The sign that something is good is when I want it to be longer. Who tf has time to get burned out in some 100 hour game they have to force themselves to finished. I think my hard cap for any game these days is 25 hours
The sign that something is good is when I want it to be longer. Who tf has time to get burned out in some 100 hour game they have to force themselves to finished. I think my hard cap for any game these days is 25 hours
I like a game that knows its place when it comes to length. If you’re gonna be story driven then either keep it snappy like a short story or do a rich RPG style lengthy story but know which is suitable for your game.
What I don’t like is games that are maximalist about story and try to content-stretch to make the game feel much grander than it really is. Two different examples of fairly recent games that hit the spot nicely are Easy Delivery Co., that tells the story mostly through ambience and gameplay mechanics and Dredge, that has more story but a lot ot the story sits in optional messages in bottles that you can read as logs in a journal to piece together the mystery while the “core” story exists in dialog that is mostly quite short - you want more story, go digging. You don’t, then don’t read.
If your game features a ton of lorebuilding, especially at the start through walls of text before I’ve even had the chance to get a feel for the controls and the gameplay then I’m probably skipping right over it. I’m not going to invest 30 minutes reading B-tier writing at the start of a game only to find out an hour in that it’s really not my cup of tea and I’m putting it in the Did Not Complete pile. I think the opening part of the original FF7 really nails it - so much is established through the start FMV, it throws you in and teaches you the combat system, and it starts breadcrumbing you with the story from there. I’m not opposed to story-rich games by any means but sometimes a game doesn’t need to explain much of itself, let alone anything at all. A loredump is not necessary just to play a round of poker, y’know?
Same goes for any sort of game mechanic. Stretching it out to squeeze an extra 10 or 20 hours out of repetitive gameplay isn’t respectful of the player’s time - let them do side quests if they want but performing the same complex jump in a platformer except this time in a jungle environment and next time in a haunted forest environment and later in a desert environment is insulting.
This is actually why i dislike the persona games so much outside of the first because the story is interspersed through hours upon hours of dull grind where i either follow a guide and play the game optimally for the reward of short dialogue snippets or miss it entirely by playing the game without a guide and gain nothing from that experience other than wasting about the same amount of time for less dialogue snippets.
At this rate a compilation of all cutscenes and dialogue is a better way of experiencing the game which is usually where i draw the line for game too long is if its more fun to watch it than play it.
I tried to play fallout 3 again and got so bored. Like theres cool content if you go find it but i dont want to find it because it doesnt pace it well or lead me there its hidden between vast wasteland of raiders, super mutants and copy paste buildings that i cant enter to travel to some random spot on the map to find out its just another raider base with 50 enemies i vats explode heads using the combat shotgun and loot. ITS BORING. THE WHOLE GAME IS BORING. Like one of the major sidequests is basically just a tutorial
Oh and to add i actually hate ff7 for the same reason. Disc 1 is sublime and disc 2 i cant even bring myself to finish. Basically the game after the sector collapse is just unplayable for me