Are games getting shorter?

I have been thinking about this for a while now. If any buddy can remember video games in the PS1/N64 era, or even PS2/XBOX era, or especially SNES/Sega era, do games seem shorter than they used to be? Most story mode games I have played on next gen consoles, seem to have somewhere between 9 to 12 levels, or even that. I remember older games sometimes going closer to 20 levels. Is it just me, or does it seem as though as graphics and technology has gotten better, games have gotten shorter?

 

Some have gotten shorter and some have gotten longer. It seems that a lot of new FPS games are more multiplayer focused so they have shorter single player campaigns, but RPGs seem to be getting longer.

 

Yes.

 

Perhaps but remember that games are now far more three-dimensional and you can do far more with your character.

Let's be honest, Shinobi's a great game but a super-hard ninja who can't swin? Kind of breaks the spell when you die on a jump for the nth time!

 

This probably also plays a part in games getting a bit shorter, too. Simple to make a linear, three-dimensional game, or a two-dimensional game with numerous variables, but a three-dimensional game with more routes and options than a tree has branches? That's a bit more complicated, and likely rather difficult (if not nigh-impossible) to pull off well outside a high-profile, high-budget game. The more they can let you do, the less time they're able to give you to do it.

 

I can beat Donkey Kong Country in an hour and a half. So no.

 

i just compared a few games.

my ps1 copy of wu tang: shaolin style and my ps3 copy of gta4 have exactly the same dimensions.

so i reckon they're still about the same.

 

I'm pretty sure really old games were all just as short or shorter than the evil modern cash-ins. Memory limitations and all that. I'm sure Final Fantasies have become a lot longer since the first. Wolfenstein was probably shorter than Wolfenstein, even without the backtracking.

A lot of the older games might not have been necessarily longer in total content, but we simply spent more time in them. When was Quicksave invented? When did Checkpoints become more plentiful throughout single levels? Did Mario Bros 3 have Midpoints? Cuz SMWorld had them. Though devs still can't get checkpoints right, especially in FPSs.

Speaking of... yeah. Half-Life was longer than Half-Life 2. But HL2 was better, so I don't mind. But I'm pretty sure it takes more time to finish HL2 than it did to finish Redneck Rampage.

Thing is, the newer one of those has more variation, which ultimately trumps pure length measured in hours. There is content and there is content.

People dislike Left 4 Dead because a campaign takes like 40 minutes and then it's the same thing over and over again. But playing Dark Carnival for a week probably has more WTF moments than playing Fallout 3 for a week. Shaky comparison, I know, but what other FPS takes a week to play?

Every studio probably could easily make every game last 30 hours, but would they be interesting 30 hours? Even harder, if they make a shorter one with plenty of options, it's difficult to make sure most players experience most of those options. Otherwise they spent time and money on something most people will never see.


Also, in before Portal. Cuz a lot of the time length don't matter if the game rules - or sucks, which is the bigger problem these days. Damn XBox. Don't ask me why I just said that, it probably made no sense...

 

Games...shorter???!? That's madness. The original Mario Bros. can be speed ran in less than 10 minutes. Most NES and SNES games (excluding some RPGs) could be beat in an afternoon. I don't know what games you guys are playing but the same cannot be said about this generation.

 

yeah, because of all the unskippable cutscenes with QTEs


where is that Doom/MFPS picture...

 

InFamous was long.

 

If you compare to NES-era, those games were long because they were impossible unless you memorized every move and had to do it over and over. Then quit in frustration and come back to it later

A current game doesn't take as much memory muscle, plus you can always look it up on gamefaqs. Plus, we are freaks and a four hour gaming session is not abnormal.

I think games are tens of times longer, we are just way better at them.

 

Personally, I can't ****ing stand it when I hear someone complaining that games today are too short. Especially when they then go on to pine for the "good ol' days".

By and large, games today are much, much longer (not to mention more complex) than what they used to be.

Here's just one example of MANY. Since that's an expert, hitless runthrough, maybe tack on another minute or minute and a half for a more average playthrough. And then double that because there's a second, harder (but otherwise identical) mode to go through after that. Even after doing that, that's still less than fifteen ***damn minutes of total gameplay. And to my knowledge, they still charged full price for that game. That game and many, many others that could be breezed through in less than a hour once you knew what you were doing. The fact that they may have been extremely difficult and/or lacked any kind of reasonable continue/save system didn't make the actual gameplay any longer. That's artificial length. There are, of course, plenty of exceptions, but a LOT of those older games were really quite paper-thin.

I actually have a theory on this. I tend to think that many of the people that complain that they're not getting their money's worth with many of today's games and say that they're too short are probably only doing so because they're the ones that are having to shell out the money for them now, rather than their parents.

If you really feel that, for example, Modern Warfare 2 was a total waste of your money because the single player campaign was only 4 hours long, maybe you ought to think about paying your parents back some of that money they wasted buying you who knows how many games that were really only an hour long when you cut out all of the artificial length. Or not. Whatever.

 

What is "short"? How do we define that in this day an age? To me, a game is "short" if its single player component can be beat without much difficult and through normal play (no speedruns or use/abuse of ingame exploitable glitches) within a single day. But would that be a good thing or a bad thing? That depends solely on your tastes and overall satisfaction with the game. If the game has no worthwhile multiplayer component (if you're into that), if you won't care about replaying it for the sake of trophies/achievements, a better score or replaying the story (if it has one), paying full price for such a "short" game may definitely leave a nasty taste in your mouth. But then again, one is hard pressed to call a short game like Portal a crappy short game when it oozes win from the moment it starts to its very end.

 

I hear that!

Portal is a very good game though. It's well executed, challenging while still being fun, and there are good achievements that increase replayability. To complete Portal you actually have to think about what to do, and it actually had an engaging story. I like that a lot. Compare that to shooter where all you do is run around shooting stuff with a thin plot, no character advancement, and simple missions. Make a game like that too long at it'll just get boring, but at the same time it won't feel like a long game because you can just switch your brain off.

Another factor that's important is the fun factor. I was playing Forza3 the other day and I was doing a Speedway event. This comprised of three Speedway races and it was the most mind numbingly boring thing I have ever known. It was just eight cars going round an oval at 100Mph+ for ten minutes. It might not sound long but for those ten minutes I just had my thumb stuck on the accelerator and I only had to steer a little going round the corners. Compare this to, say, the Nürburgring, which is 13 miles long and has seventy three corners. Each lap might take a lot longer but it's a lot more fun!

I think, ultimately, it comes down to an individual's value of what the game is worth. I'm probably agreeing with Darth_Invidious on this.

 

Saved games help. Starting from your last point instead of at the beginning makes a difference.

 

Depends on how you look at it.

I was about to say I don't do a lot of multiplayer games, but I realized that that's completely false. The two games that I've spent the most time with over the past five years are World of Warcraft and Starcraft II, both of which are multiplayer. Now, World of Warcraft has an absolutely enormous amount of content these days. Even if you never group up with a person and never enter a battleground, you still have thousands of quests to complete, all of which provide story if you care for more than just the XP and potential item the quest rewards. If Warcraft was a single player game, it'd still be absolutely enormous. Starcraft II on the other hand has a single player campaign that takes about ten hours to clear, but has some of the deepest and best multiplayer out there. Both of those games are worth their price of admission, even given the subscription fee on Warcraft.

On the other hand, I look at the single player games I've gotten in the last few years. Assassin's Creed I played through once, and it took me about ten hours. Dead Space took about the same. Dead Space 2 took about the same. But Mass Effect took about thirty hours to clear everything, about ten hours less time than Baldur's Gate II took a decade before. Mass Effect 2 was even faster, only about twenty hours to fully clear, though DLC has extended that to about twenty-five, twenty-six hours for a full play-through. Dragon Age takes me about forty hours to fully clear, but I find it's replay value isn't as high as Mass Effect.

I went digging in the basement to take a look at my games library from my Nintendo playing days: Mario, Mario 2, Mario 3, Kirby's Adventure, Tetris, Dr. Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Double Dragon 3, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II, and the only one of those games that I honestly think would take more than ten hours to fully clear from start to finish is Final Fantasy, and maybe the Legend of Zelda when you consider the second campaign.

 

I beat TFU II in one day.


I want my day back

 

i don't race through games like most people to beat it as fast as i can. i take my time. i think i was able to extend the force unleashed 1 to about a 18 hour game. fallout series is very long.

 

I don't race through games and I don't think that games in general are getting shorter. I think that FPS have gotten shorter for campaigns since a lot work is put into multiplayer which is what brings in the money most of the time and that sucks for me since I like doing single player more than multiplayer. I wish that FPS were longer, but they seem to top out at 6 hours except for Dead Space. Modern Warfare 2 is still one of my biggest disappointments since that campaign sucked and it almost seemed like a waste of money to me.

I think that action adventure games have gotten longer though since most of the time, they are at least 8 hours to about 12 hours. My favorite series is God of War with Uncharted second and those are both pretty long. Then again, they have to be since they are both based on the single player campaign and if they were short, that would be pretty ridiculous. I don't think that anything could be as bad as TFU II though with it being 4 hours and no multiplayer so that game is worth about $30, not $60 so I am happy that I rented it when it first came out. Then there are RPGs and other games where if you are a person who tries to get everything like in Batman:AA, AC 2, and AC:B, then it will take a really long time. I think that games have gotten longer in general even though they might seem shorter depending on what type of game you are playing and how fast you are going, but I just wish that FPS campaigns would be longer. Hopefully Homefront has a really good campaign since that that is the FPS that I am holding out for right now depending on the reviews.

 

i will say that pure action/simulation games are getting shorter, to focus on multiplayer featrures like the call of duty series

 

"Are games getting shorter?"

I would say yeah, but that is because I think a lot of it has to do with the popularity of the Multiplayer stuff they put onto them now. I don't play MP, so I try to look for any reviews that tell me the length of the single player game and quality.

I didn't get TFU2 for this reason (short length and no likely third game) so I am glad I saw that first.
The only game I would say that might be a long one is Duke Nukem Forever, and the head developer is bragging that it will be about 15 hours long, as it took him that long to play it through. I have it on pre-order, so hopefully my money will be well spent.

The only FPSs that I could say that really took me a while to complete would be the Halo games, but that is because I like to take my time.