ok, just a qquick thought but just been reading a few reviews and....well...is it just me or are games getting shorter and shorter? I'm talking in particular about FPS games. Crysis is aparently 10 hrs, and CoD4 apparently even shorter (yet to try them myself, must confess) Bioshock i got thru pretty quickly too. i'm sure there are other games where this isnt the case, but all the games that people rave about....are just short!
This has sadly been the case since the generation of the Playstation 2 began. Games are getting shorter and shorter as time passes it seems... That's why I play RPG's. Hard to beat 200 hours of gameplay.
yeah exactly, rpg's are the way to go for extended gameplay. with the community patches out I am playing gothic 3 again and there is more than enough to keep me going.
many popular online games have very short offline parts to them. main reason i think was that the majority play the game online instead of offline therefore its not worth the time to spend on offline that not many people play. i remember thats how it was for the SOCOM (Socom 1, 2, 3, Combined Assault) games for ps2. they ahd a singleplayer offline which was pretty fun and completing it allowed you to unlock 1 or 2 guns for online. that was Socom2. i did play the offline a little bit but not very much. i only completed socom3 and socom combined assault though(combined assault also had 4 person online co-op). and it only took a few hours as i ran through it all. i do remmebr in socom 2 i often spent over 1.5 hours on a mission. but the rest of the hundreds of hours i played the game was online along with the up to 20000-40000 people that were online at a time usually from 6pm-4am. and this is the same way it is with COD4 and Halo3 i think too. offline sure is fun for a while but it just does not compare to online. with so many people not caring about offline at all why make the game really long. and seriusly though. there arent many FPS' that have long single players anyway. i cant think of any. fpg seem to be the only games with long single player.
I've got to admit I was fairly surprised when COD4 Started ending. I just thought "Oh. Poo." I can't be bothered to spend my money on crysis.
Stalker's a very long FPS. Crysis isn't that short either. Infact the only really short fps games i've played recently are COD4 and Bioshock. Both are console titles funnily enough......
I'm not sure I mind too much about the length of games. I prefer a good solid story over anything, and even if a game has a weaker storyline when its only spread over 8 - 10 hours of gameplay rather than 20 then it doesn't seem so watered down. I still haven't played STALKER. It was daunting and there were some basic things that really annoyed me. I still plan on getting into it though. I did the same with mafia when that came out. I was on a craptastic PC and couldn't get over how slow the cars were so gave up. 2 years later I had another crack and found it very awesome. Can't wait for Mafia 2 to begin surfacing.
i remember golden axe, i was playing that on a then new 10mhz xt I tricked it up with a maths co so it ran at 11mhz, and you could actually just notice that 1mhz difference in speed it was 10% + afterall I made a nice color dos starup menu aswell, i think xtree gold was the default starup If i used the old guy with the axe, his magic lightning took like 2 or 3 minutes to finish, no crap, and if i used the chick with her magic dragon, damn, that was close to 5 minutes i think The guy's explosions were quick, something like 30 seconds. I think that game took at least a couple of hours to finish... 320x240 is bad but 4 colors really makes porn suck you'd think i'd appreciate the speed of a modern pc but they still aren't quick enough.
The length of modern games doesn't fuss me too much as long as it is solid. I'd say at least longer than 6 hours with a decent multiplayer or 12 hours without a multiplayer. Sometimes I get bored of a game longer than that. E.g. Doom 3 was about 15 hours and it was just a chore towards the end, I just wanted to finish it. Far Cry was a good 15 hour game though with a good learning curve that meant the last few missions were really quite tricky. Even something like Medal of Honour Airborne is okay with the 5 hours it took to complete as there's some replayability there with things to unlock and the achievements.
Very true. In fact with Prince of Persia, if you took longer than an hour, it was game over, lol. FPS games have never been that long, Doom was about 10 hours, Doom 2 slightly longer. Quake was hardly the world's longest game, nor was Quake 2, DN3D, Unreal etc. etc. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 were both surprisingly long if you recall, I hardly think we're massively losing play time there days. Of the other genres, such as RPGs, length has given way to content in many occasions. Whilst Oblivion isn't as long as say Ultima 3, it's got more virtual content per minute by a long shot, which personally I think is a good thing. So, here's the question, what would you say were, of each of the major genres, the longest game? Obviously it has to have an actual ending (so Sim City doesn't count). For me, fps: Realms of the Haunting (Joe brought back memories). That went on for ever and ever and ever rpg: Baulders Gate II rts: Possibly something like C&C Red Alert, those last missions took hours to complete.
I remember games being much shorter. Only a few games to me have warranted being such long play throughs. Final Fight, Double Dragons, ect. those were never very long games. Not even Resident Evil (franchise) are long games; so I don't expect as much out of recent games length wise when the older titles had no problem delivering on much shorter play throughs (Heavenly Sword, DMC4, God of War). I have to agree with Bindi, everyone's a bit spoiled with lengthy RPG's like Final Fantasy. Sometimes a game that takes too long to finish will never be finished (atleast in my case depending on the genre).
They do seem shorter as games seem easier, i used to play on easy for the storylines, but i tend to start on normal-hard to make them last longer. I also like games with some replay value, like hitman as you can do the same level in many ways.
I've just completed HL2 Episode 1 today. 3.6 hours it took me... Now HL2 is one of my all time favorites and is a good 11.4 hours of entertainment, and I wouldn't call that a 'short' game, but in reality, it kind of is. Ep 1 on the other hand is quite reasonable to be 1/3rd of the length, but it just felt too short. In fact, I was disappointed. Which is weird, because all through the game I was thinking to myself "Wow, this is an great game" but while Spoiler moving the guys through the train station I started to feel a little bored - it was kinda tedious; Spoiler fetch the guys, kill some rappelling guys, some dudes jump through the window, go outside to find a few more dudes have shown up, with some hoppers and manhacks... repeat . Then while Spoiler fighting the strider I was thinking "hmmm this is a tough battle!", then the game ends with the reactor kersploding and I just thought "man, the credits better not roll! i better wake up!" But no, that was it. And I couldn't help but feel a little cheated. It was a great game, but it ended way too soon. I hope Episode 2 is longer. Phew.
I do find nowadays that game are shorter. Probably because alot of th replay value is put into the multiplayer. (most games nowadays have some sort of multiplayer experience) Though, its probably that as you've aged, you've also increased in skill when playing games. Which obviously makes them shorter because you can just breeze through the game. I remember a long time ago, when I was a little'n. Playing Alundra on the Playstation One. (alundra is like totally ownage action rpg Cheesecake). It took me looooooong, about a year if I remember correctly. Damn those bloody puzzles in games!! But, I bought the game again recently, from my dearest ebay and I managed to complete it in a matter of days/weeks. So yeah, thats what I think. =P
