By Jim Rossignol on June 18th, 2008 at 11:30 am.
Gamasutra have posted a brief interview with one of our favourite developers-with-beard, Mr Warren Spector. In that interview he talks about the fall of the long game.
“Game costs are going to be $35-40 million, even $100 million, and the expectations are huge. You have to differentiate yourselves. One-hundred hour games are on the way out… How many of you have finished GTA? Two percent, probably. If we’re spending $100 million on a game, we want you to see the last level!”
But do you, the player, care if you don’t see the last level? Aside from the fact that GTA is a really bad example to use in this instance (given that people use it more as a playground than as a story), do we agree with Mr Spector’s statement? Games with huge play-times seem to me to be very much healthy, and staying. Perhaps if anything, as Kieron suggests, it’s actually the middle ground that is being lost. Games are either going to be very short, or endless.
What do you think, interbrain?
MMOs are another obvious counter example.
He makes a fair point, but i don’t think he backed it up very well.
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I’ve got no doubt the cost of development is rising, but I’d tend to agree more with Kieron. If you break something like GTA IV or Oblivion down into just its core missions, how much game is left? 20 hours, give or take? Once you’ve built a huge world – something that, relatively speaking, is not hard with procedural generation – it’s easy to make a game seem massive and never-ending, even if a lot of that is reliant on repeating the same tasks (see: Stalker, any MMO) or asking the player to entertain themselves. Then take a game like Deus Ex, which not only has masses of levels but is also quite complex, and you’re probably looking at a lot more work. How much would DX cost to develop now? A fair amount, I’d imagine.
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I rarely see the end of a game. There comes a moment in a game for me when the mechanics lose their charm, the plot loses, well, the plot or I get distracted by a new shiny thing.
I’m personally not a completionist. I don’t give a monkeys if I don’t collect all the orbs, complete all the side missions or unlock all the objectives or achievements.
I’m in it to have fun, when I stop having fun I stop playing. I’m not bothered if I don’t complete it if I stopped having fun. GTA4 is 50% complete. EDF is 60% complete. I didn’t even get close to completing Oblivion.
My attention span is really quite small. Having said that I don’t enjoy “casual games” all that much either. Short games being defined as just “casual games” is a bit silly (not that anyone here has defined it that way, but just saying).
Portal was awesome.
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Personally, I don’t care about the length so much as long as the game works well within that space. I like to compare Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Warrior Within on this point.
Sands of Time was a short game – maybe 15 hours or so? – but it worked. There was no padding, no filler and the story felt like it was always moving forwards. The characters were always evolving and changing. There were sections where the Prince and Farah were separated and the game felt like it might just be padding things out a bit, but the developer was still using this time to most it could.
Warrior Within however responded to claims that the first one was too short. It was double the length, with multiple endings. Unfortunately, it also felt a bit fluffed up as the Prince had to spend time going back through previous levels and tackling objectives which were needlessly complex (the two towers, anyone?).
I like both games, but I prefer SOT purely because the game doesn’t waste my time. A shorter game isn’t always a worse game and as long as developers are using the time in the game to the maximum then I don’t mind if the game is 100+ hours or 12 hours. If the game involves me then I’ll play it to the endand then probably play it again and again. If a game feels loose and full of meaningless sections then it’s lucky if I get halfway through.
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The only recent games I’ve completed are the HL2 episodes (not the 2nd one couldn’t be bothered with the strider bit), Portal, Company of Heroes and its expansion. I think part of the reason I dont finish others is I get bored of the craptastic stories and repetitive gameplay (with no reward) after about 8 or so hours. For a game to be anything over this length it’s going to have to have a really good story/script or rock solid gameplay/very good mp. Not many games achieve this with a short game!
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I’d agree that a game doesn’t have to be about seeing it through.
Lego Star Wars I did just about everything, because I loved the levels and just about everything it had to offer. Lego Star Wars 2 I didn’t get close to doing everything simply because some aspects of it grated on me after my first run through, and I don’t care enough about 100%-ing games to grind through for the sake of it.
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Certainly I think it’s a valid point with regards to FPS’ and such, particularly where strongly linear/scripted/whatever. Personally I think that’s no bad thing – such a game has to be very good to actually maintain a high level throughout, rather than just padding. Even HL2 suffered quite badly from repetition, and I think it could’ve been stronger if shaved down a few hours. So yeah, short and focused is good.
Obviously sandbox/strategy/management/MMO/etcetc games are a different kettle of fish, and I’ll happily devote weeks to the likes of Europa Universalis, Eve, Dwarf Fortress and such. Can’t really compare though, they’re a different animal completely.
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It’s a difficult one. I am a completionist and there have been many times where I’ve ended up resenting long games. In those cases it’s usually because playtime is being artifically padded out with filler. RPGs are usually the worst culprits – by the end of any JRPG that I’ve ever played I usually end up with Blepharospasm. Most recently GTAIV has plummeted in my estimation because of what I regard as pointless filler material.
I suppose the obvious answer is not to do things like sidequests… but… they’re there.
I’m usually happy with anywhere between 7-10 hours of play. Anything less and I feel ripped off. Anything more and the game had better be doing something new and interesting with its time – whether that’s plot and character development, or the introduction of new gameplay elements.
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I’ve played games since pong, and only ‘finished’ about four. I tend to prefer sandbox and freeform games anyway, so I don’t understand this concept of a games ‘length’.
COD 4 was about the right length to me. Any longer than that and I just can’t be bothered, it gets repetitive and predictable beyond that.
No game should ever let the player get ‘stuck’. that’s crap design. If I’m making my 22rd attempt to storm the beaches at normandy, the game needs to learn to ease up on the difficulty a bit, and ALL games should support changing the difficulty level mid game, or at least per mission.
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In a lot of games, I don’t care about the last level. They used the same justification for making Deus Ex 2 shorter, and I thought it was silly back then as well. If I have fun with a game for 30 hours, then who cares if I missed out on the last 20? I bought the game, I got a lot of fun out of it, I’m happy.
Would I be better off if the last 20 hours didn’t even *exist*?
If anything, I think the route taken by Alone in the Dark is much more sensible. Don’t make the game shorter, just split it up into smaller sequences, and let the player play *any* of them. If you want me to see the last level, then why do you force me to play the first 30 levels first?
Allow me to skip levels 8, 17 and 24, which were boring and difficult, and which I hated. And then give me a summary at the start of the next “episode”, telling me what I missed.
If you want players to experience your entire game, that’s what you should do. Not just chop off two thirds of the game and pretend you’re doing everyone a favor.
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I regularly play RPGs – my favourite genre – and I have *never* used up 100 hours on a single run through a game.
Personally I think there’s always going to be a niche for long and involved games just as there’s always going to be a niche for short two-minute diversions.
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I think you pretty much say it yourself, Jim, with “Games are either going to be very short, or endless”.
If you take endlessness out of the equation, since endlessness is actually something created by the player, not the developers (the devs are rather responsible for the potential for endlessness), then you’re left with the fact that most games with unrepeated content (i.e. games that have levels and a story, but no playground; GTA has story and a playground, but no hard-edged levels) are going to be very short.
Or something like that.
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Does he really believes people is spending 65 € only to complete 20 missions on a sandbox game? Does he thinks that great or complex storys last 7 hours of game? Does he thinks that shooting soldiers or causing all the destruction you can for 65 bucks are the only possible fun in the industry?
IS HE REALLY A GAME DEVELOPER? Or lives underneath a rock?
I would (or wouldn’t) like to see a sucessful jRPG or cRPG with 10 hours of play please. Or a shorter version of Half-Life, since the speed run takes too much long. Or, since you’re on it, an MMO with fixed and unchangeable content, that wouldn’t take too much long to explore. See, I am gamer, but i don’t have the time or the will of power to play games, so, if you could save all the cutscenes in a game with 2 hours of gameplay, I would apreciate it. Sam & Max just takes me so much time…
No, really. He may have a point, but, besides being poorly ilustrated, he doesn’t seem to have been thinking on that properly. The wave of casual games is a fact, but also it is a fact that gamers are not satisfied with that at all. Shorter games would mean smaller investments, but with the prices still at the same rate, why simply not giving a choice to the player? Let him decide if he really wishes to complete all that there is to complete, or if he just wants to see the ending (overrated – what is significant for the experience is the path, not the crossline), or even if he does not want to finish the game at all. Now, cutting the power of decision of the player is something that shouldn’t be done. You make the games, we decide how to play them; and that’s how it is, how it has been and how it should ever be.
Shortening the games just because you THINK we want to see the ending is a poor fascist act.
Power to the plpz B)
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@Riotpoll: Aww you didn’t finish the end sequence of HL2:E2? That was my favorite set-piece in all of Half-Life. For once, the game opened up and let you tackle everything on your own. I’ve played through it ~5 times and I still keep finding better, and more efficient ways, to beat it. Also, it’s not so hard as to stall all progress. I had a GF play that part on easy, and despite never playing a PC FPS before, she got it on the first try.
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wow. so making shorter games is now fascism?
i think thats a tad harsh.
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I’ve started commenting on this about 5 times, and I can’t make anything coherent because Spector has just spoken complete rubbish.
At the end of the say, suck it up Spector. If people don’t see the wonderful thing you designed TOUGH. If only 2% of people are finishing your game then it’s either because the mechanic became old, the plot jumped the shark or something better came along before your story finished. That’s not to say you can’t have a long game, that’s just you failing at keeping my interest for that long.
I’d say probably 2% of people ever finished a lot of the retro hard as nails console, but they put in hundreds of hours trying to get there.
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COD4 and Portal are both very topical.
COD4 was an absolutely spot on length, but i still don’t think it would have been as well received if it wasn’t for the superb multiplayer component beefing up its longevity.
Personally, I think Portal’s short length let it down, along with a lack of replayability i.e. I competed it once in a couple of hours and would never go back.
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I like the idea of episodic gaming.. that’ll hold my interest.. i watch one episode of lost then have a whole week to think about the next episode. Nobody has done episodic gaming correctly yet! Half life 2 – ep1 and ep2 would have been great if there were released only a month apart!. How can TV get it so right and then the gaming people just ignore it.
Episodic gaming also opens the doors for pilot episodes and great franchises can be focused on while others can be retired. So instead of charging 100million for a single 50hr long game make one 5-6 hr long game for 10mil .. if it does well make the other episodes.. then if the series is a hit do another series.. this isn’t rocket science.
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The equation of cost versus playtime comes into play for tight-asses like myself, especially considering games here in Aus have been $110+ for a while now – I like value for money!
Saying that, as many of you are long-term gamers like myself there must be many games that you’ve never completed (and probably in hindsight you’ve regretted not finishing, but load them up today and you’ll be wiping spew off your monitor – I never finished The Hobbit on the speccy for example, or The Lords of Midnight).
Anyway, if a game is a cheapy I tend not to bother with it – I like immersion. If I’m forking over the equivalent of half my rent per week then I damn well expect to be entertained. And that means high production values, replayability and longevity. You don’t got it, I don’t buy it.
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Its interesting that while the scope of Oblivion is something that garners it a lot of praise, I have a feeling that the sheer size of it is what resulted in my negative feelings for the game. There came a point where I was tired with the mechanic, and felt the game was becomeing repetitive, when I decided to clamp down and finish the main quest. I then completed it, and decided to trade in, pick up whatever it was that I decided to play next, and then return to the game later when it was below my trade in price and the mod scene would be healthier.
So here I am with an overall negative perception of Oblivion. However the last save with my main character is clocked at 66h, and thats not to mention the playing arround with other characters, and the times I forgot to save and the like. So probably 80h, a hell of a lot of time to invest in a game that I claim I didn’t like, is it any wonder than I began to tire of the mechanic.
Length is only as good for as long as the game continues to be interesting. Stretch something out too long, and even the best games will begin to loose their lustre. Don’t get be wrong, I loved the sheer scale of the Baldur’s Gate series, but even in that there were times when I was playing just to move on.
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I’ve become more tolerating of short games recently because it tends to be the norm, but it seems like the “short is less filler” thing doesn’t hold up a lot of the time; I’ve played many (mostly good) sub-10 hours games with as much relative “filler” as 15-20 hour games (and for that matter, some of the greatest games are at least 15 hours and have almost no filler at all)
Quite a bit of the time making a game short seems more like a failure of imagination on the part of the designer, or part of a crippling development time-limit, rather than an attempt at a better experience. Although there are of course exceptions, like the HL2 episodes and Portal.
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Well, when you fail making long games (deus ex: invisible war) it’s obvious you will try to say the problem is with long games instead of yourself. Go back to your cave Warren, we don’t need your kind here.
I have nothing against short games, Call of Duty 4 and Portal and Lost Winds all were as worthy and epic as any long game of their kind. But I’d still probably play a worthy Deus Ex sequel before I tried a COD5 or a new long 2D Castlevania or 3D Mario game over a new Lost Winds. Random examples of similar styled games here. Also, what adventure fan wouldn’t prefer an epic adventure of the Riven or Syberia or Dracula or The Longest Journey caliber over a single episode of Sam and Max?
What he’s saying is like, oh no, movies costs many billions of dollars these days, we can only afford making short stuff like
Game costs are bloated by other factors, not just the actual development, but every idiot only wants to hinder just that and not touch the other factors at all.
Thank God not everyone thinks like that…
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Portal has loads of extra’s added into to it that if you really enjoyed those 3 hours and wanted more, you can play around with minimum portals, fewest steps, advanced versions etc. There’s also the commentry track which is worth going through.
I’d much rather have a game I’d like to run through twice, than a game padded to twice the length.
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I think I can list the number of games I’ve actually finished on one hand, let’s see:
Portal
Red Alert 2
And ummmm, yeah, that’s it I think. I never finished Majora’s Mask or either of the first GTAs or Max Payne or Bioshock or Stalker and I’ve not finished Peggle yet.
Maybe games are too long….
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Ignore my previous comment’s rant about movies, I tried removing it but didn’t catch all of it and I can’t edit it anymore.
Rook: Yes, but we’re all talking about good games here, not a crap long game with a few brilliant moments in the mix, versus an expertly crafted short game.
If we put quality as a factor for the general “short vs long” debate then we’d have to accept that both the short and the long game are great from start to finish, since that’s very well possible.
If these weren’t the terms we discuss on then I could easily say I’d rather play a good long game than a shitty short game which would obviously be a true statement but a silly one to make for a debate like this…
Jon: Or maybe your attention span is not up to par so you should stick to shorter games as a personal preference. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make longer games at all. Also, Max Payne wasn’t a long game.
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@cliffski:
No, what is fascist is get in the pocket of the gamer without let him know, and not giving any kind of choice on how to play the game. But yeah, I agree that it was a tad harsh.
@James G:
In response of what you said, I too have a pessimistic perception of Oblivion, in reality, I hate the game. Hate the very concept and design of the game. But why? Why do I hate the game when I too have many hours spent on it? I hate the game because of that: It was a waste of my time; a wasted of every gamer’s time. The game is not original and is not even entertaining. Somehow, they made a renowed RPG series’ name a complete failed sandbox, and I am not telling this as an hardcore RPG player, but as a person. The game just kept making the same and useless quests/requests just to gain some kind of longevity and experience, when, ironicaly, the game scaled itself around according to the player’s level, which is absurd for a game that supposedly harness the player through exp, but, turning the table around again, if that same exp is useless, why bother, anyway? That is why the game is a complete waste of time and breeths hardwork all over. This is why I hate the game. This and the fact that it sucks in almost every aspect, but okay, that depends on the player, I guess.
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Oblivion was just a shit game that once you visit a single cavern, a single dungeon and a single oblivion gate you’ve seen everything it has to offer and it’s really not offered anything great or varied in there anyway. It says nothing about a long vs short debate just as naming a shitty short game would mean nothing. It wasn’t the size that was at fault, it was the stupid design choices of Bethesda.
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But that’s the thing.
Someone earlier commented “even if most people only play the first thirty hours, does that mean the last twenty shouldn’t exist?” to which the answer is yes.
The zots that went into those twenty hours could be re-funnelled into the first thirty, making those thirty better. Obviously you’d have to plan to do that from the start, which is the whole point.
The LOTR Trilogy is three times (being miserly) as long as a normal film. It cost three times as much to make. If you want the same game quality for X times as long, it’s going to cost X times as much to make and so you’re either going to have to sell X times as many copies, or charge X+Y times as much to make it.
Spector isn’t saying “this is what I want”. He’s saying “this is going to happen”. If the expectation is that games are going to be 100 hours long, they’re either going to be complete shit, or one a year.
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“If these weren’t the terms we discuss on then I could easily say I’d rather play a good long game than a shitty short game which would obviously be a true statement but a silly one to make for a debate like this…”
That’s another thing, the length discussion tends to lead to fallacious statements like “I’d rather play a good short game instead of a bad long one”, yes I would too, I’d also rather play a good long game instead of a bad short one, or a good short game for that matter, assuming there isn’t something particularily appealing about its concept in comparison.
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If I don’t finish a game, it’s shit.
Problem is, most games are too short for me. I finish them in 2-5 days and then they just go on my shelf. Except awesome games like the Total War series.
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Fuck it.
They make em we play em.
If they can’t afford to make what they define as a good game then they should make something else.
I never understood why people are willing to spend years of their life making a game that will be on shelves for 2 weeks and then disappear.
Say that game is shit?
What’s the motivation?
Also how much is too much?
If someone gave me a 100 million quid and I didn’t try and build a cancer hospital* I’d feel like a fraud.
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*And smoke my weight in drugs.
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A cancer hospital is for people who were injured fighting the other 11 star signs obviously.
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he’s taken slightly out of context here, he was of course talking about the action rpg story telling games he’s made and that deus ex was too long for most people to finish and to open for most people to see all the content and that deus ex 2 and beyond is more like his preferred approach with more restrictive and shorter gameplay and content, and is nothing he’s not said before.
he’s basically saying don’t expect another masterpiece like deus ex, it’s very clever lowering of the fan bases expectations because he’s aware that he’ll never make a game that’s as well loved as deus ex again (even if he makes a game 1000x better, which would be awesome) and i think he thinks (and i agree) that the fans had unreasonable expectations of deus ex 2 as they don’t want just deus ex again and they don’t want it radically changed, i.e. they don’t know what they want.
in short he can never put a foot right again in the eyes of the people who idolise him, ironically, unless he manages to get a clean slate
EDIT: i should put IMO somewhere
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I have finished every game I own unless A: it got too buggy to continue (Call of Cthulu stealth section underwater cave) or B: It was shit (a fair few too many to count). I actually hat short games. I hate them with a passion. Especially when they cost £30.00.
This makes me sad.
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I think the length of a game is fairly irrelevant as to whether most people complete them or not and the whole debate is a bit of a red herring.
For example, I’ve put over 200 hours into GTA: Vice City, but I haven’t completed the game. I lost interest in the main story missions after I took over Diaz’s mansion and now I just muck about in the city and edit the car stats to make them do utterly crazy things (like jumping from the airport on one island clean across the entire city to land on the beach on the opposite island).
Even Valve’s own stats on HL2:Ep2 show that over 40% of players bailed on the game before they started the last map, and that game is only 4 or 5 hours long, so I’m not sure you can say that making a game shorter immediately means that players are more likely to finish it.
The debate over a game’s length is a distraction – surely we should be more worried about a game’s quality? There’s no point saying all games should be less than 10 hours long if 80% of them are still going to be crap and you’re going to bail on them inside of four hours, anyway.
Developers should be more concerned with finding out what their audience wants to play and why people complete (or decide not to complete) the games they buy, so that they can use this knowledge to make better games. Simply spending millions of dollars on the shiniest graphics engine, which makes every title a huge financial risk for publishers and developers alike, and then whinging about the cost of making games is not what I’d call progress.
Personally, I’m quite happy to play long or short games, but I don’t buy a game and feel compelled to complete it. If developers want me to see the last level, they better give me a sense of immersion that makes me want to play it through to the end.
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I’m in the same ballpark as Willem; if I like a game it gets finished. Probably only Virtua Tennis has avoided this fate since the ‘end boss’ of the story mode was too hard for me.
There’s no reason why a short game can’t last 100 hours though, like Goldeneye you can have cheats unlocked for speed runs, and extra levels for completion at higher difficulties. Plus multiplayer etc. (It takes barely, what, three hours to win the world cup on PES, but for some people it’s the only game they’ve ever owned.)
Although I acknowledge people play at different speeds and that ‘hours’ is probably the best measure of game time, I find that concept hard to follow. Generally I’d say an FPS or platformer takes a weekend to complete, while an RPG only works if it takes weeks and you get to immerse yourself in the world. I think Deus Ex could have been much shorter and still as successful.
Maybe it’s 100 hours of narrative play he’s talking about, rather than game play time, but even something like the most recent Final Fantasy didn’t have that much going on.
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I think what Bananaphone said early on is significant, that DX would cost a fortune to make nowadays. A lot of the long games of the past that I enjoyed would be staggeringly expensive to develop now, simply because the cost per hour has probably gone up exponentially, given that people expect greater intricacy.
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The length of a game should be dictated by content, in the same manner as a story. Applying arbritrary limits on game-length is like having a pop at chekov for writing stories that are too short, or tolkien for writing stories that are too long. It’s stupid.
End of discussion.
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@Tomzor
yeah but this isn’t easy even for story, in films and books most of the content is stripped away by an editor because to much was generated and in games making too much content is a failing because of the cost.
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Oh yeah, why is “100 hours” always used as some hyperbolic figure for stuff like this? 100 hour games are a myth. There ARE games I have over 100 hours on, but it’s either through doing tons of sidequests/extra exploration or through many replays, there are very few, if any, games that take even close to 100 hours to merely complete.
Something like 50 hours would be far more sane as some stated upper limit of length, and even games that long are extremely rare nowadays (and pretty much always have been).
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@The Sombrero Kid
The reason scenes get edited out of films and novels is because those scenes are not integral to the plot, and are therefore better left out. They shouldn’t be left out purely to make the media shorter, since then the message of the work gets conflated.
As I said before, content should dictate length – not the other way around.
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I complete most games, to the point that the ones I don’t I’m a bit vexed about. I gave up on Far Cry when I walked into a small corridor with about 20 men armed with rocket launchers. (Far Cry is interesting because the devs specifically said they didn’t try so hard with the final levels because they expected no-one to get to them).
I’m very much a story gamer, so I like closure. Then again, as old-school PC gamers I suspect that we expect longer games, whereas I rarely make the time to put in days of play these days.
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“That’s another thing, the length discussion tends to lead to fallacious statements like “I’d rather play a good short game instead of a bad long one”, yes I would too, I’d also rather play a good long game instead of a bad short one, or a good short game for that matter, assuming there isn’t something particularily appealing about its concept in comparison.”
But clearly that’s not true of everyone. A great part of the market would (apparently) prefer a game to be bulked out with what an RPSer might consider “crap filler” in preference to a short, perfect game. Warrior Within > Sands of Time, to use an earlier example.
That’s where the debate exists. A game developer can’t afford to talk to some hip Edge elite who want to play perfectly formed pieces of forty five minute interactive artwork. He has to balance that against the global market who are prepared to pay for *mission packs*.
I think that’s why the sandbox model is succeeding. To me, sandbox means “cheap filler content which I have to invent myself”. To everyone else it seems to mean “maximum interactivity!!” whilst simultaneously (coincidentally?) bulking out the size of the game to cater to people who thought Halo would have been better if it was twice as long with no additional content (again…).
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@Mman
aye but I’ve defiantly clocked up 100 on deus ex, which was arguably targeting that market (kind of making it a 100 hour game but not really) and it’s not a big market, the majority of people will think it’s shit and you have to sink a lot of doe into 100 hours.
i say yeah still make 100 hour games but find ways to make them cheaper to develop and rake in more cash.
make it easier to develop with smaller less experienced teams and last years technology, like rpgs of old, for example you could get a team of 12 juniors on £18k working for six months for under half a million pounds and sell your game at £40 with dynamic in game ads that necessitate an intermittent internet connection and you’d only need to sell 10,000 copies to make a profit.
rake in more cash with in game ads (ad space in a 100 hour game is prime real estate) more expensive for the demographic (because they’re a minority it’s a niche product and they should pay more) and more intelligent design making it more accessible for people to get into this kind of genre/making it less niche.
@Tomzor!
wow slow down I was just saying it’s difficult to get that balance I agree with you :D
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Lp:
Oblivion “…is not even entertaining.”
Well, that’s subjective. My experience differed.
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“The length of a game should be dictated by content, in the same manner as a story. Applying arbritrary limits on game-length is like having a pop at chekov for writing stories that are too short, or tolkien for writing stories that are too long. It’s stupid.
End of discussion.”
I don’t know how it works in films, but in games content is written to length rather than the other way around. It’s not like someone says “hold the press!! we need to make the game six hours longer so we can fit in another shitty filler level set in a warehouse where nothing happens!”.
Strongly story-based games can take that attitude, to some extent, but for the average shooter it’s meaningless. Sure, there’s going to be a sewer level and an ice level and a warehouse level and you need a long enough game to include all of those sections but what part of that “content” determines how many hours of sewer level there should be?
By your logic, FEAR would be about twenty minutes long. Half-Life 2 would be about thirty. HL2 Episode 1 would be about five minutes long.
Pacing is as essential a component of storytelling as content. Sometimes you have to add more content in order to adjust the pacing or the structure, and sometimes you have to remove some for the same reason. It’s not just about whether this piece of content in isolation is a good thing.
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It’s also worth noting that Devs may have more content planned, and just cut levels for matter of quality. I believe the CoD guys do that.
KG
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I’d imagine most people don’t have the spare time required to play 80+ hour games. Unless you don’t work, or something, or don’t like reading. Though I’m partial to Tomzor!’s position. Modern Warfare is indeed an example of this done nigh perfectly.
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Jaxtrasi: I think there’s a difference between parts of a game that are there to deliberately provide pacing and those that are there just to make the game longer for no good reason. I see no reason why the former can’t be considered ‘content’ in the way Tomzor means.
However, the notion that length should be or is always dictated by content may be a nice fantasy but doesn’t really work in the real world. There are time and budgetary constraints. There are restrictions inherent in the medium (not so much the case with PC games these days but a rather big deal when it comes to creating TV episodes). There are considerations of what the audience wants. Etc.
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@Milburn
exactly you might have a half an hour content game but have to invest 20million in it, this necessitates a £30+ price point which necessitates a 10hour+ experience, you need more content to make your game work, in 90% of the markets mind I’m afraid.
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I love how people trot Deus Ex out as the pinnacle of gaming. Well based on the unending talk about the game I just finished it last week, and yes it was quite enjoyable, had a great plot etc. But I was quite bored with picking locks and bypassing security by the end. Yes I realize I didn’t have to play as a sniper/hacker, but nonetheless once you make the choice you’re stuck with it for 25 hours. I did love how explosives were treated with respect as incredibly powerful weapons instead of the gasballs in most games.
Deus Ex felt a bit too long, just a bit. The Witcher, on the other hand, felt way too long. I must have spent 40 hours in on a single runthrough and by the end I was trying to do a speedrun to finish it already.
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I don’t think his argument makes a lot of sense, honestly. Does the fact that most players don’t finish long games have a negative impact on the sales of long games? My guess is that it doesn’t–most players say they want longer games (even if they don’t end up finishing them), and tend to bitch about short games. The implication that he makes is basically “Why are we spending all this time and money making 80 hours of content when players will be just as happy with 10?” But I’m not convinced that they would be.
I think epic scale in a game tends to be a selling point even to players who don’t take full advantage of it. In fact, I think the very idea that you can play through a game without seeing every last ounce of content is appealing in and of itself.
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Dan:
Tomzor’s examples (“The reason scenes get edited out of films and novels is because those scenes are not integral to the plot, and are therefore better left out.”) lead me to believe that he wasn’t considering pacing.
Films are not about one and a half hours long by the sheer coincidence that every script ever written happens to have about that much content in it.
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Deuteronomy: Oh, I agree that Deus Ex was over long (and had The Most Horrible First Level Ever). That said, it tried to do interesting things in interesting ways, and broadly succeeded, especially compared to what most FPSs, which it tends to be compared against, were doing in the same period.
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@Ben Sones
i agree but when your targeting demographics like that i.e. deus ex you don’t make money, at least with conventional methods, which is what my earlier post was about, he’s saying this type of game is failing, but i’d say it’s the way he’s going about it + don’t forget that those games are exhausting and he’s mainly talking about to my mind himself and his role in making those games is over cause they exhaust him.
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Want to make a shorter gamer? say… 3 times shorter? Ok, go ahead.
But don’t expect to cash the same money. I am going to pay only 3 times less than usual. I want value for my money. I even prefer to sacrifice graphic quality to get that value, if necessary.
-Deus Ex was a long game, so what? It was awesome. 30 hours of awesome are better than 20 hours of awesome.
-Deus Ex had a confusing first level, but really was excellent, so full of different things to do and play.
-The Witcher was also a long game, but again, it was justified by the content, both in plot, character development and good gameplay.
I think people who want to finish fast a game it’s because the game is boring them. So, why someone like the first ten hours of a game and doesn’t like the second ten hours? I don’t understand it. People seems to be bored by the repetition. But then the same people left a shooter because it’s boring to always shoot people over more than 10 hours, and then begin another shooter where they make the same action, shoot things, in a slightly different setting.
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I just finished Gothic 3 two days ago. I played it for the past two months and saw all three ends. I guess I’m a lucky man.
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@Turin Turambar
lotr is a perfect example of why more can be less, but that usually because it’s a contagious experience and no one wants to sit and watch a film for 3hours straight, as long as the quality is consistent and the content can be broken into manageable time chunks there’s no reason why more is less should be true i suppose.
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@Jaxtrasi:
Not *all* films are 90 minutes long. Some are shorter, and some can be far, far longer. I think you also have to factor in a few things here: the attention span and expectations of the audience, and the fact that films (and games) don’t all try to do the same thing.
The two hour mean running time for a film has become an expectation of the cinema audience in much the same way that FPS players expect a good 10 hours and RPG players would be unhappy with anything less than 25 hours.
But to continue with the cinema analogy, it’s very difficult to sustain the interest of an audience an action or horror film for more than 90 minutes, because all the constant awe and gore gets wearisome and boring. Whereas it’s much easier to sustain interest in a character-driven film for 3 hours if the pacing, intrigue and dialogue are handled well.
So to cite one of your earlier examples, FEAR would have been better if it was 20 minutes long. At least in my opinion, because it got very dull very quickly as far as I was concerned. I would certainly agree that pacing is definitely an important consideration when developing a game, and that there are certainly times when less is more in terms of length, but there are gamers out there who do like long, epic games; and while people are willing to buy them, developers should make them.
As for making such long games cheaper to make… that’s the developer’s problem, not the customer’s. If developers stop listening to what their customers want and instead tell them what they’re going to get – “you’re going to get short games, pay the same money for them and like it, Buster!” – I think you’re going to find that spiralling development budgets are the least of their problems. Customers are a fickle bunch and can go from ‘paying’ to ‘non-paying’ very quickly…
(This post was brought to you by The Stating The Bleedin’ Obvious Society of Great Britain)
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“Games with huge play-times seem to me to be very much healthy”
The problem is, it’s hugely subjective. For example, I’m glad that Oblivion is such a huge game, because I loved it and was happy enough to play it for hundreds of hours. I haven’t felt the need to get to the end, so I’m not even sure where I am with the main plot. With other games, such as Portal, it’s feel like it’s over a little too soon, but is still satisfying.
And with yet other games, while you enjoy them, they do outstay their welcome and by the end, you are just playing them in order to find out what happens.
Realistically, I get to play games for an hour a day. So a 30 hour game would last a month for me, and I’d be happy enough to finsh a game a month. However, I imagine people who play for 4 hours or more today would find that a bit short. Who to make happy?
P.
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@iain
aye but then you’re still getting shorter games like warren said you just aren’t paying for it and they’ll still make their money whether you steal it or not don’t worry about that.
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I would say that the length of a game needs to be tailored to the core design of the game. Portal had a very focused design, and I wouldn’t have made it any longer. The gameplay mechanic is simple and milking it any further would be silly.
When a game becomes more complex, it needs a bit more time for everything to fall into place. A more intricate story and more varied environments enables a game to be longer without becoming a grind-fest. One could argue that a game could be infinitely long if it has enough variety, but then it starts to lose focus. A game that mixes Peggle and Halo would be silly and unappealing to both the Peggle and Halo players.
Games don’t necessarily need to be shorter, they need to be interesting enough to make the player play to the end. In Crysis it was the fun physics and battles that made me play to the end, in Mass Effect I waded through the uninspired combat to see the plot unfold.
So yeah, a game’s length is tied to the core design, so it’s pretty hard to say if long games are better than short ones or vice versa. I think it’s definately something developers should think about when making games, but deliberately making shorter games to get people to finish them is a pretty odd way to go about it.
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It really depends on what you’re trying to convey during the single player. If the producer wants a roller coaster ride (with the great start, explosive plunge and loop de loops) then its much more difficult to craft something that’s long and meaningful at the same time. Some games can be long like Doom clones just because of the dungeon hack mentality – you get the sense of achievement when you finish a level, knowing that you’ll get a new challenge. The game may not really end if that’s the case.
I feel like for Deus Ex, there was a schizophrenic tendency in that it wanted to do both. The story had issues once the number of “neutral” NPCs decreased and it began to become this kind of dungeon hack game. Pretty much everything after the return to NYC was like that. And while it was definitely fun, it kills the tension given by the story.
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There are two futures for games as I see them. Or at least two possible paths a developer could take in the future.
One is where the game is about the length of a film- Portal length, essentially. That was really the perfect length for the sort of blockbuster games that get produced nowadays. There was a plot in Portal, but it was straightforward in a sort of music video type of way- it did one thing and it did it gracefully.
The other sort of game I can see being produced is the sort of slow-burning, procedurally-generated game that can be produced by a small team of developers such as with Subversion and Love, which costs little to produce but of which the players spend years within.
Either way, I do think that expensive, long games are not at all the way forward here. Games can be long, but only if the costs of producing such games is severely reduced. Similarly, you could produce a far higher quality blockbuster for less money if it was only a couple or so hours long. (Which is only as long as about 70% of the people who buy it are likely to play it for anyway.)
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The question is why it is now more expensive to produce long games then it was 10 years ago. It can not be the gameplay part. It isn’t more complex then before. The problem are the graphics.
To create a modern graphic engine is a enormous task. As developer you should really ask yourself if it is worth to do it all over again. There are Open Source graphic engines (OGRE, Crystal Space, Irrlicht, …) that are good enough. The Ankh games use OGRE.
You also need models and textures and here there are no alternatives to doing it inhouse. Alternatives in form of procedual content generation is not there yet (et least not for fps).
I also think developers should throw away C and C++ as programming languages of choice. One can create Space Invaders in 40 minutes, given the right tools: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8788197863800411145&q=pyglet&ei=1F5ZSNqBNoz42gK8v4T2Dg&hl
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@Axel
there is no alternative to c & c++ for making games i’m afraid see the mobile phone platform for an example of what happens when you try and use a higher level language, although on pc & 360 for small indie games c# would be a better option alla audiosurf
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Penumbra Black Plague is an AWESOME AWESOME game considering it was made by two dudes in some random northern European country and it only cost 20 bucks. And it runs on Linux/Mac/XP. OpenGL + SDL FTW.
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I feel like this is such a vaguely founded discussion. Length of games is an incredibly subjective thing. I think there are some general comparisons possible – Portal from start to finish is unquestionably shorter than Baldur’s Gate II from start to finish, for example. But I’ve heard Portal pegged at being around 3 hours. I took closer to 8 to finish it the first time around and have never done the alternate levels or speed runs or any of that. Oblivion’s main quest probably would take 15 hours, but I’ve definitely spent over 120 on it up to that point and still had tons of (actual, scripted) content left to experience. In fact, in general my play tends to run long because I explore, I fuck around, and I try to do all the side content. I’m also cautious in moving forward.
At the same time, my attention span is increasingly failing me. I got two planets into the PC version of Mass Effect, was enjoying myself tremendously (at least, with storyline content – the unexplored planets are boring)…and I haven’t played it in a week or two. Oblivion went on hiatus for months before I came back and finished the main quest. GTAIV I stalled out on pretty early in the storyline. And so on. I have huge piles of unfinished games. Yes, sometimes it’s because of annoying game design (like GTAIV), but just as often it’s because I have limited time and come across other things I want to do that are newer or just more in sync with my current mood. And so quality experiences fall by the wayside because I get distracted. I am therefore distinctly in favor of a general shortening of games. Call of Duty 4, Sam and Max (episodes), etc are about the perfect length for me. They take only a couple of days to work my way through, are engaging all the way, and then I’m on to something else. At the same time, I don’t want to pay $50-60 for a game experience of that length, because I can’t spend $50-60 three times a week. It just doesn’t work out. So if the developers want me to buy their games new and not wait a few years for them to fall into the bargain bin or rent them and beat them that way….well, actually they’re probably out of luck, with me. But they should still price accordingly. Sam and Max managed that. Call of Duty, not so much.
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I’m an obsessive completionist, as if I’m going to play a game, I’m going to finish it and to the best of my ability – do everything. I think I have played GTA: San Andreas 100% 2-3 times.
My Ideal game would take me 2-3 days of full playing – after a big event I would just take a few days off and just play.
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Almost everyone here is insane, or not even trying to think about this.
Lets remember one very important premise we have to start with when discussing this:
(p1) Warren Spector is a very clever man and knows more about the video game industry than me.
No, really, he does. Lets throw in the second premise, that most of you were relying purely upon:
(p2) Warren Spector said something I completely disagree with!
With both of these two, we stand a better chance at making some sort of conclusion. We can consider a momentary lapse of judgement: but why? Some people suggested it was due to his personal relationship with the Deus Ex fanbase. Maybe. It could be any number of things in his background that caused the otherwise clever man to say something stupid.
Or maybe, just maybe, the problem was elsewhere. Maybe I don’t fully understand how to make a computer game! Alternitavely, maybe I misunderstood what he was saying, it’s possible; after all I have all my own preduces to deal with too.
Personly, that is my first suspecion when someone tells me something that I automatically disagree with. I don’t really mind whatever route you take, but when you see yourself ending up at
(c) I know more about the constraints and demands of making a video game than one of the most acclaimed game designers in the industry’s history
a red light should start flashing somewhere. And someone should hit you on the head.
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I think there’s a lot to be said for how long people are willing to play a game before its mechanics become stale. But that’s because most games are predicated on their mechanics rather than anything else. Stories and such are essentially window dressing for the blasting and the pretty pictures and other gimmicks. But it’s fairly clear you can make a long game if the story is good and the content allows for exploration.
I appreciate the budget aspect, but the cynic in me sees this push as only the games industry trying to get people to consume more games in a year. It’s probably working so far, but I reckon (as we’ve seen said here) there’s a limit to how far that will go before the average player’s consumption plateaus and we’re soon to find out just where that point is.
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@McCool
i think he is wrong though because there are people in the games industry to in love with those kinds of games and too blind to the economics that they’ll make them anyway, and they might make a profit, it’s not impossible just not safe.
Given that though i don’t think that supports the extinction of flight sims and space sims and all the other great genres that are no more, so maybe he is right.
although i agree with him that 100 hour blockbusters are going to get less common.
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@Sombrero Kid:
I should point out that I wasn’t advocating piracy with the “paying to non-paying customers” statement… What I was trying to say is that markets very rarely like being dictated to as to what they want. If a company tries to push a product that people don’t want (a good example is the OS/2 versus Windows battle), customers will generally hand the company their ass on a plate. (See also Microsoft having to extend the life of XP because people weren’t convinced by Vista)
My point is that a lot of games companies are assuming things that people want (better graphics, shorter games) without actually looking at the trends or actually asking what people want. For example, if graphical fidelity was really so important, how do you explain that the Wii is the best selling console of this generation? Or why Sins of a Solar Empire is up there with the best selling PC games this year, despite not exactly being a looker?
I do have a lot of sympathy for developers these days, because they have to take a huge financial risk on every title they make. They can’t afford to make games which can’t sell anymore – one sales turkey and it’s all over – but I think developers need to investigate ways of making the development cycle cheaper, while still being able to make great games.
As stated upthread, length should be determined by what the game is trying to do. Only an idiot would try to make a 30 hour FPS these days. But an RPG that could keep you busy for 100 hours or more… assuming it’s using a sandbox model, rather than a plot-driven model, I don’t see why they still can’t be made.
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@Iain
defiantly agree there, i can’t imagine playing an fps for that long now, but back in the day it was common, i remember people slating Jedi Outcast for being 10 hours long (and the game play too mind), but i think stalker is a good example of passionate devs working away for 6 years profit be damned and producing a mammoth of a game, i don’t see that going away soon, as with David lynch in the film industry the alternative developers might have to scale back their budget but they wont scale back their ambition.
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Warren comes from a background of novels and P&P Role Playing games, he’s a story guy; albeit in a more player-authored sense than a lot of “stories in games” proponents. He wants people to finish the games he makes because he wants them to reach the end of the story (their story).
A lot of people simply don’t finish games, look at Valve’s stats, look at XBL achievements. If a game has cost in excess of $30 million to develop and 80% (Or whatever) of people never see the final few hours of content that’s a lot of wasted effort. It’s going to be a bigger problem for the style of shared-authorship games that Warren favours, where different players will see different content anyway. It must be hard enough trying to convince publishers to fund alternate content that some of your audience might never see let alone additional hours of content that almost nobody will ever see.
From a personal perspective I’ve invested hours into some games and never come close to finishing them, but that’s very rare, (hell the last game I can say that with was Midwinter II on the Atari ST) most open-world games fail to hold my interest. I would much rather play a game I can finish than something like Oblivion where I abandoned it after only a few hours with the feeling that I wasn’t getting anywhere. I simply don’t find straight “open-world sand-box” gameplay to be that appealing. I want character customisation, personal choice and experession but I also want some context for my actions. If that means the overall play time is limited I can live with that. I’d much rather play Deus Ex, or System Shock 2 than Oblivion or Stalker any day.
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Deus Ex & System Shock 2 were finite but huge! Warrens talking about a future with games on the scale of DX2 & shorter
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@ Sombrero Kid
A couple of things.
First; you’re reading a lot into what was a very short quote. There’s simply no way either of us can be certain whether Warren meant Deus Ex length as opposed to Final Fantasy length (Which is what it sounds like to me) or Invisible War length as opposed to Deus Ex length (Which is what is sounds like to you).
Second; it took me roughly the same length of time to complete Invisible War as it did to complete System Shock 2. In the long run I’m much more likely to play Shock 2 again, but first time through both were very similar in length for me.
Third; I completed Invisible War in one fairly solid chunk. I’d left Deus Ex unfinished for months because around about the Undersea Base level I started to feel like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had to force myself to keep playing, and I’m very glad I did. But if Deus Ex had been a few levels shorter I’d have had a noticably more engaging time playing it.
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Even if it was a few levels shorter it’d still be longer than what I’m sure mr Warren wants to be creating. Many of the highly regarded long games have had some un needed parts within but even removing those would still keep them as pretty long and epic games. Just as some short games have had un needed parts, for example even Portal spent perhaps a little TOO much time to teach you the basics at the start, only made worthy by the funny monologues of those sections. That doesn’t mean much to this discussion.
Also, IW wasn’t just shorter, it was also far crappier. I’m not even sure I read much criticism about the sequel’s length, it was mostly about its quality, so I’m not sure why IW was brought into this discussion early on.
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CrashT
“I love working with Disney because I’m so tired of making games about guys in black leather carrying guns. I don’t want to make those any more,” was the statement that directly preceded the controversial one, i think it’s pretty clear he’s talking about deus ex.
@Al3xand3r
most of the critisism of invisible war was about it’s more focused/limiting approach and this is what he’s talking about when he’s saying a game which isn’t 100 hours long.
i believe he’s saying a game like deus ex is which gives individually crafted choices will be forced to either become a more linear experience or a sandbox which give choice through procedural means.
this is not a new stance from Warren Spector he’s repeated this position more than once.
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@ Sombrero Kid:
He’s talking about the style very specifically not the length. This is a guy who loves cartoons, he wants to make games that aren’t about guys in trench coats with guns anymore, and I don’t blame him.
Again, he specifically mentions GTA when talking about game length. He didn’t bring up Deus Ex, or even Invisible War. Maybe he doesn’t want games as long as Deus Ex, but maybe he does. All that can be taken from this interview is he doesn’t think games like GTA can remain financial viable as costs increase, and that makes sense. Rockstar had almost guarenteed sales of at least a million units before it was even released, few other companies have that so they can’t afford to put as much content in as a Rockstar or a Blizzard can.
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@CrashT
maybe your right but you need to take the interview in the context of who it was coming from and what he’s said on the subject before and what experiences he’s basing his knowledge on.
It’s no secret he feels deus ex targeted a market it’s very difficult if not impossible to profit from and didn’t turn a huge profit for ion storm at least where as the example GTAIV made a stupid amount of money, they’ve returned on their investment after a few weeks on sale.
GTAIV had no input from him and he has no experience in that genre of game, i believe he’s speaking personally despite saying “One-hundred hour games are on the way out” this statement falls down pretty quick i think when referencing GTAIV but not when talking about Deus Ex, GTAIV was used because it’s a good example of a game with arguably 100 hours of content that the vast majority of people don’t get to the end of, but it’s not a good example of a failed or failing business model which would be cause of a game being on the way out, deus ex is however.
he’s very clearly saying, i think, that his next game isn’t going to be deus ex or even deus ex with mickey mouse in it, specifically when he says “If we’re spending $100 million on a game, we want you to see the last level” he’s not saying that about Rockstar or any other dev that’s junction point he’s talking about.
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Yeah fair assesments, and he has made similar comments in the past. But I don’t think Deus Ex’s length was a major factor of its overall quality. Nor do I think that Invisible War’s length was a factor in its “quality” either.
Deus Ex’s strengths came from it’s core design not the extent of its content and in terms of that core design Warren has never said anything about radically changing it.
He does however talk about “differentiate” themselves (Junction Point), which goes back to his previous comment about not wanting to make games about “guys in trenchcoats with guns” again.
Junction Point’s Mission Statement is a clear indication that although he has made some concessions to commercial realities, the core design philosophy that birthed Deus Ex is intact.
For games like that length doesn’t really matter, because you’ll almost certainly be playing it again several times, in different ways. To me that’s far more appealing than a game I might spend weeks with but will put away for good when I’ve finally finished it once.
I still have Deus Ex installed, but I’m remiss to invest too much time it in again because when I start it I want to finish it, and I know I’m unlikely to do that given the time I have and the other games I want to play. If it had been a shorter overall experience, I would almost certainly still be actively playing it, knowing that I could take a different character through the entire game and not feel like I had to abandon it at any point.
One hundred hours for a game in totality, sure bring it on. But one hundred hours before I even finish it the first time? I’m not interested.
On reflection GTA was a bad choice to make an example of because it’s the kind of game that you can continually dip into over the course of months, even years. A play style I understand, even if I don’t share it.
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very true actually, I reckon you’re right on that one.
for the record i keep deus ex installed too and go back to it and finish it about once a year cause i think it’s the best thing eva! and i could bear to ask for any part of it to be cut i love it all, when i went to new york this year all i done was talk about parts from deus ex to my girlfriend, particularly the into, which i thought was a bit sad but i couldn’t help it.
but I’m not expecting anyone to come up with the same experience again and in a lot of ways I’ve moved on from it anyway, i defiantly exited to see a well made game set in a Disney universe much like kingdom hearts except square and their games don’t generally appeal to me so i missed out on that one.
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If Deus Ex took 2 hours to complete with any given playing style then it’d take 2 hours to complete with the rest also (faster, since you’d know the game’s inner workings) plus you’d probably see 90% of what it had to offer in your first play through anyway since they’d have to allow you to do that else make an already very short game feel even smaller.
How can you even properly build narrative through atmosphere and different experiences and build the different factions relations if the whole game lasts a couple hours? By using cheap cut scenes that explain everything that’s happening in 60 seconds or what?
So, yes, Deus Ex’s length was a factor in its overall quality and everyone remembers it as the epic adventure that it was for good reasons.
I can give examples of epic games like Deus Ex, Fallout, Planescape Torment… How about you name some equally great games that were actually very, very short? I know there are some FANTASTIC short games, but we’ve been talking about this open ended not 100% linear structure of Deus Ex right now so, bring it on and I’m sure we can tear them apart for being much inferior to these examples. Narrative’s required as part of their quality so don’t go mentioning all the roguelikes you can think of which offer completely different things.
Mind you I’m not saying we SHOULD be talking just about Deus Ex-like games since mr warren was pretty vague in his statements, but it’s what you guys have been focusing on and it’s an easy argument to counter so, yeah.
Also can we please stop acknolweding that 100 hundred hour games are on the way out since they were never on the way in? He’s obviously exagerating to make his (stupid) point as none of the games he worked on took 100 hours and there are NO games that take 100 hours to complete unless someone deliberately avoids doing so for whatever perverted reason (Oblivion fanboys I’m looking at you).
If he was being literal then I’d agree with him and say “yeah, don’t give us 100 hour games, Deus Ex length is just about fine for us!” so, yeah.
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These days Warren Spector is only qualified to comment on the state of his own poo because HIS HEAD IS SHOVED SOLIDLY UP HIS BUM.
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As someone who finishes every single game he ever guys, I would like longer games. Why? Paying 60 bucks for 4 hours of gameplay is, to me, a waste of money.
Replayability, however, can often fix this problem. Stalker may not be a long game, but I would be willing to finish it many times. Deus Ex was a long game, and I’ve probably finished it a half dozen times.
The only short game I can recall that I truly enjoyed was Portal. Other than that, almost every game I truly love will be long in time to beat. Also, what defines a longer game? Does Civilization count as long, or short? Does something like Starcraft count as long? What are multiplayer only games?
I think the focus on short games is a bad one, because people will simply become bored of playing the cookie-cutter version of the last short game they played. Longer games are often forced to be unique, and the gameplay is all the more fun.
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I don’t know that games really get that much cheaper to make by cutting length. It’s not as though cutting out half of Oblivion’s areas and quests would reduced the work of testing the gameplay mechanics or coding the engine, and most of the graphical assets were reused between quests. I imagine the same is true for most games, to a greater or lesser degree. Aside from the unique bits (dialogue, VOs, cinematics — the parts that are actually pulled from the movie industry) I suspect most games are fairly front loaded in terms of cost. You develop an expensive set of tools, then you let your team of designers apply them to maximum benefit. Hell, why -not- make games as long as possible?
Anyway, three things tend to keep me going through a long game — story pacing, OCD completionism, and exploration (of the world, or the rules). With Oblivion, it was the OCD bit (must… complete… all… quests…), but with Dwarf Fortress, I’m constantly discovering new gameplay mechanics over time. That kind of sandbox complexity might be the way forward for those of us that like to sink hours and hours into a game.
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