Lengthy Games 'On the Way Out,' Claims Spector

If you're going to make a game short, then lower the price a bit, too. We shouldn't have to pay $50-60 for a game that only lasts 6 hours.

COD4 was short.

Clearly it didn't need to be 4 times as long to be good or sell well.

do you think rockstar cares how many people finish the game? didn't it sell 10 million copies?

I'm ok with long games so long as they need to be long and it doesn't take something away from it. What I don't like is when it feels like the developer is padding the game length with crap to bring the time up longer. There are times in some games where you literally can almost see the developer throwing uninteresting shit in (along the lines of "throw 2 more enemies at 'em, make 'em run down this hallway here...uhm...oh yeah lets put a room here with some enemies...and lets just do the same sorta thing to eat up 15 minutes of their life"). I don't even mind if there's something about the core gameplay that gives me joy for that time...I mean FEAR could get repetitive but the combat was generally very good (mostly due to the AI) so it didn't bother me too much (though in some ways its kind of an offender on this front at times in the game...but its like eating a lot of something you like thats fairly ordinary but good for what it is...like say a good pizza...you (or well *I*) could eat that almost every day...and yeah it'd get boring...but you eat it every so often and you can come back to that and its ok...but I digress).

I guess what I'm saying is that devs need to either mix things up (I don't even mean visually so much as just keep creative with what you have players doing...though visual variety is a good thing) or you need to have gameplay that diverges with multiple play-throughs. Super Mario Galaxy was excellent in this regard (with regard to the first idea that is)...I mean if that game was 100 times bigger but kept up the pace of mixing it up like it did I wouldn't have felt bored by the end. FEAR was repetitive as hell (visually and otherwise), but the AI meant that I could reload a point in the level and toy with the enemy...and if I can do that...then fighting those same enemies over and over again is ok because I'm not always going to be fighting the same fight on different levels (one thing I loved about Crysis was the adaptability of the AI...I had some really interesting fights in that game...and I'd often (after fighting through an area) reload an earlier save point to see how I could do things differently...I do that a lot with games and Crysis was one that rewarded that the most until the end stuff).

ADHD GENERATION CANNOT CONCENTRATE ON WHAT THEY'RE...

PUPPIES!!!!!!

Ahh yes. . . the daily fix of news that caters to changing the minds of gamers for the benefit of developers. That being said if the game isn't great don't bother making it 40 hrs long. It's true.. no one will finish it. It's not that it's too long usually, it's that the gameplay doesn't hold up and/or the story isn't engaging.

Isn't he making a game for Disney or such? Wtf happened?

all i gotta say is max payne, they said over eand over "quality over quanity" and i would rather have a max payne type game then a game that gets old before even beating it.

Look at Diablo 2
Max payne
Resident Evil
Halo

All those gams are some what short and people played them for years and years after beating it. esp . Diablo 2. if the game is good it doesn't matter how short it is.

Good, I rarely finish games if they're over 15 hours. Give me higher production values and zero repetition instead of length.

"I'm so tired of making games about guys in black leather carrying guns," he admitted. "I don't want to make those any more."

There you have your explanation for Deus Ex 2. He saw it as a game about a guy in black leather carrying guns. Don't look any further.

BULL SHIT. World of Warcraft is how long, and how many people have hit L60 / L70? if it's a good game, people will continue to play. Blaming the Everyman for your lack of a good game is disappointing coming from a vet like Spector, though.

I'm fine with games shorter than 100 hours, but at the same time if I fork out $60 for a game in the morning I better not be done with it by supper time.

Aww... But I <3 long games! it makes me feel like I'm getting my moneys worth, a sentiment that is becoming more rare in our uber capitalist society!

after the anticipation and wait for GTA4 i just had to finish it, and i did pretty quickly (40 hours actually, but that includes alot of fooling around and not doing the story)..

Wow, what a genius. As games get more expensive, they'll get shorter to compensate? What a visionary.

I hope the industry doesn't start trying to emulate Value and Portal. Er, well let me rephrase that: I hope the industry doesn't start trying to make EVERY game a four-hour afternooner.

No disrespect but this guy became pretty much irrelevant after deus ex 1.

i felt this way for a while now, but the way they should go about fixing this should be like DVD movies.
You can pick which ever chapter from the get go.
obviously rpgs like Oblivion wouldn't really work well that way, but action and adventure games can be done like this

fine by me i suppose, probably why i don't bother buying any new game anymore, just used stuff for pennies on the dollar. i grew up with games providing good long stories and lots of fun, now they want to make games be the equivalent length of movies, so that's all i'm willing to pay for them, about the price of a movie.

Valve has been saying this for a long time. Why spend hours and hours and millions of dollars on content most users will never see?

I can get behind this. RPGs and sandbox stratagy games will always be long by their nature but standard action adventure games, which make up the vast majority of games, at about the 10 hour mark they have worn out their welcome.

I will be more than a little bit steamed if some of my favorite genres start getting a lot shorter.

4x games should be very long. My GalCiv2 campaigns probably take well over 100 hours to complete. I wouldn't have it any other way.

The best RPGs tend to be very long as well. Baldur's Gate 2 was a monster in terms of gameplay hours compared to more recent RPGs, and it never got tedious or drawn out.

That is not to say that games should have their play time padded out just for the sake of it. If you don't have any more worthwhile content to add to the game, then stop adding content. I played through Mass Effect (PC) recently, for example. I wonder whose bright idea the uncharted planets were? Did they serve any purpose other than adding play time, or giving Xbox players tedious shit to do for Achievements? They sure as hell weren't there to give the player something fun to do. Oblivion is another good case. Why throw dozens of dungeons into the game if you're only going to make a few of them interesting?

wtf spector.
i finished gta4 and i dont finish that many games. its the longest game ive ever finished.

So instead of making content players will never see due to absurd difficulty/annoyance in getting to it, we're just going to remove it all together! Which will basically kill any atmosphere a game has.

Anyone remember the Haunted Library in Thief 2? Finding out what happened gave you no rewards or bonus, but damn did that little addition make the game feel more real.

Finding a bunch of pigeons in GTA4?...not so much fun. If at any point in time the "extra content" in your game requires the player to have a guide or spend 1000 hours going over you game with a fine-toothed comb, you've over-designed your game.

His last prediction came true. It was something like: "In order to better serve the customers across multiple gaming platforms, developers will ruin a strong franchise by poorly cobbling together a half-broken sequel with a nearly unusable UI , clunky character animations, and piss-poor story while senselessly eviscerating all of the fun parts."

This is why I play Neopets.

All other games SUCK.

I hope this isnt true.
I've not finished GTA4 but i am still playing it, not everyone plays games 12 hours a day.

You know, maybe long games being hard to finish is more reflective of the poor writing (that doesn't draw you in and push you to continue for reasons other than gameplay) than the length alone. Elements like the way the levels or even the game itself are designed, "cool new stuff" in the case of RPGs (which tend to be longest) that is actually different rather than the same thing with bigger numbers, and particularly the story can all contribute to a game constantly feeling fresh and interesting despite being very long.

New game mechanics could also extend the player retention of long games, but that is liable to be confusing and isn't really ideal. Nobody likes a game that introduces a new mechanic 50 hours in, unless it's done very well.

Spector's general statement is correct, that games probably will be shorter, but I don't think it's as inevitable as he makes it out to be. Just because long games tend to be hard to finish or dull as they proceed, doesn't mean that it is necessarily so. Perhaps developers need to be examining the way they design games, as well as their target audiences.

I hope long games will still exist, not for the sake of long games, but because there is a lot of potential for long games to be just as good as short ones, if properly executed. It's definitely harder, though.

hey, I finished GTA IV and actually want to play it through once more. And I finished Deus Ex countless of times. I love long-ass games, am I minority? Short games piss me off ...

Spector doing no more "Deus Ex" style games. That's almost as "good" as Richard Garriot not making single player fantasy rpgs anymore, or Peter Molyneux thinking about games he can't actually complete as intended since he is already thinking about things he could possibly do two steps further -.-

Developers don't need to make long games. They need to make games that are replayable. If it's a six or seven hour experience but it can be played four times, each time differently, then that's a fucking awesome game with, probably, a much smaller budget than your 30 hour game.

No big surprise there. A lot of developers have expressed the same sentiments even in the chattys.

Heh. I never did finish GTA4. I finished MGS4 in 2 days, though. I rarely finish long games, mostly because at some point they stop feeling fun and start feeling tedious. Sometimes I can come back later and force my way through the boring parts and get back to the good stuff, but that's happening less these days since I'm so busy :(