Bah: The PC version of Borderlands has been delayed until October 26th in the US and October 30th in the rest of the world. Why WHY? “Optimization”, that’s why. Perhaps even optimisation. Stupid PCs and their different cogs.
Hurrah: While talking to MTV Gearbox creative director Mikey Neumann said it took him a rather long time to get through the game. “It took me about 100 hours. More the second time, actually, and that was to find every single little mission. I wanted to do everything.” (How long until the 20-minute speedrun, eh?)
We’re probably going to get to play the game before release, and “preview” it. Soon thereafter: judgement.
Related Stories:
“You wouldn’t find it strange if someone said that a film could do with having some scenes cut would you? So, why is it any different for a game?”
Because a game is fucking expensive. It’s a world of difference if your 9€ movie could stand to be 20 minutes shorter, and a 60€ game being 30 hours shorter.
Oh no, it is the value for money through quantity argument again!
I think the main difference here is whether you are talking about a game in the vain of Oblivion, in which there is a large world that allows you to do various things within it and the main quest is fairly unimportant, or a game that follows a main story more closely and relies on a more structured approach. Of course, if you aren’t interested in the plot, then it is not going to bother you dropping in and out a game across many years. I’m not sure which of these Borderlands is going to follow, but if it is mostly linearly structured in an open world, then I expect it won’t be able to hold anyone’s attention for that long.
Also, are games really 60€ or is that an exaggeration?
As entertainment media goes Games are pretty cheap tbh, given the man hours that can generally be wrung from them.
I don’t know if the old games / movies comparison works here. Dark Knight was a brilliant film, but I think it was too long. I don’t think I’ve ever considered a game to be too long.
@Vandelay
Yeah, games are actually 60€. That’s not an exaggeration.
60€? That’s an insane price! You’d be far better off importing it at that price. Shopto.net ship internationally for about 5€ and they’re doing pre-orders of this for 25€ so that would be half the price.
Also, so what if you don’t “finish” a game? If the only good thing about a game is the ending, then it’s not a good game in the first place. If the journey isn’t fun, don’t play it at all. Don’t whine about “it’s too long” and cut games short for the people who actually enjoy playing them.
The point is that if even the people who insist they want longer games won’t even bother finishing them, what’s the motivation for making them that long anyways. I cannot think of a single FPS that lasted more then 8 hours, nor RPG that lasted over 30, that couldn’t stand to have at least part of it cut to make a more fulfilling experience.
@DK
Not big on the whole sense of achievement/seeing a story to its conclusion thing are we? Lose often?
Yes You’re right, I’m deliciously evil
“Not big on the whole sense of achievement/seeing a story to its conclusion thing are we? Lose often?”
You just highlighted the problem with many newer games. The gameplay itself is so incredibly shallow or boring that the only sense of achievement comes from a) seeing the credits and b) literally getting achievements. The game has to pat people on the head and say “good boy!” to make people keep playing.
Have I a ton of games I didn’t finish? Sure. Does that mean I didn’t have fun with those games? Hell no.
@Kevlar “I cannot think of a single FPS that lasted more then 8 hours, nor RPG that lasted over 30, that couldn’t stand to have at least part of it cut to make a more fulfilling experience.”
I easily got 80 hours out of Oblivion, possibly more like 100, and I wouldn’t cut anything from it. The vast bulk of that time was spent on optional side quests, etc. If someone was bored and wanted to finish it, they could easily finish the game in a fraction of that time. Even with all that time spent, I didn’t do every dungeon and hell gate – many of those were kinda boring to me – but nothing was lost from the game by having them there for those that did enjoy them
“I cannot think of a single FPS that lasted more then 8 hours, nor RPG that lasted over 30, that couldn’t stand to have at least part of it cut to make a more fulfilling experience.”
I can’t think of a single FPS that lasted less than 8 hours, nor RPG that lasted less than 30, that left any kind of real impression on me. I’m not even joking, those are pretty good bench marks. Good RPG’s tend to last me hundreds or thousands of hours, the same goes for good strategy games. Good FPS’s are rare creatures, but the few greats I can think of have all been longer than 8 hours (and more worthy of replay than any of the 8 hour or less FPS’s that come to mind).
DK
You clearly don’t get it (sense of achievement isn’t a reference to games alone). No one buys a book with the intention of just reading the first couple of chapters, or buys an album and only listens to the first 4 tracks, or goes to see a film to watch the first half an hour. Nor do the people who write books, record albums and make films expect their audience to do so. With any of those things the the whole is the point. Also why is it that books are a certain size? why are albums long enough to fit on a CD? and why are most mainstream films generally 1.5 – 3 hours long? Is it perhaps because those formats and sizes are comfortably digestible for most people? Do you think Harry Potter would have been as successful as it has been with children if all six books had been released as one single unabridged volume rather than easily digestible bite sized chunks?
Literally very excited about this, I hope it stands up somewhere close to my expectations now :S
It doesn’t have to mean it taks 100 hours to reach the end though, surely people can grasp that?
Nick is too right.
This doesn’t mean the main quest line is 100 hours long. I sure you could finish this in 20 hours if you just powered through it (hell, that’s what I did in Fallout 3).
This is going to be showing my age a bit, but do any other old timers remember a game called The Summoning? No, to all the young whippersnappers thinking of The Summoner, this is an Old Game from the Beforetimes when you had different boot disks for different autoexec.bat and config.sys files to really squeeze the most out of your 640k base RAM.
The Summoning was billed at 100+ hours of game play, and I swear I must have invested six or seven times that into it. And because I know you’re thinking, “Oh, you doddering old fool,” let me just point out that we replayed that game time and time again without a single whit of ‘procedurally generated content’ and despite my rather pronounced attention deficit disorder.
If Borderlands can give me 100 hours of a singleplayer experience, then by god I might just break my vows and start playing online again too. Let’s hear it for more ambitious titles and fewer premature ejaculation titles that finish before the developers figured out what the plot was supposed to be.
Anything based on online gaming benefits from more content. Esp randomly generated content. So the game is long, but who hasnt logged hundreds of hours into multiplayer in a game. I have over 700 games played on dow 2, think 15-20 a piece ther. probably several thousand from dow and its expansions. I hate to think how many i have wasted in all kinds of other games.
i am kinda suprised about the people who doubt gearbox. Have they ever given us a reason to doubt them? They come out of no where and deliver brothers in arms series. Basically making CoD and MoH its bitch. No one came even close to delivering the intensity that BiA delivered.
And by ‘optimization’ they clearly mean ‘getting this out to people who will buy it first before releasing it to the hordes of pirating freaks we call ‘our pc base’.
I highly doubt that catska.
It has been proven that console piracy is just as rampant. Esp by the early pirate releases of several huge games on xbox.
We’re probably going to get to play the game before release, and “preview” it.
I hate you. I’m not proud about this, but I still hate you.
would baldurs gate 1 + 2, the witcher, Nwn series, mass effect and a host of other games have been as good if they were merely 6 hours long.
You are complaining about an fps game shooting shooting. well duh. They are also comparing it to diablo. What exactly did diablo do? basically you are simply clicking and casting spells, doing the same thing over a million times over, in different environments.
What is fun, is fun, regardless of how long it is. But if its fun, you would rather have 20 or more hours of varied content, rather than only 6 hours of varied content.
There is alot of stuff we havent seen for borderlands, and the skill trees are pretty varied, and they are about as complex as most mmo and rpg skill trees anymore. Not saying that is a good thing, just saying that a fps/rpg has the same depth as some pure rpgs or action/rpgs out there.
I clicked this article because of the cleavage.
I clicked this article because of the cleavage.
I clicked because I’m interested in Borderlands (sorry to break the combo) but I didn’t notice how weirdly square her elbow is for ages because of the cleavage.
I clicked because of the cleavage. And the borderlands.
kevlar says: “The point is that if even the people who insist they want longer games won’t even bother finishing them, what’s the motivation for making them that long anyways.”
Why would that even happen? Why would people who want long games not bother to finish the game, provided they like the game? The motivation is there because long games can provide to the player a lot of play time a lot of story, battles, fun, whatever, and as long as it’s all enjoyable, where’s the loss? Nowhere, that’s where! It’s about the experience, not the idea of it or how a game/movie “should” be.
Time doesn’t even exist, anyway. Oh the futility and confusion of our posts.
I’m on the side that says “Longer is likely better”, here. Short, tight games are lovely and all, but the goodly portion of my favorite single player games, like Mount & Blade, Deus Ex, Stalker, and Baldur’s Gate 2 are long, quality experiences. There are exceptions – Portal, the Half Life episodes, and System Shock (that one’s pushing it) – and I think the gaming world certainly has room for both long quality experiences and short quality experiences.
People keep bringing up games they’ve played for a long time which they haven’t finished, or that a 100 hour play-time is terrible because the game won’t be able to be finished. While finales have a sense of closure, why does reaching that matter? I keep picking up and placing down Planescape: Torment and I’m nowhere near its end – but does that make me think less of the game? No, it doesn’t. We don’t need to get to the ends of games – we just need to have fun.
Ben
No ones saying that long games are less of a game or not experiences, people are merely highlighting the fact that its nice to see a game through to its conclusion, especially when you’ve invested a considerable amount of time into it, especially if you’re a gaming aficionado with a busy life. The average gamer is over 25, not a 15 year old with endless hours of free time.
100 hr game for months?
at 8 hrs/day you only play for 13 days. :P
who needs a job, family or more than 4 hrs of sleep.
come on, quit being a slacker.
kadayi, your examples do not make any sense.
most people dont fill an 80 minute cd. a typical cd has 10-12 songs. song lengths are 3-5 minutes. that doesnt fill a cd. I also dont think anyone has ever complained that there were to many songs on a cd they purchased.
Next up, your movies. 1 of the highest grossing movies ever, lord of the rings. It was divided because you cant expect someone to devote 10 hours at a time to a movie. Most movies are 1-3 hours because that is all that is required to tell the story.
Harry potter? really. They are written as sequels, so that one doesnt make any sense at all. Anynow, harry potter would have been popular regardless.
there is nothing wrong with having long games, and in fact you get more for your money. The great thing about games is that you can go at your own pace and experience as you see fit. You can play it for 30 minutes, or hours. You will eventually finish the game.
The idea of paying full price for a short game is kinda stupid. it is basically devs that are trying to make a quick buck. They realize they can charge an absurd amount of money for just a fraction of what it took them to make previous games.
Sure games can apply to different demographics, just like music, movies, books. Alot of games just try to go the michael bay route, all flash, no substance, and you still payed full price, and then you go play the sequel, that you also payed full price for.
Give me a good meaty game to play for a long time, rather than a Call of duty series game that i will finish in a weekend and never play it again.
What doesn’t make sense exactly? You’ve just admitted that you wouldn’t sit through a 10 hour movie. Because 10 hours isn’t a digestible chunk of entertainment. My point exactly. You wouldn’t listen to a music track that lasted for 16 hours, nor would you read a 50,000 page book would you?
A 100 hour game isn’t a digestible length for most people with commitments and given the gamer demographic is between 25 – 35 I’d say most gamers do have commitments. Now I’m not arguing for 7 hour games, or do I give a shit about paying full price (whatever that has to do with it tbh) but 30 – 40 hours is a good median to aim for in terms of game length. For me if I’m lucky I might get 10 -15 hours gaming in a week, so if I can complete a game in 2 – 3 weeks, enjoy the experience and have the satisfaction of having finished it so I can free myself up to play even more games, guess what? I’m golden.
Also the shorter the game length generally the tighter the experience. A 100 hour game is going to rely heavily on the formulaic situations far more than a 10, 20 or 30 hour game.
a 100 hour game is easily digestable. look how popular multiplayer games are. look how many hours people have thrown into mmos, and multiplayer shooters and rts games.
Easily easily digestable. Because they are indefinately replayable. Just like borderlands is aiming to be.
Just because it took him 100 hours, doesnt mean it will take everyone that long either. i personally like to explore every inch of a game.
Take fallout 3 for example. you can play through that game in a matter of hours, but if you go out and explore and do other stuff, that could turn into well over 100.
Did you not read my earlier post? Or did you not quite get it?
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