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[Sean]

I'm all for shorter, better games with no padding.

I can't imagine it's fun for developers to create "filler" content. Gamers hate playing boring stuff, reviewers end up criticizing it as repetitive. Everybody loses really.

Movies these days are bloated as fuck too imo, so it's not just a problem in the gaming industry.

 

[clutch.as.it.gets.]

Hell no. Most games are already too short and i`m not willing anymore to pay big money for a 4-6 hour singleplayer game.

 

[CrazyArcadia]

I've played maybe 5 games this gen that didn't have huge long, tedious sections which would have been better off removed. It's a very rare game that isn't 25% longer than it should be, and many of them surpass and even destroy the 50% mark.

This entire industry needs to hire editors.

This. I'd rather have a good 5 hour ride that I enjoy so much that I play it again 2-3-4-5 times than a boring 20 hour game with tedious cutscenes, repetetive gameplay and boring environments. I'd rather play that good 5 hour game 4 times than a 20 hour game that is 3/4 boring filler... I never got the attitude that you only play a game once and that this one playthrough has to have a certain amount of time to justify a 50$ purchase. As I said, I'd prefer playing games again - and this is more likely without boring filler material.

Then again, I love arcade games and this is what I'm kinda missing out this gen (apart from, well, arcade ports from Cave, Capcom, SNK, Arc and many download games and indies). I loved Mirrors Edge and played it at least 30-40 hours since it was so fun I played it again and again and got better, tried to beat my times. Same for Lollipop Chainsaw recently. Both games got some bad critics for being only 5-7 hours long - for one playthrough. I certainly got at least 50-60 hours gametime out of Metal Slug 3 - a game that takes like 50-60 minutes to complete. Same for, dunno, Super Mario Bros 3 Rarely do I finish RPGs anymore since the stories are often absolutely horrible, it's the same grinding over and over again and at some point around 30-40 hours I usually quit them (with rare expections). I'd rather use that time to watch a good fantasy tv series tbh. if I'm playing a game ONLY for story...

So for me, a short but good game is worth more money. (also, at the point I am in life, a 20 hour game equals something around one month of gaming if I'm not on holiday or totally bored/sick. Too often, I just loose interest after long breaks of several weeks that come with longer games for me personally. A short game like Lollipop, I beat it a second time the next weekend ).

edit: that's not to say I'm against long games. If they are well made and offer different and new stuff even after 20 hours, ok. Maybe I'll not finish it but I'm not stopping out of boredom at least...

 

[SatelliteOfLove]

Padding with the aim of more awesome combat and exploration opportunities is always good. Funnily enough, expensive unique asset Yet Another High School Play-Level Cutscene I find as being filler. l2writeplotanddialogue, devs.

Exposition is so last gen. start at climax and then resolution.

Can you imagine suikoden 5 coming out this gen? reviews would basically boil down to "TLDR. Why is Japan so Japan. 2/10. "

This is standard for anything from there as is, but yeah.

One trick with this subject is that if you ping gaming press and a lot of 25-35 year old young urban technology geeks, I think you may find a slanted answer to "should games be shorter".

The press is full of people who can't even be bothered to finish a game before reviewing it.

Young geeks are harried, pressed for time, and sometimes the victims of their own busybusy lifestyle, so they want everything to be mobile, shorter, faster, more instant, and over with so they can rush on to the next task at hand.

This is not theoretical, I've sat and listened to plenty of people in these positions say "Oh, I wish every game was just 2 hours like a movie, who actually cares about playing a game for more than a few hours? It's a waste of time."

But games are not movies, or books. The interactive part, the actual playing-of-the-game is an experience that is its own purpose. It should be enjoyable for its own sake, even if the game has a story and a specific ending to the narrative.

Some games are padded to increase length, and that can be bad; but with the attitude of many modern game players, even what constitutes "padding" is up for debate. For some people, if you ever do anything remotely like something you did before, it's "padding" and their attention span is so short they get mad and quit the game right there.

Hence the rise of hyper-expensive Spectacackle and a disincentivizing of gameplay-derived fun.

This is what I got out of it.

These people really live inside their own little bubbles, don't they?

These people want everyone else to live inside their (the pundits) own little bubbles. That's the problem.

 

[David H Wong]

These hacks just routinely blow my mind

When can we start banning Kotaku posts? Now? Please? PLEASE.

I love Kotaku threads. It seems to be 25% people screaming THIS ARTICLE IS NOT WORTH TALKING ABOUT and 75% people talking about it just fine.

 

[SerRodrik]

Make a game as long as it has the amount of interesting/unique content to support - no longer, no shorter - and I'm a happy camper.

Yup. I've played 7-10 hour games that I thought dragged, and I've played 80-100 hour long games that I wanted to keep playing after they were done. There's no sense in restricting yourself unnecessarily to one or the other.

 

[Dali]

We had shorter games back in the day and those days were awesome. With that said a good game is a good game regardless of length. Between indie games, DD titles, budget releases, cell phone games, and handhelds, I think there's plenty of room for both to coexist. Similar to short stories versus novels not every story lends itself well to different methods of telling them interchangeably. That goes across all mediums from games and novels to movies. You don't see them trying to turn The Hobbit into a 3 movie epic like LotR do you? That'd just be silly.

 

[APZonerunner]

Sometimes games can really benefit from knowing when to stop.

Scalability is the thing - Mario 64 is a great example of this. It's a game that, first time through, you'll probably spend the best part of 15 hours on. Learned, you can do it in 3 or 4, and really skilled people are doing it in well under 2 for world record runs. This is a game that's actually quite short, content wise, but has a sense of exploration and discovery first time through that lengthens the experience.

Darksiders 2 is a great current example of the opposite, I think. That's a fantastic game, but it has two flaws - after 30 hours for me even though I was loving it, it was starting to outstay its welcome. It's also constructed in such a way where a second playthrough wouldn't realistically be much shorter than the first. It's good value for money on paper, but all it does is ensure I probably won't play that game again despite enjoying it massively.

Sleeping Dogs I blasted through in about 9 hours and felt had the perfect length, I loved it. Saints Row 3 and GTA3 similarly didn't drag, but the back few hours of GTA4 and GTA:SA felt like a fucking slog.

Generally speaking, games have gotten longer, not shorter - but there's something to be said really for saying what you need to say and then saying peace out. My desire to play them has plummeted, but there's really something to be said for the length of COD single player offerings, for instance. It does what it wants to do and gets out; it doesn't try to artificially stretch things.

 

[Jason's Ultimatum]

Max Payne 3 is a recent example I've played. I'm thinking the game is about to end, but then there's more. And then more. And then more. It got to the point where it just wasn't fun anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I love the game and think it's one of the best shooters this gen, but the final segments just dragged on.

 

[NathanMcMahon]

I've got to say, I find this post pretty insulting. Way to ruin a perfectly legitimate topic by taking a cheap shot at people who write about games.

I played Bayonetta. I loved Bayonetta. Yet I found the game to be too long for what it did and what it tried to accomplish, and that ha nothing to do with my schedule for reviewing games. I've had plenty of other similar examples.

It's basically boiled down as a "viable" critique to any perceived slight at overly sensitive gamers. Sorta sad.

 

[Fewr]

I think the writer of that article is a simpleton.

Short stories are great - really great - but the idea that a novel is "having to read through hundreds of pages to understand 'the point'" is evidence of some grade-Z brain matter. I mean, hell, it's a videogame site, but a fucking writer is saying that? Holy hell.

This.
The elephant in the room.

 

[RPGCrazied]

I'm the opposite. If I'm spending $60 on a new game, it better be more than 6 hours.

 

[soultron]

Honestly, don't care how long it is as long as the fun is there throughout.

Another thing is that just because you don't like something doesn't mean other people agree with you. It would be insensitive of me to wish away or rally against JRPGs existing just because I don't like them.

Must've been a slow day at Kotaku.

 

[Meatvillain]

I feel like I become less and less fond of this writer the more I read from them. Par for the course for Kotaku then, I suppose.

 

[M3d10n]

One of the main problems I have with games nowadays is that in a linear, story based game, there's no real stopping point where I feel like I can put down my controller and digest what just happened. For these games that are still paced like movies, every scenario just sort blends together and all it really leads to is that each act seems too long.

More games should do what Alan Wake did and not only divide the chapters into television style episodes but cut to a closing theme song that tells the player that they've reached a stopping point and a narrative climax for at least the next hour or so. Dividing the game into a series of 3 act structures definitely makes it more digestible than having it be one long three act structure.

I fully agree. This was one of the best things about Resident Evil Revelations: The episodes gave me clear points where I could take a break. Having a recap when loading a save also helped a lot, since I didn't have to worry about forgetting where I was (the Layton games do this as well).

Nobody makes 6 hour long movies. Anything that big is broken down in chapters/episodes. Games should do the same.