I’m old enough to remember a time where I would frequently complain that a game was too short (60 bucks for a 4 hour campaign? Come on guys). Because of this, I found myself veering towards longer titles so as to justify the money I was spending. But now we seem to have the opposite problem, a game being long is now a complaint. So why is this? I think it’s actually two separate issues that have been rolled into one encompassing criticism.
The first is that we’ve come to equate a game’s size as an indicator of quality. Open world games are very popular among AAA studios because you can cram a ton of content into them and use them to break up an overarching narrative. Game companies began using a game’s massiveness as a selling point which now meant that games had to have as much stuff in them (regardless if it was open world or not) as possible. This has resulted in a number of titles having content that is simply unnecessary and I think this is the point where one would claim that the game is “too long”. Realistically, you don’t need to find every collectable, do every side quest, or explore every location, but we’re compulsive (and I’d argue that we want our money’s worth from a game) and end up engaging in so much extra and unnecessary content that it becomes detrimental to our experience.
The second issue is that games have begun encroaching in our ability to play other games. This industry moves fast and we all want to play the big, new releases as soon as we can (due in part to our fear of spoilers). But at the same time, we humans don’t like to leave things unfinished so we tend to avoid playing too many games at the same time. The result is that I’m forcing my way through a game at 2:00 in the morning because “Ghost of Tsushima” and a new Paper Mario come out next month and I need to make sure I finish everything in my backlog so I’ll be able to play through them before September because there’s that Avengers game which I have to complete before my time is upended by the content bomb that will be Cyberpunk followed by a new Assassin’s Cre…
Excuse me.
This kind of stress does not lend itself to a fun experience and makes me enjoy a great game less because I feel like I have to complete it within a time frame. It becomes work and that is the last thing I want video games to become. When you’re forcing yourself through a game, you get burned out. Then when someone asks what I thought about that new, high budget, open world game that took a team of 300 people 4 years to create I can only respond with, “It was long”.
So what’s the solution? This is a problem that can only really be solved by the game makers themselves. We’ve got to get better at realizing when the content being implemented is unnecessary fluff that can detract from somebody’s overall enjoyment of the game. AAA companies seem to be engaged in a content arms race to make the biggest production they possibly can. We have to realize that a big scale might not be beneficial to the experience that the game wants to impose.
Also if you guys could reschedule all of your releases around when I’m free, that would be great.
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