Ah, Saturday morning, and I don't have work this weekend. It is one of those magical moments when I realize that I can basically spend the day doing whatever I want. Fantastic!
Getting out of bed can wait a little while, so I reach for the Wii remote and turn on the television. Time for some gaming - I haven't done any for a week or two. Because I'm not getting out of bed for at least another thirty minutes, and also because it's a darn nice game, I leave Okami in the disk drive and load it up. I'm getting close to finishing this bad boy, I'm sure of it.
Hitting the button to bring up my save games I check to see how many hours I've spent wandering through Nippon as Amaterasu. The game proudly displays the total play time as 41 hours.
Hang on a minute. 41 hours. Forty one hours?
That's nearly two freakin' days! 41 hours of my life have been spent fighting weird things with weird items, and doing weird side quests in a single game. A single Wii game has nearly consumed two whole days of my life.
Which brings me to Zelda: Twilight Princess. 59 hours. Fifty nine freaking hours. I made "Shoot, I Got Abducted!" in less time than that. Quite a bit less time, actually.
I love both of these games, and I love a bunch of other long games as well, but sometimes I don't want to spent 59 hours getting to the end of a game. Sometimes (often) I don't feel the gameplay and/or story I'm given justify the playtime required to see the ending of both, and leave the game 3/4 finished. And final scenes and battles are a big part of playing a game, right? Who watches a movie or reads the book and then walks out three quarters through, missing the ending? Not I.
Sometimes I just want to sit down and spend some time playing a game and finish it that weekend.
All three of the AGS games I've worked on have been met with the comments "Too short", but I really wonder if this is a negative comment. Keeping players interested in our story and gameplay for even one hour, let alone 10 or 59 seems like a challenge even after some experience. I wonder if "Too short" is not actually, in a strange little way, the comment I should be hoping to hear. Anybody saying that my game is "Too short" means they weren't bored by the time they got to the end, surely, and that they wanted more.
I feel that 15-30 minutes was definitely plenty of play time considering my experience at creating a story and puzzles (yes, I had help doing this in the games, it was not my efforts alone, especially in Trance-Pacific) considering my and my teammates level of experience in these areas at the time. "Too short" is something that you'll probably see less in comments as we're working on some more lengthy stuff these days, but I secretly hope to see it at least once. For me, "Too short" almost means "You tied it up nicely before I got bored".
Incidentally, a perfect length of playtime (providing story and puzzles are up to par) for an adventure game for me is around that of Dave Gilbert's commercial titles, Super Jazz man and the Sam & Max episodes. Something I can clock in a single weekend and say to my friends the next week "Oh, I finished a great game on the weekend, you should check it out".
4 comments:
In my experience, "too short" is the kind of criticism people use when they can't think of anything else to criticise. Hence, I'd say you're on the right track.
I agree, sometimes I get the impression that games *are* too long. It sounds strange, but there can be too much content in a game. Think Baldur's Gate 2. That game owes me more than a month of my life, and I still think I've not explored it fully.
Short is sweet. And while there can be a "too long", I don't think there is a "too short". Because "too short" usually has the benefit of making me want more.
Deirdra - Interesting to see that I'm not the only one that sees this popping up. Yours is an interesting perspective and very encouraging, thanks :)
Ghost - Agreed, BG2 definitely owes me a lot of time, and I know there's still tons of stuff I haven't done in there. Thanks for the comment, I'm glad I'm not alone here :D
Ah, but who was it that interested you in Nintendo when you had never owned a console? Who was it that insisted on you buying Twilight Princess against all your protestations? Who was it that strongly recommended Okami when you asked for such recommendations and had never heard of said game? I think we both know the answer. ;)
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