- Tartan 118
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- Fabled Mythic Member
Quick as a razor, sharp as a bullet.
It's a common complaint against games these days. Generally leveled at linear, story-driven shooters these days, maybe it was platformers in the '90s.
So tell me, ever-dissatisfied, ever-correct netizens of The Flood, what would be a good, nay, great length for these games? Most of them I can complete in an average day, setting all else aside, and maybe have an hour or two with my thoughts afterwards, certainly if I knew what I was doing the whole time, which isn't always the case with something like Portal.
But there's only so long a narrative or gameplay constant can last before it's developed, and the game shifts gears, and there are only so many of those, in narrative terms 'acts', that can reasonably fit into a single piece without making it feel bloated and like it's overstaying its welcome. Perhaps it's something to do with our helplessly inherent attention span.
Have you ever played a game that felt too long? To be honest, I thought Bayonetta was nearing its end when she visited Paradiso. Seemed quite ultimate to me. But no, the game pressed on back to Purgatorio, and it took me a quite exhausting three days to complete the first time. It's a fantastic game, but the length is just unnecessary and makes it feel padded and overlong.
So how about you all stop your -blam!-ing and appreciate what developers put into a game, rather than moaning when they fail to live up to the epic journeys you had playing Mario and Crash Bandicoot (Playstation generation, represent) as a child, perhaps because, you know, you were bad back then and things therefore took longer to complete? This isn't aimed at people who criticise the empty bombast of the likes of Call of Dutys 4-, this is for you folk who cried foul of BioShock's stunted final act, when another level or two would have been utterly redundant without a different story (which I actually started to write at one point, but man, encounter design is hard, and that's before testing).
[Edited on 12.15.2012 4:01 PM PST]