The perfect length

[Dan]

I'm slightly saddened to see so much talk of this game being "too short". I utterly fail to see what that has to do with a game such as this.

I just wanted to offer my counter to this - I think the journey as it is feels perfect. No filler for the sake of filler, edited to offer a tight and essential sense of flow, pacing, emotional highs and lows. Like the winding of a river towards the sea.

To me, it was exactly as long as it needed to be, ended in exactly the place it meant to, and is a perfect slice of gaming heaven that I shall remember for years beyond the three hours it took me to play it.

I can only hope to someday aspire to create something of such beauty.

Thank you! I look forward to seeing what you create next.

[Bomoo]

I wouldn't say it's too short, but I would've liked for there to have been more. In a sequel, maybe.

[palex00]

Preach it boy! I feel so sorry for the devs that they have to read so many "too short, why isnt this free?!?!?" stuff. Though those are prolly also the people who only play Triple-AAA-Titles which have fillers over fillers.

I think the game is perfect as it is.

[Zedd]

Those complaining of such things shop at poundland, don't have all teeth, or are 12 years old.
Either way they generally miss the point of games like this.

[Bomoo]

Originally posted by Zedd:

Those complaining of such things shop at poundland, don't have all teeth, or are 12 years old.
Either way they generally miss the point of games like this.

Bit self defeating to beat that particular strawman so hard.

[Dan]

I really don't think it's down to people being from any walk of life, I think it's down to decades of relentless reinforcement by games marketers who boil games down into lists of features... even the most narrative-driven of RPGs is boiled down to "8 different companions, 57 different monster types, an adventure spanning 200 unique levels..." etc, etc. It's pure nonsense, but the king of them all is invariably "a main story spanning 60+ hours!"

This is almost never mirrored in other media - you're rarely taught to consider a 3-hour movie as inherently worth a more expensive cinema ticket than a movie half that length.
An 800-page epic tome of a book will often cost the same as a 200-page novel on the same shelf, and nobody tries to pass off the huge slab of words as being of inherently greater worth. Some bands will release a studio album that's 35 minutes long, some will release one that's pushing 2 hours - largely people aren't even aware of the length before they buy it, and rarely does anyone complain... and if they do, it'd be just as likely a complaint that a 2-hour album drags on too long, and could've been better if cut down.

It's just games. Where games are first-and-foremost considered to be products manufactured to pass the time in an entertaining fashion, and very much secondarily considered to be genuine works of art, with their own inherent cultural worth. That notion should be seen as ordinary, instead it's widely regarded as "pretentious".

It's sad, because there are *so* many examples of how games can leave any other medium in the dust in terms of being a deeply emotional, highly personal, affecting experience. We really need to learn to leave behind this whole staggeringly silly propensity for boiling everything down into consumable numbers.

[Bomoo]

It's a qualitatively different approach to games, or pretty much any culture in general. Rather than engage with them as emotional experiences, or appreciating the gameplay or art or design or what have you, those that moan about raw length of the experience are incapable or unwilling to engage with it in any other way than as a means of killing time with.

It's exactly like saying an 800-page novel is four times better than a 200-page one because you could kill more time with it. All of its other merits are presumably irrelevant. Or an 8 hour film is four times as good as a 2 hour film because it lets you kill more time watching it.

Of course, that is completely asinine and totally misses the point.

[Dan]

On an entirely unrelated note... I thought it was an excellent call to make The Hobbit into three movies instead of one. When I read it as a kid, I clearly recall thinking the book was disappointingly short and lacking in action.

[Bomoo]

They probably could've made LOTR into like twelve movies if they put everything that was in the books in there.