The Game length discussion

It goes on and on and on and on

Of the several thousand trends that fly past the game development sphere over the course of the years, one of the biggest that has persisted across every genre and has touched just about every single size of development team, is that games themselves are getting longer. This has pretty much been the case ever since games accepted the 'save game' feature introduced by Zelda and thus could justify a game that had to be completed through several play sessions. Now there are games that last tens of hours, maybe even hundreds of hours, sometimes entire MMO's that demand your whole life are released, but is this the evolution that the gaming industry needs, or should we be trending the exact opposite way? (Or, wild card here, is the conversation just a tad more nuanced than blanket 'every game should be shorter'!) This is the conversation I see sparked by the game journalist media so very often that it's started to actually rub off on some sectors of the gaming public, and it's got me wondering exactly where my stance is on the issue, thus I've tried to consider all sides.

Okay, so first of all I will address the stereotype that gets bought up whenever we talk about Game journalists; that they're made up of a bunch of people who don't even like gaming, or the industry, milking coverage for cheap clicks. Now whilst for the large majority of the journalistic public that's entirely true, there are some actual real journalists who give a damn still out there. (I've counted at least two. One working for Forbes and another for Bloomberg. So there's that.) However, I think it's hardly a shock to say that a lot of the 'journalist' movement behind the 'make games shorter' conversation might just be a little bit selfishly fuelled rather than 'for the good of the game' or 'for the fans who actually buy this stuff'. But behind there that is something of a point to be made and I'm more interested in discussing that right now, however the other side must be discussed as well.

So game's reviewers are sort of tasked with playing a simply stupid amount of games every other week to completion in order to give some sort of a well rounded summation of the total experience of playing that game. There simply is not enough professional staff, nor time in the week, to do this to a flawless degree, so it's inevitable every once and while for some games to take priority over others depending on how much Internet traction the review is likely to get on the otherside. I mean heck, I do some extremely amateurish reviews on this blog and it takes me months to properly complete a game and then appropriately assess my thoughts on what I just experienced and how I would recommend it, so I can understand the struggle. However, these people would have a vested interest in all games automatically pledging to be less than 10 hours long because it would make this jobs easier, rather than because such a decree would end up making these games 'better' like a good many of them might claim. This, needless to say, is a bad reason to question the length of the AAA standard, but there up some good reasons too.

I've bought it up before but Assassin's Creed Ragnarok might just be the straw to break a lot of backs in this debate, for it being Ubisoft's (oh god, I bought them up again, didn't I?) ultimate embodiment of 'make the game longer than it needs to be'. That game ties it's progression to endless elongated questlines that border in quality from alright to godawful, and at times you feel like you're playing a badly written MMO without any of the social aspects which make those experiences worth it at the end of the day. The story of that game drags on way past the point where the gameplay is fresh to the player, blazes past how long it takes for that gameplay to mature, and lags long past the time for players to master it. By the end of the game, players have grown bored of playing it nearly thirty hours back and are probably begging for the credits. That's an example of why games being longer can be an issue for the player experience as a whole.

There's a phantom statistic, that tends to be bought up in situations like these, where companies claim that hardly any actually ever beats single player games anyway, which is proof of either games being too long or that single player games are dead; whatever narrative you're trying to push more that morning I guess. While I think that may certainly be a true statistic, it's hard to say without access to such data oneself, part of the thrill of making a game or really any piece of art comes in the way that people come and take what they want from the experience. Those that don't want a complete view of the story are free to just experience what they want and move on and that doesn't mean they've played the game 'wrong' by any stretch of the imagination. I get anxiety whenever I leave anything unfinished, so I'm a bit of a completionist, but I've never found myself campaigning for game developers to change the very structure of how they make games in order to fit my individual tastes just because one game is taking a bit longer to complete than another. (Protip: I just figure what point of completion I'd be happy to leave the game at and then do.)

As for the question of the 'general bloat of the games industry', I would counter that there a few genres out there who haven't been growing out of control and are in fact are very much the same size they've been for the past twenty years. I'm of course talking about traditional RPGs which have always sat shy of just 100 hours to complete with casual play, from Baldur's Gate to Final Fantasy, these sorts of games are designed to be marathons that keep you occupied over the span of months if not years, and that is completely to the tastes of those who like those games. A reviewer who doesn't even like RPGs might throw up their hands and say that it's completely unacceptable for a game to be more than 30 hours in today's world. "Don't these developers respect our free time?". When the truth is that is doesn't come down to that, these are games designed for those RPG fans that relish those prolonged campaigns that they come back to week after week and grind to the bone against. It might not fit adventure game enjoyers, but it's not really made for them now is it? There's a reason why the RPG genre has grown so significantly over the past decade and that's because fans like how it runs, long game length and all. I suppose it really comes down to games being as long as they need to in order to justify the value of money that people have spent.

And when we come to question why exactly it is that games of other genres are becoming longer at all, that really does come down to the general growth of the industry. As these AAA games are taking on bigger staff and always trying to outdo their past selves, it's only natural that the size of these products expand to cater the more people working on them. And yet when a lot of these games end up a mess, does that mean it's the length that is the problem here? Or perhaps could that be traced back to the loss of vision and focus that tends to happen when a team expands too quickly and the development studio are lax in affirming exactly what they want out of the company and games that they make? I like to think it's a bit of both, because it's no great revelation that a very vapid measure of a game's 'quality' when it comes to marketing is how long it would approximately take to beat. (Which always ends up being the time of an average player who x 2.5 for some reason.)

So it's fair to say that being long isn't the be-all-end-all of the gaming world and certainly shouldn't be used as a metric for a game's quality, one way or the other. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be mentioned at all when talking about games. Even outside of the reviewer sphere there are those who would like a game to wrap up in a timely fashion so that they can move onto the next one, I see you, and those sorts of people might be interested to know things like the fact that Tyranny is a CRPG with a less than 50 hour long campaign. (I mean sure; personally I wish it were longer because I adored that game and know I'll never get a sequel. But someone out there has to get excited over that.) That won't stop me rolling my eyes and sighing everytime I hear the catch-all rally cry of "All games need to be shorter so that I can review them quicker", for as with practically everything in life; nuance and context applies.