Gamasutra asked an interesting question last week in their weekly “Question of the Week” segment. The question?
“How important is the length of a video game for you, as someone involved in the industry? Is there a particular ‘hours per $ purchase price’ that makes sense, or are there other sensible measures of re-playability beyond simple linear mission modes? How should the game industry address this problem in the future?”
The article got me thinking beyond just game length. To be sure, with the Wii, great games might very well be shorter, open ended fare like Wii Sports or Wario, at least at first. Couple that with the fact that most adults really don’t have the time to engage in a 50-hour Final Fantasy epic, and you have a strong case that today’s great epic may be tomorrow’s collection of Wii Play games. As Wii Sports, Excite Truck, Madden ’07 and the DS have proven, graphics might also be for the first time in a long time much less important to gaming.
This isn’t to say great franchises like Final Fantasy will just “go away,” but I do think that in a few years time, with the as-of-yet unknown success of the Wii factored in, these kinds of titles just won’t be as important (but, by all means, give me a few great RPGs on the Wii, please). That said, a game of incredible quality is still going to fail my smell test if it’s only a few hours long. Excite Truck, for all its candy-coated, turn off your brain fun, runs shorter than I would have liked, for example.
But what do you think? What are some of the attributes you consider necessary for that hypothetical “perfect game?” Has the answer to this question changed for you at all over the years? Do you see it changing in the future? Maybe you’ve already played that perfect game — if so, what the heck was it?
[Image courtesy Penny Arcade and ThinkGeek]
Since you brought it up, game length is a VERY important factor for me. I think that the whole dollar-per-minute attitude is misguided, since it usually results in games that are too long for their own worth.Example: I'm looking forward to playing FFVI Advance. It has a core quest of about 25 to 30 hours, and enough easter eggs and dungeon crawling left to satisfy those who want to go beyond. It's a perfect game lenght, it delivers what it should in spades without getting old and tired.Another good example is ICO. It's not that long, but a worthwhile experience from A to Z. I hate those mandatory 20 hour games that start to cave in at 8 hours or so and then make you plow through until either the story or gameplay becomes interesting again after hour 15. If the Wii has the effect of slicing away the cumbersome parts of contemporary games (resulting in faster releases and lower prices), then God bless the Wii! Nowadays you wait for months (or years) for that hyped game that entertains you for what, a few weeks? No sir, back to the days when games were like short, controlled bursts, had high replay value and came with dozens throughout the year! All of you who disagree, riddle me this: try to add up all the gaming hours that felt like a chore rather than gaming, and had absolutely no worth (such as honing skills or breaking high scores) other than stretching playing time, and see how much time you lost. Scary…
So have you already unlocked the mirror mode in excite truck? Crap. I got this title at launch and just finally beat diamond last night. Admittedly, I've also been playing CoD3 and Redsteel, but still, excite seems to have enough content in it for me. I was happy when I opened up the new batch of trucks halfway through.Anyway, more specific to this post, I really hope there is a good mix of game types/lengths out there. I like that some games take 30 hours and some could be beaten in a weekend. Back in the day, friends would spend the night on the weekend in grade school and we would rent a NES game with the goal of beating it over the weekend. We usually would do it too. I don't think there is a "correct" game length. It really depends on how the developers put everything together.
Made by ?? ?
To me a near perfect game is Resident Evil 4. It was the perfect length, was challenging, but not too challenging, a cracking story (with great graphics and cut scenes), intuitive controls, perfectly postitioned save points, amazing boss fights, and the mercenary modes and the bonus levels meant longevity. I've played through it a couple of times, and I know people to have done it 5 or 6. For a game to do this must mean it's good. If it had a multiplayer mode, it would probably have been the perfect game for me.
For me, a perfect length would be the length of an Advance Wars game… I'm not sure how many hours it took for me to finish it, but it was literally months of on-and-off play. But what really adds value for me is what you can do after you are done with the main single-player mode. Multiplayer options, collectibles, create-your-own maps, harder modes,… adding one or all of these is essential to add value to the length of a game for me.
It's not the size of that counts, honest!No matter the genre, the quality of the time you spend with that game is what's most important. A game shouldn't be artificially lengthened by monotonous dungeons or whatever. A game should also not be so short that it feels incomplete. In other words, length is important but longer doesn't necessarily mean better.My favorite PS2 RPG is Shadow Hearts and that was about 40 hours long.I also loved Snake Eater which was about 15 hours long.Both lengths are perfect because each game was a joy to play the entire way through.
For me it comes down to replay value (second only to gameplay). Every game I own I've gotten because it's the kind of game you play over and over or you just don't get tired of going back in there and fooling around even if you already beat the game. I buy very few games a year so this is very important to me. Whether the game is really long or short it doesn't matter, as long as it's fun and gives me a reason to come back to it later.Now that I have less time to play, I find that games around the 15 to 20 hour mark hit the sweet spot, I've no longer the patience/endurance/time to play through games like DragonQuest 7 which reportedly had over 100 hours of gameplay… thanks but no thanks.
I play the classic Mario games to this day (I grew up on the NES) and though I can beat them in minutes if I want to, I find them endlessly entertaining. Style, tunes, gameplay and something wildly original; it all comes together with Mario.That said, I thought Trace Memory was brilliant and felt that it was the appropriate length for telling it's story and feel that it's 6-hour plus game time shouldn't be thought of as a detraction. It was manageable and appealing enough that, despite the fact that I know what happens, I still feel compelled to pick it up for another play. By contrast, the Phoenix Wright games are really lengthy, but they're divided into smaller chapters that offer satisfying gameplay in a more accessible manner, something that I genuinely appreciate.I'm also not against great epics, but I'm happy knowing that I can have the yearly Zelda title while I have a bunch of smaller games that I can mess around with. My point in fact? I've become obsessed with my 'Bit Generations' games for GBA that I've imported; Orbital alone is now one of my favorite games of all time.