I dont mind back tracking in games, and having to work out where to go for myself. Makes you put a little thought into your game rather than just following the game around on rails.
I may be alone in this, but I vastly prefer to read and follow the storyline through in game diaries, logs etc, than have some npc spell it all out for me coz like readin wordz is 2 hard 4 me m8.
You're right that shorter doesnt necessarily mean worse, but give me a really good modern pretty looking game which takes 8 hours to finish, and an equally good but not so pretty looking 20 year old game but lasts for 8 weeks, and I know which one I would like to see more of.
These days I usually play MMOs and strategy games, because they seem to be the only titles around which last more than a week
but the very thing here is in the mmo's and strategy games there isn't "more" game there, its just repeated over and over and over. now i like mmo's but you do repetitive missions, it can be made fun. but in general the "stories" don't matter at all, you can read why someone wants 10 rabbit hides, but it doesn't matter, has no bearing on the game and most of the reasons behind wanting the hides are crap. story telling is actually fairly non existant in mmo's, there are basic, writen in 5 seconds reasons for collecting or killing whatever you need. but theres no pulling you in, scaring, intriguing you at all, no length, no sub plots, no character growth.
now, they could have had exactly the same game area's in bioshock, but quadrupled the amount of switches you had to hit, in certain orders, with repeated backtracking massively increasing the time spent to complete the game, but really adding nothing at all to the experience.
the problem is design/coding time to implement games now. as i've said in the physx threads, physics in games don't have to be complex or accurate to be good, the main game physics won't ever need "boosting" with extra power. if a wall is breakable it takes 10 times longer to design, programme, debug and fix than a plain piece of wall, infact it might be 100 times longer. a plain wall with simple characteristics is easy, give it some basic arguments, can it be passed through, no, is it solid, yes, can it be broken, no, etc. when it becomes breakable you suddenly have to design the original wall, how it looks broken in a dozen different ways, program how the bits fall, make the edge's look real, give the wall a health, determine how much power is needed to break it, a weight for broken pieces to add to the power of gun/nade/punch to determine how far bits will go, etc, etc, etc, etc. its massively more complex and simply takes a lot longer to code.
we're in the stage where every new thing in games takes exponentially longer to program/code and make. so one guy building a level over a year has turned not into 3 guys making a level over a year, but 10 guys making a level over 3 years.
but i can't play old games anymore. at first, you had space invaders, it was fun, and about as hard core as games got at that point. basic, fun, but we grow, we learn, we got bored of basic and i would never go back to basic long games over more complex games of now.
Some didn't like the big boxes and stuff but I thought they were great.