?

.....

Even just charging last gen prices would still provide plenty of profit, since the game was cheaper to make and more people will be tempted to get it.
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I think the writer misunderstands the part of game making which takes the time/cost investment
 
Caracus2k said:
Usual click bait nonsence
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Yup!

Saw that article and stupidly fell for the clickbait :(

12 hours kills many of the most popular game franchises and genres dead in the water.

RPG - that barely gets you out of the tutorial
RTS - you aren't going to scratch the surface of the meta/end game tactics
Any kind of management sim/city builder/4x - don't even bother, you'll reach maybe 50% of the tech tree?
Survival - your twig house probably doesn't have a roof, and you're still chopping down trees with a blunt rock

No more Fallout, Skyrim, Cyberpunk, no MMOs etc.

It's a stupid article on a stupid site, written by a moron... if people didn't want games longer than 12 hours, they wouldn't buy them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
Caracus2k said:
metro.co.uk

No video game should be longer than 12 hours - Reader's Feature

A reader suggests making all single-player games shorter will not only help with budgets but ensure people aren’t put off from playing them.
metro.co.uk metro.co.uk

Usual click bait nonsence or do many people agree?

Quick accessible games have their place but I have multiple games where Steam indicates playtime running into the hundreds of hours. And some of these are definitely amongst my all time favorites.

Some quite old titles that vet returned to every now and then like the Fallout series, Oblivion, Skyrim, Civilisation series (I still occasionally load up Alpha Centauri from circa 1996), Elite etc.

I know there's concern about the balloning budgets of some of the newer games but thoose budgets don't always corrlelate with replayability/ longevity of a title.
Click to expand...
i want a broad spectrum. what i dont like especially are games with pointless padding, retreading the same area over and over for needless reasons.

however my over 3000 hrs in elite dangerous (over a decade timespan in my defence) would suggest i am ok with a longer game ;)
 
Imagine we said that about other games, such as “you should only play football or rugby for 12 hours during your whole life”

It’s a stupid statement.

When I was younger, I played Chess at least once a day for probably 8 years.

In PC gaming, imagine making Microsoft Flight Sim and limiting people to 12 hours. Most people wouldn’t have finished binding their controls.
 
Mr_Sukebe said:
Imagine we said that about other games, such as “you should only play football or rugby for 12 hours during your whole life”

It’s a stupid statement.

When I was younger, I played Chess at least once a day for probably 8 years.

In PC gaming, imagine making Microsoft Flight Sim and limiting people to 12 hours. Most people wouldn’t have finished binding their controls.
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You need at least 12 hours in SKYRIM to decide which ENB you are going to use.
 
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bigmike20vt said:
i want a broad spectrum. what i dont like especially are games with pointless padding, retreading the same area over and over for needless reasons.
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You mean Ubisoft Game(tm) 2684? :p
Darujhistan said:
You need at least 12 hours in SKYRIM to decide which ENB you are going to use.
Click to expand...

And the next 12 hours waiting for a frame to render after you install every single mod :p
 
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I think 12 hours is a good length for games like The Last Of Us which are quite linear.

I also tend to lose interest in single player games within 12 hours but that’s just me, I’m not big into rpgs or strategy type games which require long sessions.
 
some people want to "waste" or "lose" time and them selfs in a game. so yer stupid article title.
i do agree some people dont want long.
some games 12hrs is right for. a video game narrative more than 12hrs might just be lots of fluff.
so temper it with over or under 12hrs were approriate. but no game should be 12hrs. 11hrs 59mins or 12hrs 01misn is ok thought..
 
adidan said:
I like open world and will happily sink hundreds of hours into a game.

Plus I'm tight so like getting my money's worth :)
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I'm the same.

I just dont have the time and patience for a full on story driven single player game. Picking up randomly a few days or weeks later just makes it even more of a pain to get back into. I prefer games like Helldivers, where i can just jump in, play a few hours and turn it off without worrying about what i was doing the next time i load the game. Cue, Gandalf meme.
 
It's clickbaity, but there was a period recently where games were almost being rated on the number of hours they'd take to complete.

And like most things, as soon as it was measured, manufacturers started to work towards that.

So suddenly your story driven game has a big segment in the middle where you need to complete a string of pointless activities to get to the end.

That's not a positive for gaming. They should be the length they need to be, with any other stuff optional. Not drawn out to hit some target metric.
 
It's a load of rubbish - and that's coming from someone who normally runs out of steam playing games and stopping before I get to the end of them. For example I've not finished (including DLCs)
Fallout 3,NV,4
Skyrim
Witcher 3
Pillars of Eternity
Baldurs Gate 1,2
Icewind Dale 1,2
Grim Dawn
My Time at Sandrock
Stardew Valley

Are these games rubbish? No! I just burn out with a lot of them because I hate switching between games when I'm playing one, so inevitably I'll stop. But I've enjoyed my time on them when I've played them, and that's what is important. There's no point playing a short game if it's poo, equally no point playing a long game if it's poo. That's the metric you need to judge a game by - is it good.

Exception to the above - Starfield. I stopped playing not because I was burnt out on it, but because there was nothing dragging me back in to play, and I still played (apparently) 3 days 20hrs of it.

Games I have finished are normally ones I play with someone - Borderlands 1,2,3 (I think i didn't bother with pre sequel DLC) and Dying Light. There was nothing exceptional about any of these game (except BL2 having what I consider my favourite bad guy), but playing with someone else made me not burn out.
 
12 hours for any kind of RPG or space sim type of game is way to short.

The games industry is in crisis because they keep making rubbish for lots of money.
 
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