140- Game length, value, and quality

[matt]

Continuing my discussion about game length, I try to look at all arguments and figure out what the deal is.

[ranger_lennier]

I agree with a lot of what you said, and I definitely don't want to see games padded out just for the sake of being longer. At the same time, many people play games for 20 hours a week or more, so if game prices averaged $10 per hour of play time, people would be spending over $800 a month. I've actually been pretty shocked at how much movie prices have went up over my lifetime. It would certainly be possible to spend that much money on going to the theater and buying Blu-rays, but I doubt that many people do.

Of course for the most part, really short games are released at well under $60. And most games drop in price fairly quickly. So I don't think we'll need to spend $800 a month to have enough fresh game content anytime soon.

By the way, I haven't played it myself yet, but I hear that South Park: The Stick Of Truth is a good and short RPG.

[matt]

Games are replayable, so I think if you enjoy a short game, you can get more value out of it.

There are F2P games, multiplayer games, and GameFly, so I think there are cost conscious ways to game. I think people DO spend $10/hour on entertainment, so I don't think it's completely unreasonable that games ask that for a game.

Perhaps games like League of Legends or DOTA 2, which you can play for free forever make us look bad.

[gagaplex]

Yeah. I mean, the game doesn't have to be hundreds of hours long, but there should be some value in it. It's not just that a lot of games are short these days, it's that a lot of them are full price, more than 60 dollars, especially AAA titles, featuring, what, a 4-6 hours singleplayer campaign? That's pathetic. And, to respond to the 3 minute game idea: The problem is that these short titles are usually not filled with euphoria but with common shooter tropes and repetitive shooting.

You are right that multiplayer gamers may get a lot more fun out of such games, though, but I at least rarely want to do that, so something like Call of Duty has very little value to me.

Even though I have a lot less time these days, I still want to get some value for my buck and, funnily enough, indie titles - especially ones with some procedural generation, like Rogue Legacy, Don't Starve, Binding of Isaac... - are much, much better at this than many major titles.

But at the same time, extending the gameplay time through grinding is not acceptable, true. That's not really filling the game with content, it's filling it with... filler.

My favourite game is Sacrifice, by the way.

[matt]

Procedural gameplay is definitely a way to give your game a lot of replay value, but it doesn't lend itself to all types of games. Story driven games are always going to be tricky, and I'm of the opinion horror games are too, but maybe someone will come up with an epic procedural horror game and make me look bad.

Personally, I'm not really interested in procedural games for the most part. I'd rather play through a short finely tuned game by a developer, than some random encounters of varying difficulty.