Why are video games so long nowadays?

[Tazor]

This has been grinding my gears for a while. Who even asked for this? Who wants 30 great hours of content and 70 hours of mindless busywork? Looking at you Witcher 3. *skellige flashbacks intensify* "You're not supposed to grab the lootboxes in the water". Then why are they there? I will gladly take a game with 10 hours of great content and nothing else instead.

Do people even enjoy such long games? Do they play them? Judging by the statistics not really. Most people just buy them, play them for a few hours and then never again. I don't blame them. There is sooo much copy pasted content in these games.

Take Wildlands for example. I finished it 3 times (once coop with a friend, once solo messing around and once solo 100% stealth). I know, the irony. Why did I play it 3 times even though it has so much trash non content? Because the main missions are 11/10 legendary status from a stealth gameplay perspective. And because the fashion you can do with your character. Wildlands would have been a MUCH better game if it had no open world. Just a level select menu to do the missions. Choose your entry point wherever you want nearby and go.

On the topic of quantity, why are almost all games nowadays focused only on singleplayer or multiplayer? Ey? Why is there almost no mod support? BAK IN MAI DEI video games generally had singleplayer, multiplayer and mod support. Age of Empires 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Unreal Tournament (still the best bots I ever saw 24 years later, ♥♥♥♥, that's a quarter of a century. We got talking robots but no basic AI for video game enemies.), Quake, Command & Conquer Generals, Half-Life, Rainbow Six 3.

Just looking at the completion times for the God of War reboot on howlongtobeat has me rolling my eyes. What the ♥♥♥♥? 20, 32 and 51 hours? So you made a 20 hour long video game and added 31 hours of trash filler? Why would you do that? The original GOW is 9, 10, 13 hours. An increase of not even 50% for completionists who want to search for secrets.

Anyway enough rambling from an old mad man. I don't understand this trend.

[Jerry]

I'm not sure, if any of this is actually new, or just a tendency that has always been there being amplified by better technology (a DVD sure can hold a few more hours than a 3,5 floppy).

How much geographical area did Elder Scrolls Daggerfall have?
By how much did the length of a game like Lufia 2 increase, if you went for the bonus dungeon?
Did anybody in their right mind ever try to play Arcanum - Of Steamworks and Magic without the quicktravel feature?
Which evil mind came up with the attractions in FF7s Gold Saucer?

I think, all of this could even be traced back until whatever game it was decades ago, that included the first sidequest.

Computer/console games are the only medium, that brags about its quantitative amounts on a regular basis, sure (well, maybe except for the distinction between longplay and shortplay records). On the other hand, players are kind of expecting it and demand at least a certain amount of hours to feel, that it was worth their money. In a certain way, it is also the counterpart to its twin in the arcade games, where the developer goal was to keep game sessions short.

As always, in the end quality is the bigger factor about it in many ways. A 3 hour game can leave you with a well-rounded, satisfying experience, while one of 50 hours may still feel incomplete in the end, or the other way around.

[Muppet among Puppets]

If you want a game to be short, you like it enough to be over with it.
I like to play games that i buy.

[Leonardo Da Pinchi]

I love content packed games if the gameplay and story are also pretty decent. Hell, you can spend HOURS grinding out/smithing/farming items to build houses in Skyrim for example, but the story is really short. Still a great game.

[FPS]

AAA games are made long to justify the price tag. There are players who want to get more hours per dollar spent.

You should take a closer look at indie games withj a smaller price tag. They can afford to be short and eventful, and AAA games often come as bloated-openworld-something

[Leonardo Da Pinchi]

Originally posted by FPS:

AAA games are made long to justify the price tag. There are players who want to get more hours per dollar spent.

You should take a closer look at indie games withj a smaller price tag. They can afford to be short and eventful, and AAA games often come as bloated-openworld-something

I like open world, and farming and crafting... :(

[Jerry]

There is of course also always the factor, which gameplay elements are currently trending and therefor expected by either the publisher, the gaming press, popular video makers or the gaming world as a whole.

If your boss says, that your egoshooter really needs to have a crafting system, there has to be a battle royale mode in your exoplanetary economic sim, or your snowboarding game won't be sold without an RPG skill and level system...
... or nine out of ten streamers tend towards games with jump scares, and that's why your farming sim really needs that...
... you let out a sigh and slap it on somehow.


(P.S.: If we extend this to the assumed need to have a bunch of eastereggs and hidden lore, because a game can't just be a game anymore for some, indie games are at least as guilty)

[RPG Gamer Man]

Try indie games..they tend to be shorter than the longer games you do not like.

[Tazor]

Originally posted by RPG Gamer Man:

Try indie games..they tend to be shorter than the longer games you do not like.

I have. And older games. I barely touch modern AAA titles anymore. Wouldn't play them even if they were free. Would play them if they paid me to play them.

Originally posted by Jerry:

There is of course also always the factor, which gameplay elements are currently trending and therefor expected by either the publisher, the gaming press, popular video makers or the gaming world as a whole.

If your boss says, that your egoshooter really needs to have a crafting system, there has to be a battle royale mode in your exoplanetary economic sim, or your snowboarding game won't be sold without an RPG skill and level system...
... or nine out of ten streamers tend towards games with jump scares, and that's why your farming sim really needs that...
... you let out a sigh and slap it on somehow.


(P.S.: If we extend this to the assumed need to have a bunch of eastereggs and hidden lore, because a game can't just be a game anymore for some, indie games are at least as guilty)

I hate this as well. You end up with games that look and play exactly the same.

Hey, why does this fantasy RPG play exactly the same as this modern era shooter? You run around a giant empty open world full of copy pasted content killing people. They give you XP and your character gets more health, damage plus other goodies. They drop random trash loot that you use to craft some mildly helpful things. You also use this trash loot to upgrade your gear. You got all these checkmarks of busywork you got to do, otherwise your character will stand no chance in the main story (looking at you AC Origins, what a trash game). PlAy YoUr WaY which basically translates to stealth or loud plus choosing your weapon when attacking an enemy camp. Why can't I just call in a nuclear bunker buster like in Mercenaries 2?

They both even look the same. I swear some of the assets look like they came from the same asset store. Why do these forests look exactly the same? This fantasy game isn't even set in our world. Give me a Darkwood (name of the game), Northern Journey (game), Elwynn Forest (World of Warcraft map) or Red Forest (STALKER map) kind of vibe. The same washed out rEaLiStIc color palette by people who were never outside. Don't forget that awful blue fog that starts after 20 meters.

Everyone is copying everyone. Even DOOM has RPG mechanics and upgrades using crafting materials now.

Originally posted by FPS:

AAA games are made long to justify the price tag. There are players who want to get more hours per dollar spent.

You should take a closer look at indie games withj a smaller price tag. They can afford to be short and eventful, and AAA games often come as bloated-openworld-something

Why don't they have singleplayer, multiplayer and mod support in the SAME GAME? Mod support is gone. Games focus only on singleplayer or multiplayer. BACK IN MY DAY, that's how you used to justify the price tag.

"Oh I just finished probably the best campaign ever made in under 10 hours in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. What a trash game." -literally nobody. I finished that campaign probably 100 times at this point. I can finish it in like 2 hours now. You then had an amazing multiplayer mode. Later on came the improved multiplayer Wolfenstein Enemy Territory (f2p with 0 microtransactions, can you believe that?). And finally you had mod support for both singleplayer and especially multiplayer through the map creator to finish this trio of value.

Copy paste for Half-Life minus the Wolf ET bit.

It's still sad to see what a barren wasteland the modding scene for Red Dead Redemption 2 is. Rockstar was so butthurt about GTA 5 they made modding for RDR 2 pretty much impossible. Less bang for my buck, yay.

EA still hasn't remastered all the old BF maps as they promised in BF 2042. Exactly as I expected. And of course you can't mod it in yourself. Exactly as I expected.

[temps]

Honestly, most people I've seen complaining on the forums about game length frequently seem concerned that a game is or may be too short.

Personally, I'd rather have 8 hours of 10/10 excitement than 500 hours of 7/10 excitement. Then again, I'm an adult with a lot of demands on my time. You have to remember a lot of people on Steam might be 12 year olds with seemingly endless amounts of time to spend playing games, and limited budgets because they buy their video games with small amounts of money they get from their parents for doing the dishes or something. Or perhaps retirees who find themselves with similarly endless amounts of free time.

Part of the problem is the whole push toward making every game "open world." When you have a "linear" game, you can typically progress through the story/campaign more quickly and the game content is more condensed. "Open world" games typically have the same amount of content as a linear game, but it's more spread out... leading you to spend a lot of time wandering around not doing much in the game world. But some people seem to want to practically live in the world of their games even if there isn't much happening while they wander around from point A to point B in the game world, so I guess that's why we have what we have.

Probably some people approach video games with a value-for-money mindset rather than a quality-seeking mindset, and they view 500 hours of 7/10 fun preferable to 8 hours of 10/10 fun when the price of the two games is equivalent.

[FPS]

Originally posted by Tazor:

"Oh I just finished probably the best campaign ever made in under 10 hours in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. What a trash game." -literally nobody. I finished that campaign probably 100 times at this point. I can finish it in like 2 hours now. You then had an amazing multiplayer mode.

Because everyone decided it is a bad idea in mid-2000. Making a good multiplayer game and a good singleplayer game requires very different approach, so most of the time you essentially need to make two separate games. I remember a period in mid-2000 when multiplayer mode was created by separate tem, like in Dead Space 2 or Bioshok 2 - and these games are still remembered as purely singleplayer. Battlefield 3 has a singleplayer mode but is remembered purely as multiplayer.

Originally posted by Tazor:

Copy paste for Half-Life minus the Wolf ET bit.

Multiplayer in Half-Life 1 was awful, the arsenal wasn't balanced for PvP and the maps design didn'r help either. It was still fresh, I had a lot of fun with it, but don't want to come back now. Btw, the multiplayer satill works, there are active servers

As for mods - back in the fay modding was the only way to make your own game for a small team or even for a single develoiper. Game engines were unaffordable, but now you can just downoad UE of the current version, or Unity, or some other engine and unleash your creativity upon the world. :ots of talented people from the modding scene just create their own otiginal games now.

Also, you may be just looking at the wrong games. Just check the list that use Steam Workshop, and many of them can be played in single and multiplayer:
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?category2=30

[Jerry]

About the issue of Open World or extended maps, that came up a few times; here as well it depends on how well you implement it, no matter if in two or three dimensions.
If you scatter important bits over a map and then fill out the gaps with copy and paste patterns or random biomes and encounters just because, the area feels wasted and could as well have been left out.
If your world feels like an organic place, where each place contributes to the atmosphere and has a purpose, not necessarily to the player, but maybe just for NPCs or monsters, it is an effort well worth it.

I'm not a speedrunner type, and if a gameworld feels well made, I can very much enjoy sitting on an ingame bench and watching the other characters do their thing for a while too, or just enjoy the view of the landscape. Or of course do a bit of hiking to see, if the path has some nice views to offer, with no concerns about driving the story forward.


(And you have to admit, the most fun part of games like Settlers or Knights and Merchants was watching cute characters do stuff.)

[Lithurge]

Originally posted by temps:

Honestly, most people I've seen complaining on the forums about game length frequently seem concerned that a game is or may be too short.

Probably some people approach video games with a value-for-money mindset rather than a quality-seeking mindset, and they view 500 hours of 7/10 fun preferable to 8 hours of 10/10 fun when the price of the two games is equivalent.

Yep, it seems to have died off somewhat, but there was a time every story led indie title would attract people complaining it wasn't value for money because it was only 5 hours long and how superior the current Assassin's Creed was with it's 100's of hours of play.

Of course if you boil those games down to just the main story you end up looking at about 5-8 hours of 'play' with the rest just the busy work necessary to skill your character up to complete the story thanks to increasing enemy difficulty or locked areas that require certain skills.

Whilst I can enjoy a bit of busy work every now and then, I usually find my interest starts to trail off around 40 hours, so it's rare I go too far beyond that doing anything other than racing to the stories end. Generally my preference is for shorter games with a good (or at lest interesting) story to tell.

[Tazor]

Originally posted by temps:

Honestly, most people I've seen complaining on the forums about game length frequently seem concerned that a game is or may be too short.

Personally, I'd rather have 8 hours of 10/10 excitement than 500 hours of 7/10 excitement. Then again, I'm an adult with a lot of demands on my time. You have to remember a lot of people on Steam might be 12 year olds with seemingly endless amounts of time to spend playing games, and limited budgets because they buy their video games with small amounts of money they get from their parents for doing the dishes or something. Or perhaps retirees who find themselves with similarly endless amounts of free time.

Part of the problem is the whole push toward making every game "open world." When you have a "linear" game, you can typically progress through the story/campaign more quickly and the game content is more condensed. "Open world" games typically have the same amount of content as a linear game, but it's more spread out... leading you to spend a lot of time wandering around not doing much in the game world. But some people seem to want to practically live in the world of their games even if there isn't much happening while they wander around from point A to point B in the game world, so I guess that's why we have what we have.

Probably some people approach video games with a value-for-money mindset rather than a quality-seeking mindset, and they view 500 hours of 7/10 fun preferable to 8 hours of 10/10 fun when the price of the two games is equivalent.

If you really are a kid with LOTS of free time and very LITTLE money, why are you paying for the latest video games? It makes absolutely no sense to me. Old games are dirt cheap. Video games haven't evolved much over the last 10 years. In many ways they have devolved. You're not missing much. You got the time to do some basic research on what you buy. The length of the game shouldn't even concern you with how cheap it is.

Same thing for retired people but they have more money. So even less reason to care about the number of hours.

You can then play the same game multiple times if you really like it. Pretty much the same thing as clearing another identical looking base on an open world map. I finished the games that I really like sooo many times. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, Titanfall 2, Distance, Tetris Effect Connected (yes, tetris has a singleplayer campaign mode), HUNTDOWN.

Again, on the topic of forced open worlds. Wildlands is open world. What is the point of the open world? What do you do in the open world?

I will tell you what I personally do with the open world when I start. First of all I find me a helicopter and go do as many of the trash missions that unlock you a permanent helicopter before the one I stole explodes. So I must interact with the open world as little as possible. I also have to drive (the driving sucks so hard) once my helo explodes.

I also need to find some random NPCs/ objects and talk/ interact to them to see where this trash content is. I then use CheatEngine to get millions of resources and skill points because the main missions only give you XP, 0 resources and barely any skill points. You need XP, skill points and resources to level up so you can do harder missions. No idea how to cheat for the NPC and unlockable helo. You can also PAY THEM REAL MONEY TO GET THIS STUFF IN A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SINGLEPLAYER VIDEO GAME. They know how much people want to NOT interact with the open world.

Finally I fly around that HUUUUUUUGE EMPTYYYYYY MAP to grab the guns and attachments that I like.

The rest of my time interacting with the open world is spent flying from mission to mission. So much busywork for the good content.

People are screaming "WE WANT OPEN WORLDS!" but at the same time they don't want to interact with them in any way because of how boring it is. And then companies sell them shortcuts that allow them to not interact with the open world.

We live in a society... Am I the crazy one?

[Viking2121]

Heck, I think games are too short, I like to get my $60 bucks worth out of it, a game lasting 10 hours with vary little end game is not a game I want to play.

[peppermint hollows]

Originally posted by Tazor:

If you really are a kid with LOTS of free time and very LITTLE money, why are you paying for the latest video games?

Well, the average child is not exactly known for being able to make the wisest financial decisions or truly understanding the value of money. And new, shiny things in general attract the mainstream audience way more than anything that's considered old or out of style.