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I peg this on Minimum Wage.
It’s great that the well-paid gamers have their options of exciting, linear singleplayer games. Realistically, if we want AAA gaming to be defined by that, it needs to be profitable enough, which means people buying those games on release consistently, and even maybe accepting the $70 price tags.
Some people do so - but many others are only buying one or two games a year due to shrinking personal budget. And those games need to fill the hundreds of spare hours they’ll have during that year.
The situation could be reversed if more people had a generously-sized personal budget; if they weren’t fearful of managing their rent each month, or debating whether to save a few pennies from their paycheck for retirement. $40 or even $70 for the hot new 10-hour singleplayer game of the month shouldn’t be a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it’s everything in a world with so much income disparity.
For me, it’s not so much a question of length but whether a game should last as long as it does. There’s got to be something that makes it worthy of its run time.
Case in point, I played about 24 hours of Assassins Creed Valhalla when it came out, only to sack it off when my friend informed me that he clocked about 100 hours in it to play through. Fuck that! That game would have been a decent 20 hour Viking romp but it’s got nothing to say, show me or keep me engaged at 5x that length. Hell even at 40 hours I’d have said it was inflated, but 100! It’s madness.
On the flip side, I played Elden Ring through to completion over 80 hours and would have played for 80 more had it asked. It was engaging, exciting, full of interesting locations, characters and things to fight. There’s tension in and intrigue in just exploring this unique setting and it all adds up to an experience that’s worthy of its runtime.
Similarly, one of the only JRPG’s I’ve finished in recent years is Persona 5 Royal, which took me a huge 109 hours to finish and yet I loved it. It’s full of style, flair and a sense of fun often missing from this genre that it just got me hooked. It’s not even that the story is all that great but the characters are well realised and there’s a wonderful dynamic in the core cast that really got me to go along for the full journey. I also think P5R also did the one thing many games fail at and it’s pacing, the thing just goes and despite facts like the tutorial is about 8 hours long I never felt like I was just killing time.
My point is, my feelings these days are that most games aren’t worthy of being over 10-20 hours, and even less so of being 20+. It’s not a one size fits all answer and individual mileage might vary person to person but there has to be a hook (gameplay, game feel, story, characters, setting, playing with engaged friends , etc.) to warrant time invested beyond a point.
Elden Ring is one of my upcoming games and I was worried about the length versus how much it would engage me. Glad to hear it kept you going for your whole playthrough.
Why is length a problem exactly? If you enjoy a game for 200h that’s great. If you get bored of it after 20h fine play something else. There’s no need to complete everything in every game you ever bought.
I very much do move on when Im done with a game, rather than when it’s done. I mentioned that I moved on from AC Valhalla only 25 hours in, and a more recent example is when I stepped away from Armoured Core 6 after only about 5-6 hours realising it wasn’t really for me.
The problem with length is when length is the reason I stop playing. I can love a game at first and think it’s great 4 hours in. That love can turn to like if the formula is getting a little stale or the plots not going anywhere. If this continues then my like might turn to just “consuming “ to get it done, and if I’m still plugging away for long enough in this state it’s easy enough for things to slip into a negative view of the game because it’s asking more of me than it’s giving back.
Take Final Fantasy XVI this year. It took me 44 hours to finish, but imo it peaked around the close of act 2 (a certain boss fight that went hard about 30 hours in). By then the gameplay formula was established and it’s largely the plot carrying it but (imo) neither ever really got any better in act 3 but I still had another 14 hours to go. I was invested enough to keep going but I went from loving it to just liking it as a whole because it never escalated and 14 hours of treading water is a bloody big investment. This was main-lining the game too, I gave up on side quests early on, so we’re not talking about completing a game just getting through them.
It comes back to games justifying their lengths. This is going to mean different things to different people, as well as the games themselves doing different things so there’s no one size fits all.
I had to stop playing long single player games because of time constraints. Having a full time job and family means little.time remains for free time and that free time is not consistent. So if I do try to start a big new game the next time I find time to go back to it I will have forgotten where the story was, what the controls were and very quickly give up on it and go back to quick pick up and play games.
There’s too many games in the world that I want to play and I like to change it up in terms of what kinds of games in playing, and often have different games on the go at the same time on different platforms to keep up with my adhd. I really appreciate short games that give me a full experience without overstaying it’s welcome. Very few games can keep me going 30+ hours in, they have to either be REALLY good, the most fun I’ve had in ages or a truly gripping storyline with fantastic pacing, especially if it’s an RPG expecting 100+ hours.
Some busywork in games is fine as long as it’s not overdone. the insomniac Spider-Man games come to mind with that. Traversal and combat are fun enough to carry those games through any lull it may have that it actually makes going around ticking stuff off the map genuinely fun for me. And usually I hate it when games just fill a map with icons of things for you to do. It helps that its world isn’t THAT big compared to the likes of farcry, at least relatively to how fast you can traverse it.
The more hours you can get out of a game to me is money well spent.
I feel the opposite. I pay for the narrative and experiencing the game’s mechanics and interactive art, not to flush as much of my life away as possible. When I see people complaining a game was too short, I am basically ready to add it to my wishlist.
Well, I guess I’m somewhere in the middle. I’ve finished games and thought, that’s it? But I want a game that makes me WANT to spend more time with it, not one that forces me to grind an area for hours just to milk more time spent in the game. If I spent two hours on a game and I’m still in the tutorial, I’m probably not coming back to it.
I want to want to spend more time with the game, but i also want it to not let me. Eject me forcibly from its world once the story has naturally concluded, with fond memories of the tightly edited purposeful experience.
Take a look at COCOON. The mechanics are brilliant and I really wish it was longer. Might be right up your alley!
Cocoon is fucking great for sure. I do wish it were longer though.
Thanks, I’ve been looking at it! It’s beautiful, definitely on my radar.
What’s the timeframe within that I am curious. I am not the type of person to spend 100 hours playing a game though I regularly see that online and on my friends list, for example I spent 19 hours playing Metro Exodus recently, 28 hours on God of War and 34 on horizon zero dawn. I feel like that is around the amount of time I want to spend on those games and would feel like 10 hours to complete the story and most objectives is too short.
Really depends on the game. But roughly something between 3-20 hours is my preferred range. I thought Sayonara Wild Hearts was fantastic and the perfect length for the story and experience it set out to convey (took me about 2 hours to beat).
There’s lots of great games that are short.
The problem is that those games aren’t great because they’re short.
The vast majority of them could be vastly improved by being longer.
Money and time are separate costs, consuming time is not, in and of itself, something of value.
