By John Walker on April 20th, 2011 at 12:49 pm.
We have seen some astonishing claims for completion times of Portal 2. When I criticised a number of the recurring nonsensical complaints against the game yesterday, one of the aspects I highlighted was that the game simply couldn’t be finished in four hours. But we’ve since received so many comments, tweets and emails from people claiming to have finished between 4 and 5 hours that we became a little suspicious. Having spent yesterday morning replaying the game, knowing all the solutions, I was certainly nowhere near finished in four hours. And the rest of us on RPS have found it’s taking at least seven hours. And then we started hearing about some even more incredible finishing times for Portal 2, based on Steam’s in-built timer. We’ve some news for you: the timer doesn’t work.
People’s desperation to finish games quickly has always bemused me. It’s like spending £20 on a Blu-Ray movie and then watching it on fast-forward, and boasting to your friends it only took you 45 minutes to watch Avatar. (Well, that’s not a good example, but you understand the point.) When spending £30-£50 on a game, surely you’d want to take your time, get the most out of it? Take the “1000G” approach (to speak in the parlance of our console cousins).
But here we have people saying they explored as much as they could, listened to everything, and yet clocked in times under five hours. With a Valve insider telling me it takes them around six hours to finish the game, something is surely up.
Which leads to two conclusions:
1) People are missing out chunks of the game by some means.
2) Steam’s timer doesn’t work, and people can’t tell time.
2 is definitely true. There’s no doubt about that. People have reported to us finishing times as low as 33 minutes according to Steam. Our own Richard Cobbett had Steam tell him an entire day’s play had lasted only two hours. And we’ve heard many, many more. There’s no doubt that it’s very broken, and all those basing their extraordinary finishing times on this stat should probably have taken a look outside and noticed the sun went down and they’d forgotten lunch and dinner.
As for 1, that’s even more intriguing. Another RPS contributor has told us he doesn’t remember playing some of the areas, including the section where you bounce repeatedly between two walls to reach a distant platform, and the second time you use blue paint on turrets. So are those who have based their completion times on their own timing – rather than Steam’s – and still find it came in under five hours, missing out on content?
Is this possible? Could there be a big, ugly bug that’s skipping a chunk of game? Is the Director at work here, stripping out sections? Or are people just mad?
We’re contacting Valve to find out, although replies aren’t very forthcoming at the moment.
20/04/2011 at 12:52 Dana says:
My timer shows 4 hours, and Im at chapter 7 afair. The part with orange gel.
20/04/2011 at 14:02 Wulf says:
Did you mean the blue reaction gel, or Cave’s statement about the orange gel which doesn’t actually appear in the game? (Which was a play on portal colours.)
20/04/2011 at 14:11 skalpadda says:
There is orange gel in the game, it’s the stuff that makes you go whooosh!
20/04/2011 at 14:42 Seth says:
There is orange gel in the game, Wulf (the speed gel).
20/04/2011 at 14:42 mda says:
Wulf must have got the skip-3hours bug, or been 2bad and director skipped orange gel for him :<
20/04/2011 at 17:52 Flobulon says:
I’d be interested to know if anyone else inadvertently skipped the orange (or for that matter white) gel chambers. Pump Stations Beta and Gamma respectively, I think.
20/04/2011 at 19:07 Blackberries says:
Flobulon: Do you mean that you did manage to accidentally skip two of the pump stations?
21/04/2011 at 00:39 Twisted says:
I would not be in the least bit surprised to find this is an anti-piracy measure, a la Battyman and the cape of non-flying.
21/04/2011 at 09:26 eoy says:
There’s a lot more bugs to the system.
This link shows me getting like 10 achievements within the same minute (12:30AM)…
and yeah I didn’t spend 19,9h playing through SP once either
21/04/2011 at 14:43 Flobulon says:
@Blackberries – Not at all, I phrased that badly. I meant anyone other than Wulf, as I’ve seen a couple of people claim to have missed the orange gel bit.
21/04/2011 at 19:46 reigh says:
WHAt?? Part were we use blue gel on turrets let alone once but twice were?
23/04/2011 at 16:18 CaiusCaligula says:
@Twisted
As far as I know (and I pirate a LOT of games*), no one’s been able to crack Steam just yet to make it work like that. Usually, they just cut steam out like a big honking tumor or disable it somehow. So the gameplay time and all would have to be a bug with the actual game, or someone along the line is lying.
*Yes, yes, I know, boo hiss…I do buy the games I pirate, unless they’re on GoG, in which case I refuse to give any current publishers money for abandonware I used to get for free and had installed for free. When it went up on GoG and I had to pay Activision, Atari, or whoever else currently owns the titles and wants to shovel more money into their festering maw, I balked just a little. Especially after I learned some of the games on GoG still don’t work, even after supposedly being optimized.
24/04/2011 at 10:13 Zern says:
@CaiusCaligula:
You do realize that the stuff on gog can be no longer considered abandonware by definition, right?
20/04/2011 at 12:55 BigJonno says:
According to Steam, I completed the game in six minutes.
20/04/2011 at 13:23 Meat Circus says:
Premature emancipation.
20/04/2011 at 13:29 bascule42 says:
/wipes coffee from screen.
20/04/2011 at 13:56 MonkeyTwat says:
/wipes orange juice from nose.
20/04/2011 at 14:52 Urthman says:
Steam timer also doesn’t work if you’re offline.
21/04/2011 at 00:02 ERGlabs says:
/wipes [REDACTED] from [REDACTED].
22/04/2011 at 12:53 Vanderdecken says:
Meat Circus, you win THE UNIVERSE.
20/04/2011 at 12:55 Gunrun says:
I’ve found if my internet drops out for a sufficient length that I sign out of Steam Friends then regardless of it coming back the time spent on that session isn’t counted. I reckon this is probably a big cause of the timer. Also it only shows hours after a certain time, so if your playtime was 4 hours and 59 minutes it would only say 4 hours.
20/04/2011 at 19:11 JohnH says:
No, the timer show hours plus one decimal. e.g.: My Steam timer for Portal 2 showed 5.7 hours playtime when I had finished the game, so 4 hours and 59 minutes would show as 4.9 hours.
(I completed the game in two sessions so I can’t comment on the validity of my timer.)
20/04/2011 at 12:56 Hunam says:
If you want to find close to the actual time (probably add 15 or so minutes for bits before and after) just use the time between the wake up call and lunacy achievements.
20/04/2011 at 12:58 Gunrun says:
This only works if you completed the game in one sitting.
20/04/2011 at 13:00 Hunam says:
True, but I’m sure most people saying 4 hours did just that.
20/04/2011 at 13:39 12kill4 says:
I did it in one sitting, except for one or two short breaks, which put my timer at around 6 and a half hours. I got a little stuck on two or three puzzles for about 5-10 min a pop, and I did occasionally do a bit of snooping around for secrets. So assuming that I’m fairly representative I’d say the game can be ‘beaten’ in just under 6 hours if you were really hurrying from room to room and didnt have any difficulty with the puzzles.
20/04/2011 at 15:16 Chizu says:
Steam told me I had completed the game in 5.2hours when I finished in one go.
Those achievements are at the following times.
Wake up call: Unlocked: Apr 19, 2011 5:42am
Lunacy: Unlocked: Apr 19, 2011 10:40am
I make that 5 hours still.
I really do not know what else to say :v
I didn’t TRY to speed through the game, I also don’t care if it only took 5 hours, Because I enjoyed it so much.
And whilst I didn’t find all the extra stuff on the first time round I found some of it, its not like I was just burning through the game to get to the end.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Chizu/stats/Portal2
shows a basic timeline based on when I unlocked things.
20/04/2011 at 16:01 gorgol says:
rareh,
PCGamer are much worse in my experience for impartiality. They are also EA fanbois and I’ve even seen them delete comments for highlighting their sometimes inconsistent journalism.
RPS is the best PC games site I’ve come across despite the fact its not perfect. To be honest I think the journalism here is by and large excellent and never less than acceptable. For example I can’t imagine them balls out saying that a truly bad game is great as I’ve seen PCGamer do on many occasions.
20/04/2011 at 19:24 zemerick says:
Chizu: Look at all of your times. They don’t make sense. ( mine don’t either btw ). They should be in the order completed, plus they are almost all story specific so they are forced to be completed in the order you hit them in the story.
A really obvious one in my case is that apparently I picked up the potato BEFORE pressing the conflict resolution button. Like 2.5 hours before, when it probably should have been 2.5 hours after if anything. Theres several other such occurrences in both of our lists.
So, Game Played Time is not the only thing messed up.
20/04/2011 at 12:56 Ilinx says:
According to Steam I am halfway through and only at 1.6 hours and yet the little hand on the clock moved from pointing left to pointing a little to the right of vertical. Valve has a pretty impeccable history when it comes to time, so I suspect the sun might be broken – do you think should we tell someone about this?
20/04/2011 at 12:56 Titotito says:
I completed it in one sitting in 6 hours (sat on the computer at 8 am and started decrypting the preloaded files, finished at around 2pm)
Also i know you guys like valve but seriously do you have to come off as such retarded fanboys on every article about them? Can we get a little neutral please?
While the game is great its far from perfect and the cash shop is an insult.
20/04/2011 at 12:59 John Walker says:
Yeah, I was being such a fanboy when I wrote about how stupid their stupid store was. Also, you may note that 6 hours is half as long again as 4 hours. Useful mathematic fact.
20/04/2011 at 13:00 Protagoras says:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr3_9tQ9csU
20/04/2011 at 13:05 BooleanBob says:
The internet: not so much a ‘double-edged sword’ as an ‘omnidirectional shit-hose’.
20/04/2011 at 13:11 Titotito says:
Its just my opinion, and im just a reader of this website, but i expected more from the actual journalists here in RPS, the last article “Let’s Address Some Portal 2 Nonsense” felt like i was listening a 12 year old defending his favorite pokemon on the schoolyard more than an article on a well known PC website
20/04/2011 at 13:13 gorgol says:
I actually agree on the fanboism, but I recognise it more generally than in just the writers here..
For starters the game is clearly a bad console port, http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/04/here-is-how-youll-access-your-pc-copy-of-portal-2-via-the-ps3-disc.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
Further, in general I feel Steam/Valve tend to take the piss with their pricing and their DLC, yet the community here insists on giving them slobbering, deepthroated e-BJs everytime they take a leak.
Just sayin’.
20/04/2011 at 13:21 Tomm says:
I just noticed as I started to write this reply, another trollish comment got made in this thread. Fair play to RPS getting their hands dirty and trying to sort out the mess, it’s frankly ridiculous what’s happened/happening. I’ve not yet finished portal, but I’ve read all of RPS’s articles, and at no point have they come across as ‘fanboyish’.
In any case, back to the subject at hand, I’ve just started the third act of portal and I’ve been going perhaps around 6 hours with the steam timer suggesting I’ve played 5, so it’s a little off for me, but not massively.
20/04/2011 at 13:23 skalpadda says:
Perhaps because they keep making good games that people get a lot of fun out of, and in this case the DLC is entirely cosmetic, silly and optional. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they actually are taking the piss.
20/04/2011 at 13:24 Mman says:
“For starters the game is clearly a bad console port, http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/04/here-is-how-youll-access-your-pc-copy-of-portal-2-via-the-ps3-disc.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss”
How the hell does that say anything about it being a port? All it says is that the PS3 version is the best console (emphasis) version of the game.
20/04/2011 at 13:24 subedii says:
@ gorgol:
Dude, that post says nothing about it being a console port.
And to be blunt, claims that it is one are complete and utter tripe. Some idiots are drawing that conclusion from one freaking loading screen which was accidentally unchanged. Boo freaking hoo.
I have yet to see anything that leads me to the conclusion that the PC version was somehow compromised for the sake of the dreaded console market.
20/04/2011 at 13:29 Harlander says:
There’s something about adding “Just sayin’” to the end of a statement that really makes me want to crush styrofoam cups in my hands in a dramatic fashion.
20/04/2011 at 13:31 Protagoras says:
“Its just my opinion, and im just a reader of this website, but i expected more from the actual journalists here in RPS, the last article “Let’s Address Some Portal 2 Nonsense” felt like i was listening a 12 year old defending his favorite pokemon on the schoolyard more than an article on a well known PC website”
==
pepole think this [comment] is worthles.
go ahead! say it! i dont care! im just trying to make a point here!
blam this piece of crap!!!!
(Also, opinions are like assholes, everyone has one. However, you don’t see my anus spewing verbal diarrhea everywhere.)
20/04/2011 at 13:39 blind_boy_grunt says:
i just wonder if all the rage originated from the arg or if people were just waiting to hate on valve. The store seems to offer exactly the kind of dlc that makes sense, useless trinkets for people that just can’t get enough of a good game. Actually good or essential dlc generally makes me a lot more nervous. And portal was a pc game, the source engine has been developed for the pc. What does consolification in that context actually mean, besides some left over buttons?
20/04/2011 at 13:45 mondomau says:
@Boolean Bob: I read your reply as ‘omni-directional shit-horse’ which is now my phrase of the day. ‘Shit-hose’ is good too, and makes more sense, but I’m sticking with my original interpretation.
Also, get a fucking grip, people.
20/04/2011 at 13:45 drewski says:
The trolls are winning :-(
20/04/2011 at 13:50 Titotito says:
@protagoras
whats the point of a comment section if not to voice my opinion?
or is it reserved only for certain opinions?
20/04/2011 at 13:50 MuscleHorse says:
@Gorgol
Their overpriced DLC?
Correct me if I’m wrong but everything they’ve released has been completely free for the PC, aside from useless cosmetic items. They’re just about the most generous developer about.
The idiocy of the masses is upsetting me.
20/04/2011 at 13:58 Maykael says:
I was reading this horrid comment on my way home in the tram on an iPhone. I got quite angry. I’m glad that many people have pointed to the sad little troll that read only the title of Ars Tehnica’s post that the article doesn’t say Portal 2 PS3 is better qualitatively in any way than the PC version. If I had a PS3 I’d buy that version as well, not because it plays better on the console (no first person game plays better with a gamepad), but because two versions of Portal 2 are better than one by sheer reason of quantity.
Regarding the “fanboy”-ism of RPS and the other inane complaints, you are clearly not equipped with enough brains for this site and its community so will you please get back to YouTube and Destructoid. We don’t want your kind here.
20/04/2011 at 14:03 Kadayi says:
@Titotito
Your opinion is only as good as the logic behind it. Demonstrate some logic and perhaps people might take you seriously. Simply shitting on the editorial staff and accusing them of being biased is kind of groundless.
20/04/2011 at 14:06 Wulf says:
@Titotito
The detractors were far, far worse. Far worse.
“If you don’t finish it in the amount of time I did, then you’re a bit simple, yeah? Kind of challenged up top. Not too bright if you can understand what I’m saying.”
Nothing that’s been said about Portal 2 can match that in sheer childishness. And when people say things like that I can’t help but think that perhaps Portal 2 took them 20 or so hours, and they’re just overcompensating for that fact.
Compared to those people and my own experiences, I’d rather believe John.
20/04/2011 at 14:07 Grygus says:
Some of you guys are obviously either trolling or parroting what you’ve heard with no personal experience. If you’ve actually played Portal 2 and are willing to call it a “bad console port” then you are unfamiliar with the definitions of the words you are using; that stance isn’t remotely logically supportable. This isn’t about opinions, it’s about objective fact: there is no overt sign that it’s a console port (even a loading screen in common only indicates that one system had a shared developer,) and it was developed on a PC-based game engine (Source.) And even if it WERE a console port, which it clearly isn’t, it would be the gold standard of ports! The entire statement is nonsense.
The game has minor flaws and some of them are worth discussing, but if you don’t like Portal 2 in general, then it’s for some reason that’s not the game’s fault.
20/04/2011 at 14:09 Titotito says:
what more evidence do you need than the last 2 portal 2 articles on this website? Going out of your way to defend something you have no relationship with like this is typical fanboy behavior because they are emotionally invested in the product/franchise/company.
internet trolls: Portal is 4 hours long
john walker: NO!; YOU ARE PLAYING IT WRONG!
20/04/2011 at 14:12 Deadjim says:
@Gorgol
You have proven yourself wrong in the link you provided if you just go to the bottom of it then you will see a link for what Doug Lombardi told Ars previously:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/01/portal-on-playstation-3.ars
“its not two copies of the game its the same game.”
I don’t mind the fanboism of most PC gaming websites and mags because Valve is one of the developers we as PC gamers should be proud of! they make quality games for their users and generally don’t rush things out just to make a quick buck from the sweat of your brow unlike other companies I won’t care to mention *cough* EA *cough* *cough* Activision *cough*
20/04/2011 at 14:15 gorgol says:
The raging replies are amusing and ironic. Please continue.
20/04/2011 at 14:21 Wulf says:
As possibly one of the most jaded gamers in existence so completely fed up of the same old toss that I can barely get excited about anything any more, I can and will point out that I had a hell of a lot of fun with Portal 2. It made me smile, it made me happy, and it left me wishing that more games were like it. There are very few games that engender the desire in me to just come out and say what an amazing game something was, because often it’s an over exaggeration and it isn’t.
But Portal 2 had so much charisma, every damn thing was endearing and I could list so many memories that made me happy. Want one? Right. This is going to get very spoiler-y so let me just take care of that for a moment, okay? I’m going to do my best to take care of this so that people won’t have something that I loved ruined for them.
SPOILERS FOLLOW! THESE ARE ACTUAL SPOILERS AND THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT IN MY MIND THAT THEY ARE, INDEED, SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE GAME YET, PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T READ UNTIL THE SPOILERS END, THANK YOU.
If we could use colours here then I’d actually colour it white so that you had to highlight it to read it. Maybe some kind of spoiler plugin for WordPress would be handy for that, I bet they exist.
Anyway.
There’s a point in the game where you have a line of trashed turrets heading to ‘retribution.’ They’re on a conveyor belt headed to a furnace, and that’ll be the end of them. Most of them are trashed, but you come across one that’s almost whole, you hear a squeak of “I’m different.” as you pass it. I picked it up, of course, and took it with me. I got it away from the conveyors and set it down in a safe place. I didn’t know what would become of it, but it had clearly become sentient and maybe one day there would be some way to save it. It thanked me and I moved on.
That was a marvellous little touch. I absolutely loved it. It was one of those tiny things that most devs wouldn’t consider, something that made me happy to be playing Portal 2.
Yes, I’m a big old softy. What did you expect?
That was just one of the great moments I encountered, and if I’m going to be truthful, I wish gaming had more of that sort of thing, because seeing something like that, something that didn’t need to be there, something that most players would likely have missed… something like that told me that the people who were making this game absolutely loved what they were doing.
I love Portal 2. I love very few games, but I love Portal 2.
20/04/2011 at 14:24 Mman says:
“The raging replies are amusing and ironic. Please continue.”
Translation: I’ve just realised I don’t have a leg to stand on, so I’ll try to turn things back on everyone else (and fail miserably at it).
20/04/2011 at 14:27 HexagonalBolts says:
John, please stop getting angry at the stupid comments. It ruins my mental image of the RPS writers as this giant paternal cuddley monster. 99.99% of your readership know that RPS is the pinnacle of computer games journalism and that you aren’t biased, what with the site being so popular and this being the internet you’re bound to get the odd youtube-style comment. You don’t need to justify yourself.
20/04/2011 at 14:27 7rigger says:
@Wulf
100% agree with your last statement. In the section after the one you describe, I spent 30-40 minutes trying to catch as many broken turrets as I could, as I didn’t want them to die… :(
Compared to my usual Zapp Brannigan-esque (Stop exploding you cowards!) way of playing it was an important moment
20/04/2011 at 14:34 bill says:
Maybe RPS are sad because a great game is being shat on by a large number of idiots who don’t know what they are talking about. And by virtue of things like Metacritic those idiots could actually damage the sales of the game.
It’s in gamers best interests for great games to be rewarded, not screwed. That makes it in my best interest that RPS points out that these people are WRONG. That doesn’t make them fanboys (seriously???) – it makes them humans who like games.
20/04/2011 at 14:35 Protagoras says:
“@protagoras
whats the point of a comment section if not to voice my opinion?
or is it reserved only for certain opinions?”
@Titotito
[This is gonna be a long rant, so TL;DR is available in the end if you're so inclined.]
You see, thats the problem now-a-days. The combination of open and easy ways of expressing oneself, combined with the cacophony of bullshit that modern society tells its younger members (bullshit along the lines of “everyone is special! ” “every opinion matters!” “you can succeed if you try hard enough!”) makes people think that its ok to post any damn thing that comes to their puny ape-like heads.
Sorry to break it to you, but most people are stupid. And even among those that aren’t complete and utter morons, very few are actually of any worth. The rest are unenlightened shithead. And while I may very well be just another failed genetic bi-product-stepping-stone in the ultimate quest for survival of the human species, it doesn’t mean I have the right to spew my bullshit opinion everywhere. Thing is, people have been lied to so much they actually think that whatever crap comes out of their badly designed neuron based electro-chemical pathways is of actual worth. ITS NOT. Most of us will be nothing but the quarks that make us. And then we die. DEAL WITH IT.
Regardless, if you actually feel like putting whatever moronic thought crossed your head on a silver platter for ones who are better than thy to judge (and there’s always someone better), please, please, please! follow the rules that have been set for an exchange of ideas to occur. Have a logical framework to support your conception, have physical, verifiable facts to give it credit, and the proper tools of the trade to make your analysis easy to comprehend.
Now for the TL;DR:
Its reserved to logical opinions, you fucking imbecile. Either poast one, or face my WRAAAAAATTTTTTHHHHHH.
20/04/2011 at 14:37 Malfernion says:
@Titotito: I really fail to see how what RPS is doing is a filing of their journalistic integrity and a fall into fanboyism as they are upholding facts, not opinions which is kinda the definition of good journalism..
It’s like if i came on here and said “i played portal 2 and found the rocket launcher in the first level, and killed glados in the face right away!” they would be lying, if enough people said this that someone at RPS felt the need to defend the truth, then that is them being a good journo, not a fanboy.
Sheesh, some people need to learn the meaning of certain words.
20/04/2011 at 14:52 Titotito says:
you know trying to sound smart while insulting someone is still insulting someone protagoras, but whatever lets go to the point, “logical opinions” how do you logically prove an opinion? Opinions are just opinions and it is one of mine that this website is biased when valve is concerned, i read the ” portal 2: wot i think” article and thought it was fair and well written, what i disliked were the 2 following articles responding to internet trolls.
Anyway, just restating, i thought portal 2 was a great game and id rather play a 4 hour portal 2 than a 50 hour Dragon age 2 or call of duty 2011.
20/04/2011 at 15:20 Sarah says:
I have to admit I have been sitting trying to decide whether or not to comment on your opinion as I firmly believe in the mantra if yo don’t have anything nice to say don’t say it at all.
With regards to your comment: “If you don’t finish it in the amount of time I did, then you’re a bit simple, yeah? Kind of challenged up top. Not too bright if you can understand what I’m saying.” How can you comment on how smart people are when your next comment is written so badly?
Also the point of a comments section is to comment on the game and show your opinion on the game not the writer. Or is that me being simple and a bit challenged up top?
I have to admit I have not played portal 2 yet but I have watched my husband play it and it took him longer than 4 hours and he thoroughly enjoyed playing it. I have to ask what is the point in buying a game for any amount of money and then ripping through it? Surely that defeats the purpose?? You are supposed to enjoy the game?
20/04/2011 at 15:23 Joshua says:
Adressing Internet Trolls is like Obama trying ot adress the Tea Party…
Adressing the Internet Trolls is not done because people like VALVe so much. It is because the INternet Trolls, with their accusations of the 4 hour thing and the console port, are just as much wrong as FOX news declaring that Bulletstorm causes rape.
As another example: John McCain defended Barrack Obama when some McCain supporter said that he was some arab bent on dominating the US and introducing Sharia Law. That did not instantly mean that he loved Obama, but just how untrue the statement was.
20/04/2011 at 15:31 President Weasel says:
Titotito, you are perfectly entitled to post your opinion in this comment thread, and other people are just as entitled to post their opinions of your comments. My opinion is that your comments read like they’ve been written by a whiny idiot, but that’s just my opinion.
20/04/2011 at 15:44 rareh says:
Ye i think RPS writers should be neutral instead of going all valve fan-boyish on their articles.
Its the second article that this happens in 2 days, i have pretty much unsubscribed for this reason.
I want neutral journalism, not fanboy journalism.
No more RPS for me.
I hear PCGamer is good ? I should probably subscribe to that, at least i never saw them saying other peoples opinions are wrong(i only read like 2 or 3, so not much to base on that opinion).
20/04/2011 at 15:46 Wulf says:
@Sarah
Two things.
1. I think you misunderstood the purpose of my comment. I’ll clarify: I stated that others had made the claim that if it takes you longer to complete the game than it took them, then obviously you’re an idiot. I think that’s quite nasty of them and not at all necessary.
2. Saying something is badly written and not explaining how it’s badly written doesn’t get us anywhere.
20/04/2011 at 15:47 Unaco says:
“do you have to come off as such retarded fanboys on every article about them?”
“you know trying to sound smart while insulting someone is still insulting someone protagoras”
Take your own advice Titotito, please.
20/04/2011 at 15:49 Muzman says:
…with logic perhaps? Facts maybe?
Just a thought.
20/04/2011 at 15:54 Sarah says:
@Wulf
Upon re-reading the comments I understand what you mean. I was purely trying to point out his bad grammar and have since realized this is below the belt.
20/04/2011 at 16:08 gorgol says:
rareh,
PCGamer is a lot worse. They are EA fanbois and I’ve seen them delete comments for highlighting their sometimes inconsistent journalism.
20/04/2011 at 17:44 kavika says:
Only trolls and troll-bait come from this thread.
Don’t feed the trolls.
20/04/2011 at 18:03 subedii says:
@ Mman:
Gorgol’s response is pretty much summed up in the usual way really.
http://files.sharenator.com/Trollface_RE_my_best_troll_yet-s755x1255-123762.png
20/04/2011 at 18:26 Grape says:
Hmmm. I find myself agreeing with Titotito more than I’d like to admit.
The game was… fun. For the most part. Nothing amazing, as opposed to what you’d think from reading some of the reactions, here. Jesus.
When I came upon that situation Wulf posted, I smiled a bit and went on with my life, treating it like what it was – a cheap but fun, little throwaway-joke. Absolutely not the little piece of genius that Wulf made it out to be.
I see people in this thread who writes things like “I bought two copies of Portal 2! Not because I need it, but just BECAUSE!”, and I just want to slap them.
20/04/2011 at 19:54 DJ Phantoon says:
You know what would make the bot store make sense?
More maps.
21/04/2011 at 02:25 Laephis says:
“the DLC is entirely cosmetic, silly and optional. ”
You’re playing a video game, the whole bloody thing is “cosmetic, silly and optional.”
21/04/2011 at 07:23 Lusit says:
@Laephis:
Forget it! All the personal revelations have left me baffled, disoriented. Values are baseless and nothing can be known or communicated!
I believe this is called nihilism.
21/04/2011 at 13:22 dangermouse76 says:
Fuck off.
20/04/2011 at 12:58 Protagoras says:
According to steam, my epeen is 26cm long.
God you semi intelligent apes annoy me.
20/04/2011 at 13:58 Burning Man says:
Just beacuase.
20/04/2011 at 14:45 Corrupt_Tiki says:
“Semi-Intelligent” apes? Jeez, didn’t anyone tell you; only give credit where credit is due, ffs ;P
Also, Raging trolls are funny.
20/04/2011 at 12:58 Alfius says:
Does this mean that my Empire Total War play time, north of 250 hours thus far, may actually be an UNDER estimate?
Mind you I clocked over 400 hours on Battlefield 2142 …
20/04/2011 at 13:08 Phydaux says:
Probably.
My TF2 time played, according to Steam, is less than that of the total time playing a single class, according to TF2. I’ve always thought the Steam “time played” was massively wrong, I just ignore it.
20/04/2011 at 14:13 wiper says:
My personal favourite is Steam telling me that I completed Dragon Age 2 in 26 minutes. I mean, I knew Dragon Age 2 was shorter than Origins, but man!
20/04/2011 at 14:39 bill says:
Probably. I played Jade Empire for a few hours today, and i’m at least 1/3rd of the way through it. Steam says 11 minutes.
Most of the way through Lugaru. Steam says 10 mins.
It also seems to think I finished Braid in 5 hours… but i seriously doubt that. World of Goo was apparently 3 hours to finish.
Mirror’s Edge was 13 hours though.
21/04/2011 at 05:10 JuJuCam says:
While I was clocking up massive hours of Mount and Blade, Steam would regularly let me know that it was “Last Played: Tomorrow”.
I knew me well…
20/04/2011 at 12:59 brog says:
The ARG continues…?
20/04/2011 at 15:03 Det says:
shut up and play portal 2.
NERD.
20/04/2011 at 20:27 Dances to Podcasts says:
It does feel like an alternate reality I’ve ended up in.
20/04/2011 at 13:00 Samdav says:
I played 19 hours of Portal 2 on its first day of its release yet my Steam timer reads 3 hours.
20/04/2011 at 15:25 Joshua says:
19 hours on the first day?
What happened to your sleep man?
20/04/2011 at 13:02 Unaco says:
Everyone does know that the Time Played for a game on your Steam Library is in Valve time? Right?
20/04/2011 at 13:04 Cyber Rat says:
This game is awful. I paid full price for a game that took me 2 hours to complete. The puzzles are way too easy, the dialogue is uninteresting. The characters are one-dimensional (except for the main character who has no dimension) and all the levels look the same. They couldn’t think of new functions for the Portal gun, so we have some silly gel and “anti-gravity tunnels”. Heck, the game still has only one enemy: turrets! And to top it off, Valve is holding a gun to your head to buy all the DLC or face online social stigma from whoever you play the game with.
Also, I hate fun and enjoying good games.
20/04/2011 at 13:06 Sergey Galyonkin says:
Also, where is a turn-based combat, RPG elements and real life weapons? AI for arch-nemesis? Laughable, we desperately need USSR / Generic Mid-Eastern enemies back!
20/04/2011 at 13:20 Dana says:
Are you serious ?
20/04/2011 at 13:22 Sergey Galyonkin says:
Completely!
20/04/2011 at 13:27 Gnoupi says:
USSR / Generic Mid-Eastern zombies.
20/04/2011 at 13:31 Phydaux says:
Aaargh!
How do I conceptualise zero dimensions!?
20/04/2011 at 14:06 Malawi Frontier Guard says:
A point has zero dimensions.
20/04/2011 at 15:56 PanzerVaughn says:
But they made the Portalgun fire twice as fast, so you can deal twice as much portaldamage. Shit gets intense with those numbers filling the screen.
And you dont need new enemies, when you have your friends who constantly forget which portal is sourcing the lightbridge youre on, and drop you both into acidsludgewaste.
Also, the mention of zombies now has the mental image bored into my mind, of sidestepping a charger and having it Portal directly behind a teammate, which NEEDS to happen now.
21/04/2011 at 02:30 Tuco says:
@Cyber Rat: this is one of the stupidest, wrongest, more false and uninformative comments I have read about this game, and I’ve read lots of them.
21/04/2011 at 02:34 Mario Figueiredo says:
He was being ironic, tuco.
20/04/2011 at 13:04 Sergey Galyonkin says:
if your internet connection drops during a game for some reason, steam stops counting time even after connnection has been reestablished.
It is a known issue and until now haven’t actually been a problem for anyone :)
I had “completed” Metro 2033 in two hours and Modern Warfare 2 under 40 minutes because of this :)
20/04/2011 at 13:04 JohnnyMaverik says:
Yea that clock is broken, it’s always eventually updated and showed my real time on games but lead to the slightly embarrassing situation of me beating MW2, in quite a leisurely pace broken up over two short sittings, exiting and checking the time and I was like… Oooo, 2 hours and 30 minutes, how did I go that fast? I left it for a couple of hours, checked it again and it was still 2 hours and 30 minutes, so I was like… ok, that’s something to brag about I guess, no idea how I did it but even for a short game, that’s pretty damn quick.
Told a couple of my mates, a day later they ambushed me on Skype and accused (disclaimer: when I say accused they were just taking the mick, not actually angry) me of lying. I check the time, 4 hours :’(
*shakes fist @ Steam*
I’ve definitely been taking my time with Portal 2 though, took me an hour and a half to get the reunite with Glados achievement… now that’s pretty slow. It’s just so hard to leave places in that game… they’re all so beautiful :’)
20/04/2011 at 13:06 Brumisator says:
I’m sorry, what does 1000G mean?
20/04/2011 at 13:09 Harlander says:
Console players like to play games on Saturn?
20/04/2011 at 13:10 Jonathan says:
It’s the maximum amount of points you can get from achievements for a full-price 360 game. Console people seem to care about that kind of thing.
20/04/2011 at 13:12 John Walker says:
Ask a young scallywag in the street.
20/04/2011 at 13:19 subedii says:
@ John Walker : Surely that’s Pieces O’ Eight?
20/04/2011 at 13:06 r3spawn says:
yeah the Steam timer isn’t very useful. Apparently it took me 12 minutes to get to level 57 in Borderlands.
20/04/2011 at 13:24 Giant, fussy whingebag says:
Yeah, the Steam clock has always been broken. It tells me I only played 2 hours of Alpha Protocol. I finished that game twice and there is no way it took 1 hour a go.
That said, it seems pretty accurate for everything else. I can see why some people might be confused, if it’s working for all their other games. Still, if you start playing a game at 10am and finish at 5pm…. surely you can tell a long time has passed, even if it doesn’t feel like it?
20/04/2011 at 13:06 thepaleking says:
I rushed a fair amount-I mean I listened to all the dialogue, but I didn’t stop to eat easter eggs or anything-due to being paranoid of spoilers. Still clocked in at around 7 hours and 30 minutes. I was only stumped on 2 or 3 puzzles as well. To be honest, with all the unskippable content, chases and falls etc, I can’t comprehend how you can complete it in less than 4 hours without purposefully speed running it.
20/04/2011 at 13:27 CaLe says:
edit: nvm
20/04/2011 at 14:02 Mattressi says:
Me too…I’d love to see how he watches a movie or reads a book. “Nope, skipping that last section, don’t want to ruin the ending!”
20/04/2011 at 14:14 thepaleking says:
I think you misunderstand what I mean by rushed. I listened to every bit of dialogue, those are the talking bits that reveal all the central story, basically what comprises the game other than the puzzles. I merely didn’t go around looking in every corner for hidden rooms and achievement easter eggs.
Edit: Brief: I enjoyed the game in a different way. Deal with it.
20/04/2011 at 13:06 Stephen Roberts says:
This is what happens when you play with Portals.
20/04/2011 at 14:55 bokadam says:
lolz, cant agree more
20/04/2011 at 13:09 Theoban says:
Took me about six hours but it’s obvious I missed things, I wasn’t ‘rushing’ I just didn’t explore every nook and cranny. That’s for playthrough number two.
Going on what some people are saying though, it looks like I missed entire rooms. Hmm.
20/04/2011 at 13:10 gulag says:
Disregard Idiots
Acquire Portals
20/04/2011 at 13:25 Gnoupi says:
Open portals under idiots feet.
20/04/2011 at 13:51 nayon says:
Now you’re thinking with Portals!
20/04/2011 at 13:11 The Sombrero Kid says:
I can confirm that both steam stats are wrong, i’ve played it for 7 hours to completion, steams stat on the launch page says 3 hours and steam community stats says 4.2, both are wrong.
EDIT: I didn’t do the puzzle where you bounce between 2 painted blue panels, but i remember an area that looked like the demo which featured that, i think i solved it differently.
20/04/2011 at 13:16 subedii says:
I can also attest to the timer being completely broken, at least for me.
First time I played Portal 2 was for about maybe 2 and a half hours. When I finally exited though, the timer literally only showed half an hour.
Don’t really understand how that’s supposed to work.
20/04/2011 at 13:11 ShiftyParadigm says:
I completed both single player and co op. Steam says 10.7 hours. This seems to be about right (3 hours for coop, 7 for single player). As a student with less money and more time I’d say that the game is a bit on the short side however it is also a fantastic and unique experience. Shame theres no advanced tests like in the orginal though.
20/04/2011 at 13:49 drewski says:
Wouldn’t surprise me to see that kind of stuff FreeLC’d in later.
20/04/2011 at 23:30 BunnyMaz says:
I would’ve liked more opportunities to play with gels and other fun things once they were introduced, but I think with a plot like this it isn’t easy to make the different areas longer without dragging the plot out too far.
That said, I would like a non-plot multiplayer version where you just play levels and puzzles without the plot. I must clarify I LOVED the plot and story – both in single and multiplayer – but having a plotless multiplayer would allow them to freeLC all sorts of extra maps and levels and puzzles.
After all ***SPOILERSPOILERSPOILER***
GlaDOS claimed to have many more bots she was using, and now she has all those humans to test as well. We could play as them in extra levels.20/04/2011 at 13:12 Koozer says:
If you meet your future self, do not make eye contact.
20/04/2011 at 13:12 WASD says:
“The Steam Timer Is A Lie”
Yep. Also, the Steam stats are a lie.
The Peak Today for Portal 2 is at 94,115. It was around that yesterday.
The other games on the stats page are always around the same amount?
“During the past 12 months the platform had year-over-year new user growth of 178%, pushing the total number of active accounts to over 30 million, with over 1,200 games now offered. Peak simultaneous player numbers were also up to over three million, with over six million unique gamers accessing Steam each day.” http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/10/18/thirty-million-steam-accounts/
Something doesn’t add up…
Something else that doesn’t add up? All those complaints on the Steam forums over the weekend regarding the early release of Portal 2, and not a single article on RPS about it. Now gamers are saying the game is short, RPS has posted two articles defending the game?
Nice ad on the site though.
20/04/2011 at 13:36 John Walker says:
As an editorial team, we’re completely uninvolved with what ads appear on the site, and honestly, I couln’t give a shit.
I have written about the game not being released very early and people’s disappointment in the article I link to above, and I’ve put the complaints to Valve and am still waiting for a reply.
Really, get a grip.
20/04/2011 at 13:47 WASD says:
What? You intend to write an article regarding the complaints on the Steam forums about the early release of Portal 2 after the game has been released? Yet you’ve posted two articles defending Portal 2?
You don’t have to wait for a reply from Valve to see that the whole Portal 2 promotion/ARG was a marketing scam.
20/04/2011 at 13:47 brog says:
Regarding it not being released very early:
You’re designing a game. It’s cooperative. There’s a prize for everyone if/when they win.
Do you -
a) railroad it; tweaking the difficulty of the game as it runs to make sure that people do win?
b) stick with your original design, even if it turns out that you’ve set the difficulty too high?
Neither option is great! The best solution is to get the difficulty right in the first place (and usually Valve do a great job of this through playtesting, but you can’t playtest on the scale of this ARG). It turned out, given how many people were willing to put in an effort to win, that with the parameters they’d set it only came out a little bit early. Oh well, no big deal?
20/04/2011 at 13:51 John Walker says:
I’m sorry WASD, but if you can’t be bothered to read the words I’m writing, I can’t be bothered to eng…
20/04/2011 at 13:59 WASD says:
John, I read your words and it sounds like you want Valve to explain to you that the promotion of Portal 2 was a marketing scam:
“4) This one is tougher to figure out, really. To the best of our knowledge, as a result of the ARG, the game did come out a few hours earlier than certainly we’d been told to expect. Whether Valve oversold the possibilities of what might come about from people engaging in the Potato Sack CPU business is still up in the air. Clearly there are some who are upset that it didn’t bring the game out over the weekend as so many had hoped, especially if they paid for the Sack in the attempt. We’ll be contacting Valve to see if they want to comment on how it all went.”
Yeah the game did come out early John. 6:30am on the morning of release?
Again. You’ve posted two articles defending Portal 2 and not one single article about the complaints on the Steam forums over the weekend?
You know, something like this would’ve been fine: http://uk.kotaku.com/5793317/did-valve-just-take-everyone-for-a-ride
20/04/2011 at 14:08 John Walker says:
Article in which I raise the issues with Portal 2′s “early” release:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/04/19/lets-address-some-portal-2-nonsense/
Article in which I unambiguously criticise the idiotic Portal 2 store:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/04/19/robots-need-hats-portal-2-has-a-store/
I have not gone on to write an article declaring that the ARG was one thing or another, because I do not know. I do know that the game came out earlier than planned, albeit not very much. I also know people hoped it would be over the weekend, and it was not. So I have contacted Valve in the hope of hearing their side of the story, rather than just writing the ill-informed rant you clearly crave.
My interest here is in reporting reality. Your agenda is likely being fulfilled by other sites, so I suggest you read them and feel good about yourself. I am interested in balanced reporting, rather than biased speculation.
But if you reply telling me that I’ve not mentioned the disappointment regarding the “early” release again, I will edit your comment to entertain myself.
20/04/2011 at 14:12 WASD says:
“…I will edit your comment to entertain myself.”
Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me.
20/04/2011 at 14:12 D says:
I for one do not understand how this “Marketing Scam” concept differs from the concept of “Marketing”
20/04/2011 at 14:14 Kadayi says:
@WASD
At any one time your average world wide online game expects to have about a maximum of 10% of its player base on at any one time (not everyone is gaming 24/7 after all). On average Steam has between 1.5 – 2.8 million users online generally which is consistent with a projection of 30 million users accounts (after all some probably are inactive).
20/04/2011 at 14:46 Steven Hutton says:
I think the accusations of bias are a little odd. Giving equal space to the concerns of fans might seem like a good idea but if those concerns are patently ludicrous then it’s irresponsible to repeat them. RPS’ and any games journalists primary responsibility is to their readers to inform them about games so that they can make informed purchases.
If someone is discouraged from buying Portal 2 because they read a claim that the game is four hours long (it’s not), that it has day one DLC (it doesn’t – and the DLC that it has is optional, cosmetic and harmless) or that it’s a console port (it’s not) then they’re missing out on one of the best games of the year on false pretences. RPS have a journalistic responsibility to correct these errors and ensure that their readers are properly informed so that they can make decisions based on facts not rumour and innuendo.
As far as the ARG is concerned RPS haven’t yet come out strongly one way or another on the issue. They might in the future render a verdict on that subject but right now they’re still gathering information and trying to contact Valve for comment. Which is a pretty reasonable course of action as far as I can see not least of which taking another few days before publishing a retrospective on the ARG gives people a chance to cool their heels a little and will likely lead to a more constructive discussion.
It’s not a mark against RPS as games journalists to encourage people to buy a game that they consider to be truly excellent. That is, in fact, the most important part of their job.
20/04/2011 at 15:11 RakeShark says:
I remember Kane&Lynch 2 Ads on this site, as well as Mafia 2 ads.
I do remember some less than kind WiTs about those games.
20/04/2011 at 15:28 heretic says:
your response to RPS not posting a full article on what you want to read is that they must be biased because of the adverts on their website.
u mad??
._.
20/04/2011 at 15:31 Wulf says:
Also, here’s something I want to do right now, it’s a little experimental, all right? And I don’t mean to patronise at all, but I just think this is necessary, to put things into perspective, objectively.
I looked up scam on Wiktionary and it told me that it was a fraudulent deal. Fraudulent, in turn, implies dishonesty; based on fraud or deception. And fraud itself is defined as any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved and/or unlawful gain.
So for this to be a scam, I think it’s safe to assume the following elements;
1. Valve was trying to deceive us by being dishonest.
2. Valve was trying to profit from deception.
Now, considering that they could have used their own games for this, and that they saw fit to add free content to their own games, I don’t see that they’re making much of a turnaround from this. They were raising awareness of Portal 2, yes, but it was hardly the best way to do it. I’ll say again that they could have used their own games, they could have had people buying the Orange Box, but instead they chose to work with a group of independent developers, with most of the money from the potato sack purchases going to independent developers.
So 2 seems suspect at this point and I’m inclined to discount it since it doesn’t seem designed to be a profitable venture, it was fun, it was profitable for the indies, but in order for it to be a scam it would have to be very profitable for Valve. Portal 2 is a well hyped triple-A game that everyone was going to buy anyway, regardless of this ARG. The ads, previews in magazines, and little videos they’ve released were more than enough to convince us. Therefore, the ARG was more about providing a way for us to have fun and occupy ourselves whilst waiting for the released than anything else.
And I personally think it was an awesome two weeks. I had a lot of fun. I got a great deal on a bunch of games, most of which I never had any idea were so good, I got DLC for those games at no added cost, which was dumped into them after I’d bought the potato sack (I didn’t buy it for the DLC, I bought it because it was a good deal), and anyone who already had those games anyway would also have gotten free DLC. So how did all of this specifically benefit Portal 2 rather than just being a bit of fun and helpful to independent developers? Unless someone can make a case that this ARG was necessary for Portal 2, I’m going to discount point 2.
Now, point 1.
How did Valve deceive us? There were a lot of assumptions in the ARG and I think that Valve assumed that people would be able to figure things out more easily than they did, and that the information wouldn’t be corrupted by trolls, they also assumed that the turnout for the GLaDOS@Home project would be higher than it is. All of these are honest mistakes. I want to see the purposeful deception. Show me that. Show me deception. Make a case for me on how Valve deceived anyone. No one was obligated to take part, no one had to buy anything, no promises were made on how early the game would be released, and the game was released early (12 hours early is still early, even if it’s not early enough to meet someone’s entitlement-borne desires).
So again, where is the deception? Where did Valve lie to us? In order for point 1 to stand you have to make a case that Valve was purposefully trying to mislead us, and provide evidence to back it up rather than just a rant. Show me. Without that though, point 1 doesn’t stand either. So without evidence that Valve was trying to purposefully mislead us, we can strike 1 from the record, too.
So… they didn’t 1) obviously benefit from this, and they didn’t 2) purposefully try to mislead us. (Again, if you have any evidence which is contrary to this then provide it, but back it up, no rants, actually back it up.) Therefore, if it doesn’t meet the requirements for being a scam, it is not, in fact, a scam.
What it was was a marketing stunt. People created these little self-entitled desires and got all wound up in them, this had nothing to do with Valve’s marketing stunt, and because of their detachment from reality and what they thought they were entitled to, suddenly Valve’s marketing stunt was a scam. Except it isn’t a scam. The only place in which this stunt is a scam is in the very subjective mind of the person thinking it, because they detached themselves from reality and went with what they thought was true rather than what actually was.
A lot of this anger as well might be that no HL 2 Ep 3 information was provided as ‘promised.’ That might have been part of the scam too. Except Valve confirmed early on that there was no HL 2 Ep 3 info in the ARG and that the heavy-handed ‘puzzles’ being spread around were being distributed by trolls, very obvious trolls if you ask me. The whole Borealis thing did not fit Valve’s MO for handling ARGs at all, it was patently ridiculous. But because of the trolls, people might have also felt that they were entitled to information about HL 2 Ep 3, and therefore this was a scam because none was provided. However, if we return to reality for a moment, no information on HL 2 Ep 3 was promised by Valve, so again, scam subverted.
What we have here is entitlement going crazy and fantasies borne of entitlement. Almost anything can be a scam if you create vivid fantasies of being entitled to far more than you actually are, and therefore this whole scam thing is pure fantasy and hyperbole. Now consider the following: Why does Mr. Walker wish to contact Valve? Because then he’ll be able to point out in his article just how much of what happened in the ARG was trolling and BS (which people eagerly lapped up). That is a good reason for John to want to contact Valve before writing and publishing an article.
And after that, I’m going to fall over exhausted.
20/04/2011 at 15:44 mrjackspade says:
Just had to log-on at this point to say…
What an argumentative douchebag!!!
Right, carry on!
20/04/2011 at 15:53 WASD says:
@Wulf; According to the Oxford English Dictionary in front of me;
scam – a dishonest scheme.
It definitely was.
“Last Chance to Pre-Purchase Portal 2, Help Release It Early
This weekend is the last chance to pre-purchase Portal 2. Get your copy now, save 10% and be ready to play the moment it is released.
Help release Portal 2 early: From now until release, play any or all of games in The Potato Sack to expedite the launch of Portal 2. Your efforts will be tracked on the official GLaDOS@home page.
Each game in The Potato Sack has received a massive Portal-themed update, making a collection of 13 hit indie games even better. So why not get a taste of Portal 2 now while you help launch it?” http://store.steampowered.com/news/5308/
Portal 2 was released on the day of release. Yeah, that’s not a scam!
20/04/2011 at 16:10 TheApologist says:
The internet reaction to this game is baffling. Valve releases a game that is clearly very good, and people manage to work up a rage about it. Then when a games journalist counters what are clearly lies about the product that journalist is accused of various forms of financial corruption.
Get a fucking grip, and enjoy your entertainment instead of turning it into a soap opera.
PS On the timer thing, I just played the game for 1 hour and 43 minutes, and steam reckons I played for 34 minutes.
20/04/2011 at 16:24 heretic says:
Can’t argue that it wasn’t released as early as you would have liked, its possible Valve miscalculated their ARG. Anyway for people who participated a lot in the ARG they received Valve’s full catalogue of games including Portal 2 for free.
Now you moron, what kind of scammer gives freebies worth more than the alleged scam?
u mad??
._.
20/04/2011 at 16:27 WASD says:
@TheApologist; That article above ends with “We’re contacting Valve to find out, although replies aren’t very forthcoming at the moment.”
Yet John Walker has gone ahead and wrote/posted the article anyway? So why can’t he write an article regarding the Portal 2 promotion/ARG/scam without waiting for a reply from Valve?
20/04/2011 at 16:35 TheApologist says:
What do you mean why? There are a bunch of patently false claims about the length of the game floating around which people are using the Steam timer to justify, which he knows to be broken. Why shouldn’t he post a story about that?
Anyway, that wasn’t my point. My point(s) are, i) you are turning something fun, a game, into something to get angry about that. Why would you do that? ii) Why do you think it is ok to cast aspersions on another person’s honesty on the basis of no facts at all? Seriously, that is not ok.
BTW, I regret swearing at you in my post. Sorry.
20/04/2011 at 16:55 Scatterbrainpaul says:
@WASD
When you say you’ve got a copy of the Oxford English dictionary in front of you, does that mean you’re English. If yes, I’d like to distance myself from you and say we’re not all moaning little twats who are incapable of having fun.
Play the game, have some fun in your life. If you don’t like it, don’t play it, go outside, it’s sunny
20/04/2011 at 17:02 ResonanceCascade says:
“your response to RPS not posting a full article on what you want to read is that they must be biased because of the adverts on their website.”
Ha, exactly. WASD, I think you’ve written enough of an article about this ridiculous subject in the comments section. We really don’t need another one, but thanks.
We all know that a bunch of people are mad at Valve about the ARG. We know, we know, we know, WE FUCKING KNOW!
We know because you’re all trolling metacritic and messageboards and twitter and every article about this game. Every one on the internet is aware of your opinions on this matter, and frankly, just about everyone is sick of hearing about it.
20/04/2011 at 17:11 WASD says:
@Scatterbrainpaul; Read the comments.
So nobody here finds it odd that RPS hasn’t posted an article on the Portal 2 scam?
ResonanceCascade wrote; “We really don’t need another one, but thanks.”
If they were going to write one they’d have done it by now.
20/04/2011 at 17:17 heretic says:
No. Just you *pat pat*
you trollolololololololololololololololololololololololololololololololol you :D
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/04/why-complaints-about-valves-portal-2-arg-miss-the-point.ars
20/04/2011 at 17:46 WASD says:
@heretic; Ars Technica wrote this on Friday:
“Update: The counter has run down, and now it looks like we’re going to have to buy and/or play the games in the Potato Sack to unlock the game. You can watch the progress in what seems to be real time, but the clock doesn’t seem to be counting down any faster as of this writing. Our response? Lame. So lame.” http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/04/less-than-an-hour-away-from-valves-big-surprise-lets-guess.ars
It’s the same author too!
20/04/2011 at 17:55 Joshua says:
Apperently he revised or better explained his opinion.
20/04/2011 at 18:06 Steven Hutton says:
@WASD so your complaint pretty much boils down to “Valve said Portal 2 could be released early which it was, but not early ENOUGH!” Well how early would’ve been acceptable to you? And more importantly who made you the arbiter of exactly how generous companies are required to be?
You might say that the ARG didn’t meet your expectations for what counts as an early release but that’s just as much your fault for having unreasonable expectations as anything else.
Maybe you should’ve played more Defence Grid over the weekend.
Also, I really, really hope that all of this non-sense isn’t preventing you from playing and enjoying Portal 2. Frankly Valve could adopt a policy of setting fire to small children in the street and I wouldn’t care if they kept releasing games of this quality.
20/04/2011 at 18:32 iainl says:
Can I also point out that anyone complaining that they had a miserable time playing Super Meat Boy, that it was poor value for money or that they feel ripped off and scammed into buying it, has such incredibly poor taste that I kind of don’t care whether they’re upset or not?
21/04/2011 at 07:49 Lusit says:
WASD status: told
21/04/2011 at 08:05 Picklesworth says:
> Yeah the game did come out early John. 6:30am on the morning of release?
Solution: move to a better time zone.
21/04/2011 at 13:33 vagabond says:
Yeah, if you can, go with that suggestion. :)
I’m in Australia, and the 12 hours early unlock meant that it was available to play ~4pm rather than 4am the following morning. I can see how in the UK that probably meant it went from unlocking in the afternoon some time, to the early hours of the morning, on a school/work day, which is essentially meaningless for most people.
21/04/2011 at 15:32 pepper says:
@ WASD, Just because you keep calling it a scam that doesnt make it so.
20/04/2011 at 13:13 groghog says:
There were a couple of points where I felt like I’d skipped past a bit by portalling to some distant walkway rather than take the route in front of me, but I’m not sure if I was actually being clever, or the game was making me feel clever.
20/04/2011 at 13:21 Harlander says:
I kinda get the opposite effect. Finding a solution to a puzzle that’s been tricking me for ages and it’s something absurdly simple makes me feel stupid…
20/04/2011 at 13:19 skalpadda says:
I’d just like to take the opportunity to say thank you John, for leaving any kind of serious spoilers out of your review. It was the only one I read before completing the single player game, and having read a few others after I’m very glad about that. PC Gamer even had screenshots of the thing you censored, that should be all kinds of criminal.
20/04/2011 at 13:20 Oozo says:
Why does not one of the people coplaining about it being too short do a second playthrough, listening to all the conversations,getting to all the easter eggs,still finish it in 4 hours&you know,RECORD it? That way,you get more playtime for your money and can prove us others wrong. (Oh,and don’t forget:it’sno speed run,so don’t forget to take your looking-around-the-room-thinking-pauses, like the rest of us first timers do.)
20/04/2011 at 13:37 Kaira- says:
“Why do you complain that this 10 page novel is too short? Read it again and really stop looking at the pages and read the preword”
With all due respect, but that argument is bad, to say at least. Not that I would know about Portal 2 yet, as I haven’t played it, but still.
20/04/2011 at 13:45 Koozer says:
No Kaira, it’s like complaining that the book is too short after skipping every other paragraph. Go back and read it properly!
20/04/2011 at 13:48 poop says:
your hungry? why dont you just fucking regurgitate your breakfast and chew on it some more if you like eating so much, learn to appreciate your meals, bro
20/04/2011 at 14:09 Oozo says:
@Kaira
I’m not sure if I get your point. If you think that it’s implausible to demand somebody to do a second playthrough in which he “simulates” the experience of somebody playing it the first time, you’re probably right. What I wanted to say is: I’d like to see a video of somebody playing it the first time (or in a reasonable pace) and finish it in 4 hours, just to see if it is PHYSICALLY possible. I somehow doubt it, after my own first hours in it, but I’m maybe slow, so you can prove me wrong.
The other thing I wanted to say is this, though: If you’re speeding through it without paying proper attention to the dialogues, the environment (or the environmental storytelling, like the turret manufactoring John mentioned), you’re either super-perceptive or missing out on vital parts of the experience. I’m not saying you’re “playing it wrong”, it’s your right to play it whatever way you want. It might just be that you’re not playing the right game for you. “Portal” never was exclusively about the great puzzles (they were and are clever, but they would hardly have been enough to justify all the fond memories and the praise), and if you’re only there to beat them, well, don’t come complain that it was too short. There’s more than enough content for my money in there. Maybe not for yours, though, which is perfectly possible, but maybe you and the game were just not a match made in heaven.
Or to use your analogy: If it’s a 6 page novel with a lot of commentary, maybe something is wrong with it. Or maybe it’s “Pale Fire”, a full-prized book consisting of a 45 page poem, and 180 pages of commentary. I’m not saying you don’t have the right to find that stupid, or stay far from “House of Leaves” or “Infinite Jest” because footnotes annoy you – I’m just saying that if you’re reading those books without looking at the appendix, and find them unsubstantial – I want at least to hear some good arguments to back up your judgement.
@poop
Maybe I made myself clearer. If not: Go eat at a top chef’s restaurant, swallow down whole in great hurry everything he puts in front of you and go think that you have wasted AAAALL your money, hungry as you are. (You might be right. I wouldn’t think so.)
20/04/2011 at 14:39 Kaira- says:
@Oozo
What I was saying is that I don’t really think you should add second playthrough with commentary to the time it takes to complete the game. To me it compares much like saying that you didn’t complete the game if you didn’t play it on all difficulties. Since most players (numbers calculated by Stetson-Harrison-method) probably don’t play the game through with commentary on the first time, I really don’t think it should be counted in playthrough-time. I usually play games in such manner that I try to explore as much as possible, so to be honest, I doubt that P2 is just 4 hours, maybe around 6-8 hours to me, but it will remain to be seen.
And speaking of novels, is “House of Leaves” any good? I’ve been thinking about buying it for months, and it seems rather good, yet odd, book.
20/04/2011 at 14:54 Oozo says:
The fault is on my part then – note to future self: don’t mix quite reasonable demands with troll-infused fury in the same sentence.
But fair enough, your point is, of course, valid. Since you haven’t finished it yet, either, you might find that while the game is in fact not terribly long, it’s longer than that rad claims by people. Maybe you won’t – as I said, I would be really interested in seeing somebody play it that fast. But I agree that while counting the coop might be fair, it’s at least dangerous to count further playthroughs of the singleplayer-mode to the overall playtime (depends on the game, I guess – in Minecraft, totally valid. In an RPG, no. In Portal? Somewhere in between, due to its mixed nature.) As I said, if I could have abstained from bitching in my first post, that’s not exactly what I wanted to say, though.
I loved “House of Leaves” – it’s a bit flirting with the intellectual with all the meta-stuff and all the footnotes, but what I really liked about is that it never forgets that deep down, it’s a haunted house-story, with all the silly bits that implies. So, while it has you pingponging quite a bit between the different levels of the text and it throws around big words, it’s properly serious, spooky, demanding and tonge-in-cheek at the right times. Plus, it’s a beautiful book-as-object in and of itself, so I’d like it for that alone, I guess.
20/04/2011 at 13:21 Diziet Sma says:
I do have the unnerving feeling I’m missing bits of the single player game but I don’t think it’s a bug, it’s just making me want to play through it a second time even slower straight away. Which is a very rare feeling for me with games or indeed anything… books, movies etc.
The steam timer is definitely borked, and not just in Portal 2. On the one hand it can be quite accurate (159hrs play in Fallout : New Vegas for example when my save game indicates less which is understandable given reloads etc.) on the other hand it can be completely wrong… logging only a few hours play in some games for me when the play time on my save files is easily double that.
It doesn’t have to be accurate, it’s not supposed to be used for speed runs or anything is it? And time as a gauge of the quality of an experience is, to pardon my french, bullshit.
20/04/2011 at 13:22 20thCB says:
According to the timer, I finished the game in 1955, just narrowly saving the day at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance – and I CERTAINLY don’t remember any bouncing gel :S I think you guys must all be confused or something.
20/04/2011 at 13:22 Mr_Day says:
I am kind of amused that people are just now figuring out that Valve Time is in fact not very accurate.
You see, the Steam timer is made by Valve, and so – oh, I’ll just shush, shall I? Ok.
20/04/2011 at 16:35 Nick says:
I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. It makes perfect sense.
20/04/2011 at 13:24 Cooper says:
Quantity =!= quality.
I’d take 6 fantastic hours over a 60 hour padded-out slog anyday.
Complaints about the brevity of a game are only meaningful if it’s also a bad game.
20/04/2011 at 14:01 Maykael says:
I agree with you, friend!
20/04/2011 at 15:54 Wulf says:
I’ve been saying this over and over, too.
This is a moment of clarity in a sea of insanity. This is actually proving to be really depressing for me and is largely impacting my Faith in Humanity metre. I mean, if you want to say that you didn’t like your experiences in Portal 2, fine, but… there’s so much nonsense and BS, it’s hard to cut through it all.
Thanks for your comment, Cooper. I’m just glad it’s here.
20/04/2011 at 17:20 DarkWeeble says:
This game has more attention to detail, charm, and fun packed into every minute than any half hour of non-indie game I’ve played in the last year. I wasn’t bored or annoyed with ANY of it. How many of you can say that when you’re doing your escort missions and shooters? You know why it’s shorter than most games? Because there’s no filler! I don’t have to walk through empty corridors, shoot the same idiot in a ski mask over and over, drive across brown landscapes, or visit a jungle that, when you think about it, could be the same thing copy-pasted between games. Seriously. The hills are just put in new places.
I can say with near certainty that I only ever enjoy 8 or so hours of most 20 hour games anyway. What you paid for is just the good parts of a 20 hour game. It also includes the modding tools, the near-certainty of free addons from the developer, and the possibility of playing with your PS3 friends who can’t quite keep up a dedicated gaming rig.
For the people complaining, all this probably cost about $45. Even if we ignore the fact that Valve let everyone know that the game would be 8-10 hours long, this seems like a reasonable price to pay. I pay $12 to see a two hour movie in theatres. Why shouldn’t something that’s worth way more than four times a movie’s entertainment value cost AT LEAST four times as much? If you get your movies on Netflix, well, it’s important to realize that they probably operate the same way insurance companies do and make their money off the people not sucking up their bandwidth.
In all honesty I wish more developers made games with this kind of design philosophy. I’m pretty upset about BF:BC2′s total lack of mod/level/dev support but I don’t remember ever seeing this much hate when it came out. That game only had one good hour of singleplayer (which no one played) and all of five or so maps for multiplayer that were just rehashed based on the game mode? If you want more maps for that game you know what you do? You pay for DLC. I’ll stick with Portal 2′s free, forthcoming community-built maps, thanks.
Three years from now, when I’m still enjoying the hell out of this game, I’m going to throw Valve some extra cash and buy myself a fart animation and a Headcrab Hat. That’s how I see the DLC store. It’s a donate button. I have no problem throwing Indie developers some extra money when I like their product, why should Valve be any different? They’re independent, after all.
20/04/2011 at 13:24 yutt says:
How does anyone think they beat this game in 4 hours? Are they completely unaware, even in retrospect, of the passage of time? It is a rather terrifying thing for them to brazenly argue that they’ve 2-4 unaccounted for hours missing from their life.
If anyone still feels they beat the game in 3-4 hours on their first run, I highly recommend seeking a trained psychologist (not those untrained ones).
20/04/2011 at 14:55 Archonsod says:
Maybe it’s aliens!
20/04/2011 at 18:37 iainl says:
The first Portal took me about 4 hours the first time, because I got stuck on a few puzzles, enjoyed the atmosphere, played around doing stupid things like getting the long jump achievement etc.
Even the biggest “Portal 2 is a rip-off” whiner has yet to claim that the sequel is shorter than the first game, however.
20/04/2011 at 13:25 Navagon says:
Tell me about it. Apparently I have completed the original Portal twice in a couple of minutes. That timer is so broken it makes Stardock’s promises look fulfilled. Playing a game offline is an automatic guarantee that the time won’t be calculated. But there seem to be more problems with it than that.
20/04/2011 at 13:26 Deano2099 says:
A little off topic, but EG reporting GAME are selling the boxed version now:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-04-20-game-selling-pc-portal-2-right-now
Kind of puts all that ‘we can’t possibly release boxed copies in all territories at the same time’ nonsense in perspective doesn’t it?
20/04/2011 at 13:26 mattyjw says:
I really wish Valve would remove the hours played part from Steam especially as it’s wildly inaccurate. Portal 2 sounds a bit like a Mario game if you can finish the story without doing all the levels. Didn’t Super Mario World have 16 bajillion levels of which you had to complete 36?
20/04/2011 at 14:27 Jad says:
If you got both warp whistles in the first world in Mario 3, you could skip all the way to world 9 and beat the game in after playing about 20 levels.
20/04/2011 at 13:27 trjp says:
It’s the Vanquish thing all over again!!
For the benefit of people unable to sample the awesomeness of Vanquish – it’s internal timer is a bit screwy leading to people reporting completion in under 4 hours.
It’s physically impossible to do it in that time (Eurogamer did the testing to prove that) but the clock on your savegame will happily announce a silly completion time anyway…
I’m actually wondering if someone is trying to make it look like we spend less time playing games??? Certainly everytime I typed “/played” in WoW I used to cringe – so…
20/04/2011 at 16:02 Wulf says:
Yeah, exactly.
Not to mention that I think we’re moving out of the era where we’d have to devote our lives to games. Things like this seem to be the death knell of those old, padded grindfests and I couldn’t be happier.
2 hours, 4, 8… if we got enough fun to justify the price we paid, does the time even matter? I’ve paid for MMOs and I’ve barely had an hour of enjoyment for the day I played it for. So that’s 1 hour in 23 of actual enjoyment and fun, versus 6-8 hours of actual enjoyment and fun.
I mean… what kind of message are we sending developers, here? Make our games far, far less fun! Make them less clever! Make them incredibly grindy! Make them like World of Warcraft!
This saddens me.
20/04/2011 at 13:28 Yokorose says:
The issue with it saying how long it taken you to play the game is a bug with the steam clinet its self as i have had it happen on another new game i just got after playing portal 2 , if you leave it along it will update after a reboot of steam or a couple of hours as my portal 2 said i did it in 10 mintures but i was really on it for 3 hours
20/04/2011 at 13:29 Combat says:
“Another RPS contributor has told us he doesn’t remember playing some of the areas, including the section where you bounce repeatedly between two walls to reach a distant platform, and the second time you use blue paint on turrets.”
I think I have skipped some of the Cave Jonson area as he complimented me on not doing things by the book & going my own way (I saw no bouncing turrets with blue paint at all) I thought this was odd as it was the only way I could see to go, seems there are multiple ways through certain areas though as a result of reading the above, perhaps this is where the difference in time comes from.
For the record I’ve played for 6 hours & am 1 hour into the last area, though did get stuck at a couple of the second actions puzzles
20/04/2011 at 13:38 WASD says:
Anyone spot the Pneumatic Diversity Vent? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xHOQp91yOk&playnext=1&list=PL194A66A41F26D15F
20/04/2011 at 13:42 John Walker says:
I believe that line from CJ is a joke, and the only available route. However, you absolutely should have plopped blue paint on turrets to make them not shoot you, via a t-beam. Did you definitely not encounter that?
20/04/2011 at 13:45 skalpadda says:
That’s not in that section though, it’s in the last part of the game.
20/04/2011 at 14:33 Combat says:
If it’s in the last section of the game I haven’t got to it yet, if it’s in the CJ section I didn’t see it at all, there were no turrets at all in that section of the game
20/04/2011 at 15:25 Chizu says:
Pretty sure theres no turrets in the Cave Johnson section.
Their asthetic doesn’t fit the time period that part of the enrichment center is from.
The painting turrets comes later.
20/04/2011 at 13:31 Tunips says:
I’m glad to hear that I don’t need to call the lovely John walker a liar, he doesn’t need to call me a maniac, and we can shout rude words together at a robot timekeeper.
20/04/2011 at 13:31 SuperNashwanPower says:
To the issue of not seeing whole chunks, maybe there are shortcuts to levels, a bit like in map 14 of the original? Here’s a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U01S-nHin8w . Its not me by the way, so dont shout at me for the mumbling.
Perhaps people are finding the shortcuts in certain maps, and so simply not seeing sections that other people might have seen? If you accidentally got the shortcut first time through, you might not even realise you skipped a whole chunk of map.
20/04/2011 at 13:39 sockpuppetclock says:
The Portal 2 levels showcased in the pre-release events and whatnot (gel ramp through spikes, the second blue paint turrets that break the glass, bouncing on blue gel walls into the abyss, etc) look like they were either made for those events or cut out, because they really aren’t in the game at all.
…or maybe they’ll just be released later? Speculation is rather abundant
20/04/2011 at 14:07 Xocrates says:
If you watch the first Portal pre-release videos, essentially none of the chambers there show up in the final game.
20/04/2011 at 16:33 Dozer says:
Excellent. I felt sad about watching them because I thought they were minor spoilers. There’s only a limited number of puzzles in the game, and I want to solve them all myself, and seeing part of the game done for me in the trailers would make me feel cheated of my fun, a little bit.
EDIT: Xocrates said “the first Portal pre-release videos”, ie for Portal 1 not the earliest Portal 2 pre-release videos. I am misunderstand.
20/04/2011 at 13:40 Gunrun says:
Minor spoilers but you remember that test that Cave said might contain trace amounts of time travel?
Clearly this is the end result.
20/04/2011 at 13:43 Tei says:
I have finished it in 8.4 hours. I have found the borealis achievement (so I have been finding stuff).
I am not a portal expert, or a clever person, I got stuck one time.
20/04/2011 at 23:43 BunnyMaz says:
I am so jealous. I haven’t found even half the stuff on my first playthrough. NEED to go through again!
20/04/2011 at 13:46 Solar says:
Started at 1pm, finished single player by 8pm solid playing, enjoying and exploring a little. Steam states 7hrs played but I was in menus and exploring for a good 1hr around extra content, searching for achievements etc. Atmosphere is massive improvement on portal, much more dialogue, much more story. Size does feel smaller that I was lead to believe (‘more like HL2′ which is actually pretty darn long compared to this). Missed a fair few of the achievements even though I was looking for them.
No negative thoughts about length, really did enjoy it. Went back to get the ‘final transmission’ and working on test chamber 10 speed run. Puzzles did not stretch me too much, a lot more finding surfaces you could use in this one, but that exploration was great. Not even touched multiplayer yet (which I can only imagine is great fun with lots of cursing at your ‘research associates’).
A brief note on the DLC. It’s pretty much a direct translation from TF2 style of DLC. Unlocked a hat for finishing the game. Pretty sure more will unlock in the multiplayer scheme of things. My opinion is that things which change gameplay should be availible in game without DLC. Large content changes may merit DLC depending on size but shouldn’t alienate player bases (which thay almost always do). Thankfully valve have only done that with L4D going to L4D2 (which is quite a massive improvement in retrospect) and was in part pressured into this move by producing for the console market. The DLC in TF2 is all availible in game aside from status hats/badges and generic weapons. My biggest gripe is needing keys to unlock crates (still not opened any and at around 15 with casual play).
People baulking at portal DLC don’t really know what it’s for or how it works, all they see is the option to spend more money. I can see this being frustrating and had I not known how valve usually runs their DLC I too would have been annoyed. As it is not bothered at all. As long as the choice to play and unlock or pay and unlock remains for DLC I’ll be happy. Tight and stingy I’ll just keep playing.
20/04/2011 at 14:01 poop says:
im not really that angry about the dlc as much as dissapointed that the hat bullshit from tf2 is starting to leak out into other valve games.
20/04/2011 at 14:21 Solar says:
@Poop: There is a lot to be desired for the ‘hat’ based DLC. Lots of things I would change for TF2′s style of things mainly from the interface. Would be nice to have crafting trees or suggestions for your next craft, would like to have a seperate backpack that holds one of each item so you don’t go crafting it by mistake, better trading options or an auction/trade option for when you’re offline. Mostly I don’t want to have to pay extra money or make getting the items prohibitive in terms of play time. The crates just suck unless the keys dropped in some way, which they don’t.
As for leaking into portal 2, yeah it destroys some of the atmosphere for me, and the recent update that choice TF2 hats are in Portal 2 now also makes me sad. As long as gameplay isn’t affected it’s ok but still feels a little sour, probably until I get my uber skin and ‘Loser’ gesture.
20/04/2011 at 14:59 Archonsod says:
Never understood the bitching about DLC myself. A company tries to take advantage of your primitive hoarding instincts and yet somehow it’s bad that they do that, rather than that the complainant appears to have all the self control and backbone of an intoxicated sponge.
20/04/2011 at 15:34 shoptroll says:
@Poop
Avatar customization is a huge deal for people. Look at what Microsoft did with the 360 avatars. Is it any different than people paying for ringtones on their cell phones?
That said, I still don’t think we know what their plans are in regards to DLC. It doesn’t look like many people have dived into the co-op play yet, so maybe some of the items are obtainable that way?
20/04/2011 at 19:25 Kaira- says:
What, people still pay for ringtones? It seems highly absurd to me, unless you have old phone (like, early 2000s old). But maybe it’s just me, and I’ve lost touch with reality.
:(
20/04/2011 at 19:43 meatshit says:
One the valve guys did an interview on NPR’s “On the Media” recently and this topic came up:
“One of the other things we kept finding was that we had some customers who had already bought the product from us who were starting to send us kind of strange emails, like, do you guys have a tip jar or something like that, where I can – you know, I sort of feel guilty about the amount of free content I’ve got from you in the last couple of years, I’d like to give you some more money.
So we created a system which allows you to purchase additional stuff that you can use to customize your character and sort of show that you’re a fan.
But to us they’re all just specific implementations of solving this core problem, which is when people like something, they want to be able to show they like it, and one of the best ways you can do that as a customer is to send some money at it.”
I really don’t find that objectionable. People who love the game and want to show it can throw money at Valve by buying useless little vanity trinkets. The rest of us can pay retail (or wait for a steam sale) and not miss out on anything of substance.
20/04/2011 at 13:46 Yeargdribble says:
I’m unclear how this article is fanboyish in anyway. He’s reporting that low completion times are likely factually inaccurate and then pointing out possibilities for this. Just because the citing of actual errors may actually be in favor of one party does not mean someone is in the pocket of said party. Besides, both of his posited reasons suggest bugs. A fanboy wouldn’t parade around the idea of a bug but rather try to obfuscate it.
20/04/2011 at 15:00 Archonsod says:
Because it disagrees with the groupthink of some other internet muppets. So clearly it’s fanboism, as everyone knows opinion is the new objective fact.
20/04/2011 at 21:28 Dances to Podcasts says:
I wish they were actually muppets. Then we could have singalongs and stuff.
20/04/2011 at 13:51 DarkeSword says:
I did the whole thing in about 6-7 hours. This included me being stumped on certain maps for quite a while, because sometimes I’m a big stupidface. Thoroughly enjoyable though; this game was worth every penny and then some. Gameplay, graphics, story, music; just phenomenal all around.
I haven’t even touched the cooperative mode. I imagine I’ll get dozens of hours of fun out of that.
20/04/2011 at 23:49 BunnyMaz says:
You really must get right into the coop. Seriously. GlaDOS is on TOP FORM throughout. Also, the other half and I found that when we were riding through those excursion funnels together we automatically started “doot de dooting” that little ditty that the
*SPOILER*
turrents are singing in that hidden area.*SPOILER*And dying/getting killed is really quite hilarious. Especially as it is almost ALWAYS down to one or both of you being stupid. Sort of like Magicka death in that sense.
20/04/2011 at 13:57 PFCskinner says:
It does make me cringe a bit when I read you RPS guys actually putting in the effort to reply to some of these people…
20/04/2011 at 13:58 Digital says:
My overall time shows 6 hours… after 2 play throughs and co-op mode for ages. It’s VERY wrong, haha.
For a more accurate answer, how about first through last achiev?
“wake up call” @ 1:21am
“Lunacy” @ 7:19am
= 5:58 total. Throw in a few minutes padding on either side for intro and closing vid.
Straight run through, held up at 2-3 tests but never anything major. Nothing skipped. Did a second run through yesterday and it didn’t feel any shorter really… maybe 30 min or an hour tops.
In fact, really unless you’re cheating or bugging I don’t see how you could end sooner. Say for example that blue bouncing wall… you have to go down that to get to the cube to hold down a button; he did go that way. And that’s only about 30 seconds of content. In order to shave off any meaningful time they’d have to be skipping whole chambers like the old bug-video’s from Portal 1.
… also I already see the complaint about using acheiv times…
“Yeah, my start time was 1:00am, and my end time was 8:am… but I totally slept for 6 hours! 4 real srsly!”
20/04/2011 at 14:03 poop says:
man remember when both a three hour game AND a seven hour game would be considered comically short?
~memories~
20/04/2011 at 15:02 JackShandy says:
Yes, who could forget the golden age when a man could spend up to 20 minutes at a time trying to defeat a rousing game of Pitfall!? The ancients truly mastered game design beyond our modern ken.
20/04/2011 at 14:02 V. Profane says:
That’s nothing, I finished Alpha Protocol in 4 minutes.
20/04/2011 at 16:47 Will Tomas says:
I completed the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.
20/04/2011 at 18:41 Miidgi says:
Someone finished that game?
21/04/2011 at 09:51 MonkeyMonster says:
I completed the original dune in maybe a few days? Hells yeah I’m awesome bow down foolish mortals!
20/04/2011 at 14:04 Megadyptes says:
Steam told me I took over 8 hours to complete the game.
Edit: Single player that is. I’m going to hit up co-op later on with a friend and tomorrow I might go through the single player again but with the commentary on and also I may look out for some of the secrets I missed.
20/04/2011 at 14:11 Lu-Tze says:
I know I started installing it from USB at 22:00. At about 22:20 I started playing. At 03:20 I posted my summary of playing it.
The Achievements support this, with me getting Wake Up Call Unlocked: Apr 19, 2011 10:21pm and Lunacy Unlocked: Apr 20, 2011 3:13am. Just shy of 5 hours.
To give an idea of how much I was “storming through it” I managed to get Ship Overboard and Portrait of a Lady in my playthrough, which generally suggests I was exploring around and not high-tailing it for the finish.
This was all following a 12 hour work day at the early hours of the morning, so I was being a bit THE DUMB at times, and yet still… around 5 hours. Don’t know what to say.
20/04/2011 at 14:50 JackShandy says:
Are you including co-op in that time?
20/04/2011 at 17:32 Flobulon says:
Whilst I believe you, I find this very very odd. I don’t understand how you could finish a first playthrough in ~5 hours.
21/04/2011 at 03:36 Hidden_7 says:
I believe you too, but it’s one of those situations where I’m a little baffled.
Personally I finished the game in six hours, but I know I missed stuff. I didn’t intentionally try to rush, but I missed pretty much every side thing there was. Which is odd, since it’s usually my style to go off the beaten path looking for stuff. I blame Valve’s subtle signposting; in other games it’s quite obvious where the game wants me to go, so I go everywhere else first, in Portal 2 (and other Valve games) I feel like I’ve decided to go the direction that they wanted me to go. Oh well, just stuff to catch on the second playthrough.
Another friend beat it in 8ish, but he managed to get the side stuff, and more importantly, actively tried to get side stuff. He spent a lot of time trying to stuff himself into every crack in the wall he could find.
Yet another friend claims to have beaten it in four. I found this shocking, though I believe him. I asked if he had been skipping stuff, and he said no, not really he just “never got stuck.” Which… I mean, he IS pretty clever, I just wonder what that’d look like, what with him walking into a room and immediately knowing what to do, and then executing it flawlessly.
Err… the point being (I think) that I think the game CAN be beaten in four hours on a first playthrough, even without intentionally rushing. However that doesn’t mean it’s a four hour game. Those people are the exception, the top end of “fast playing” bell curve. Four hours is not reflective of the average person’s experience, which I’d wager would probably be closer to my time.
20/04/2011 at 14:15 Kelduum Revaan says:
7.6 hours for me so far, and I’m at chapter 8 or so… spent some time exploring and being randomly stumped by simple stuff.
Also, Steam says I have 1402 hours in EVE Online since I bought it there in the thanksgiving sale, the year before last.
If that’s being underestimated, I hate to think just how much time it actually is…
20/04/2011 at 14:21 Betamax says:
It’s funny, I had the same reaction to reading how x amount of people were completing the entirety of DA2 in 20 hours or less. Some people just play games at a much faster rate I guess, but I’ll never understand it. It’s perhaps even more odd in the case of a game like Portal which is over relatively quickly anyway.
20/04/2011 at 15:03 Archonsod says:
Amazing thing about the relative anonymity the internets provide is that people tend to be far less honest than they would be face to face. Who’da thunk it?
20/04/2011 at 16:14 Wulf says:
Also, I have no trouble with DA2 being shorter to be honest, so long as it’s fun and I never, ever have to visit the Deep Roads again (ever!). That’s why I’ve been tempted by DA2, whereas I was seriously disappointed with the 60 hour slog of DA1, which utterly killed it for me. I got to the Deep Roads and just gave up. I found the game a bit boring to that point, so my frustration at the Deep Roads just blew everything out of proportion, and I ended up hating it.
So, yeah, I’m actually glad that DA2 is shorter, very glad, since it means potentially no Deep Roads. There are no Deep Roads in DA2, right? So… yeah, I keep pondering over picking that up. I wish the werewolves had made a proper return appearance though. Regardless… DA2′s shortness is a blessing in my book.
20/04/2011 at 16:35 Bloodloss says:
I also have this reaction but the huge amount of people swearing up and down that it’s true has me doubting my reaction. I just play games like a sloth, it would seem. Portal 2 took me 9-10 hours… I can’t really fathom how people did it in 4. Surely that would mean they went into a room, instantly, and I mean instantly, saw what needed to be done, and immediately did it. Repeat 40-60 times. I didn’t even have a huge amount of trouble on many of the rooms… so yeah, I don’t really get it.
And it’s not that I just suck at puzzle games; take Mass Effect 2 for instance. A friend of mine claims he beat it in 12 hours and also claimed to not rush through it. This utterly baffled me, I simply refused to believe it. Most people seemed to do it in 20-30 hours. My playtime? 60 hours. Yep. Again, I don’t think I recall a single fight or area in that game giving me significant trouble, so it’s pretty strange. Maybe I just have frequent seizures, black out for hours at a time, and don’t realise it?
20/04/2011 at 17:24 drplote says:
I’m not done with Portal 2 yet, but there’s definitely been quite a few places in it where I’ve sat still for a while just to hear what Wheatley or Glados will say. In particular, there’s a really long bit of speech from Wheatley where he says he’ll do something that’s really up to you to do, and if you just go ahead and do it rather than listen to him prattle on in his attempt, you’d easily shave off 3 minutes. I can see where if you were just running from goal to goal, your playtime could shave off probably an hour over the course of the game just from that.
Also, just looking for secret areas, whether they’re actually there or not (in fact, ESPECIALLY if they’re not there) can add quite a bit of time. A few of the secrets I’ve found have been pretty obvious, so just saying “I found secret , so I must not be speeding along” isn’t necessarily a good indicator of how much time it might take someone who is actively checking the nooks and crannies.
That said, I don’t think a slowpoke like me who checks every nook and cranny and sits around waiting to hear all the dialog (including the “hurry up!” bits) is a very good representation of the average game length.
20/04/2011 at 21:56 bleeters says:
@ Wulf
DA2 does feature the deep roads again, yes. Sorry. It’s a whole lot shorter though, and actually features some story importance, rather than having the player slog through darkspawn until the very end, when something interesting happens.
20/04/2011 at 14:23 Frantics says:
anyone else finding it increasingly hard to give a shit about what noisy entitled dickheads care about on the internet? would annoy me if it was worth caring about or any of the issues marginally important
thanks for the WiT john, well written and hiding story details definitely the way to go with a game like this. every time I play a bit more something great happens – accompanied by voice acting, writing and animation that shames most games I’ve played.
easily one of the best experiences gaming’s given me so far. i stopped to watch the turret manufacturing bays and pretty much everything cool for far too long so it’s taking me a fair amount of time, though I think my steam count is wrong saying 6 hours to the start of chapter 7, feels like quite a bit more.
with that said anyone get the occasional nagging feeling that for many of the best sections of play they may as well be making a cgi movie as you just watch, move and barely interact? don’t think this even a bad thing, no-one does first person storytelling and detail like valve. it’s like a wonderful harder edged pixar. could watch the robot animations and room rearranging all day
20/04/2011 at 14:24 Item! says:
I remain utterly bewildered by the sheer amount of venom directed at Valve for making (and marketing) a video game.
I also profess similar bafflement at the lack of basic reading comprehension displayed by those who remained determined to accuse RPS of “fanboyism”.
On topic: I have been playing for around 5-6 hours and am some way in to Act 2. Not sure where this puts me in the league table of SpeedPortling, nor do I much care as I have relished every second.
20/04/2011 at 14:26 darthmajor says:
All this is obviously a foreshadowing for portal 3, hinting to the fact that portals not only open holes in space, but time as well. I don’t know why all the confusion really…
20/04/2011 at 17:57 PanzerVaughn says:
No no, its going to be Portal 2: Episode 1.
20/04/2011 at 14:34 Optimaximal says:
It would be fantastic if The Director was actually at work, deciding on random rooms for you to experience…
It would tie in with GLaDOS wanting to challenge the user and might be a credible explanation for the number of lifts/level loads.
20/04/2011 at 14:38 Jad says:
Of course the timer is broken. It’s also been broken in the other way too. Since it counts the amount of time an exe is open, if you don’t quit out of a game when you take a break from it, you can vastly pump up the timing. A friend of mine bought SpaceChem solely because he saw that I apparently had put 20+ hours into it just a day or so after I bought it and figured if I liked it that much he’d have to get it. It’s a great game so it worked out in the end, but I really had only played about an hour before going to bed and accidentally left it on.
Worse was when Call of Pripyat crashed to desktop on me: apparently the xray.exe process continued running and I ended up with 96 hours played in Steam, when I’ve really only put in, at max, 10 hours. It’s currently the “most played” game in my Steam list, and I’ve just barely gotten to the second of the three zones in the game.
20/04/2011 at 14:43 CMaster says:
It also does things sometimes like track ancillary programs that are started up.
It’s claimed very long times on Company of Heroes (because relicdownloader kept running) or Bad Company 2 (because of punkbuster).
20/04/2011 at 14:39 Eddy9000 says:
If you believe the stats then I’m now the average gamer, 34 years of age with a full time job and a kid. Honestly if a game is more than 10 hours long then by the time I manage to finish it I’ve forgotten what was happening at the beginning.
Games like fallout (clocked 50 hours over the last year) get around this by not having much of a central plot and being about experiencing that character within an interesting world, and offering mini narratives as side quests that can be dipped in and out of. Dragon age I just couldn’t finish, simply lost the consistency of the narrative through my forced piecemeal playing habits.
Well done valve for getting the pacing and quality-quantity balance just right for the gamer with a job.
20/04/2011 at 16:39 Nick says:
Then maybe, just maybe.. you shoud play the vast majority of games that are catered towards your desires and ignore the longer ones rather than wishing they too were shorter.
20/04/2011 at 19:13 ResonanceCascade says:
Well, Nick, I would hope the people whining about Portal 2 would take the same advice with regards to “short” games as well.* :)
*not that I consider Portal 2 a remotely short game by modern standards. When I look at the last 5 FPS campaigns I played, I logged 8 hours in Crysis 2, 5 hours in CODblops, 5 hours in Singularity, and 4 hours in Homefront. It took me just under 8 to finish Portal 2 and I haven’t even touched the co-op yet.
20/04/2011 at 14:43 Deano2099 says:
Some people just play a lot faster than others and really don’t realise it. I’m on the far end of slow, but when some people say “oh I took my time” what they really mean is “I usually rush through games as fast as possible, skipping cut-scenes and conversations, but for this one I didn’t”
Until you actually watch other people play, you don’t realise the huge differences.
20/04/2011 at 16:44 Wulf says:
So much to say on this.
And I find myself agreeing with your opinions all the time, it’s entertaining, and once again I’m replying to your post with a “Yes I agree!” and a long ramble as to why that is. I’m sorry, you must be getting tired of me doing that.
So, I was elucidated to this fact when I was playing Guild Wars co-op with a friend, and I tend to play things slow, look for all the secrets, and find amazing things. My friend, on the other hand, was the rush to the finish sort, he follows the map directions, and he wants to get things done as quickly as possible, and by comparison I take a leisurely stroll.
The problem with this was that our gameplay styles were incompatible, as we found out, and I could pretty much no longer co-op with him in anything as I came to find out. He’d rush ahead so fast and have such little communication about it that I’d actually become very confused about what was going on. No laying traps as a Ranger, no strategies other than build wars which he knew worked, and generally… I just got confused.
I have health issues, I do get slightly motion sick, and due to various factors I even get confused if things around me move too fast for me to keep up with, I completely lose track of everything, this leads to me locking up and doing nothing. I had frequent lock-ups when playing alongside him and he couldn’t understand why it was, and I frequently reassured him that it wasn’t his fault, and when we decided not to co-op, he felt bad about it, and it took me ages to explain that it was just a difference in how we played, that people aren’t born equal and don’t do everything the same way.
The problem was was that he assumed that I already knew all he knew, and that my play style would naturally be the same as his, but it wasn’t. And when he actually did stop to slow down and let me wander, interesting things happened. He said that I had a talent for finding the most epic dead ends ever. See, in Guild Wars, there are these beautiful vistas you can look out over, incredible sights, but you actually have to explore to find them. You don’t have to be after the Cartographer title or any such nonsense, you just have to have the desire to look around.
When I play, I take it slow and when I see a group of enemies, I plan my strategies. I do the same thing in Magicka – one of my favourite Magicka mechanics is the minefield and other, similar things, because I like setting traps, I love creating a gauntlet of horrible things that a group of mobs have to run through before they can even reach me. And when I’ve played Champions Online, I’m a big fan of crowd control because gives me a chance to work with my power synergies to build up my nasty stuff without being swamped.
Now, when playing Portal 2, if I saw anything suspicious I’d investigate it, I’d do that and then I’d go back, I’d explore all paths available to me and check out every nook and cranny, even if there wasn’t an advantage. Sometimes I’d even figure out how to do things I’m not supposed to which would end with very entertaining results. This was true in Portal 2 as well. “That was interesting! Not helpful. But interesting!” I said that or something like it more than a few times, and I liked finding unusual ways to do things, too. Great stuff.
But some people will just blow through the game in a linear path and not want to do that, they’ll just move quickly and go from place to place without even realising that there might be places to explore, they’re given a linear path to follow, so they just follow it without ever asking any questions. SPOILERS FOLLOW. When GLaDOS asked me to come and run a test chamber when I was escaping … I actually had to stop and consider what I wanted to do. Did I want to continue escaping, or did I want to check out that tantalising test chamber? SPOILERS END.
ArenaNet found they had an interesting problem with Guild Wars 2 as well. A number of their focus group folks when beginning to play the game had no idea where they were supposed to go. The classical conditioning of WoW had gotten to them, so they ran around looking for quest NPCs and found none, they checked the entire village and there were no quest-givers and they complained about this. ArenaNet’s response was pretty much this: “Had you took a look just to your right, there are evil bandits destroying stores of food. [Or something.] Why didn’t you try to stop that from happening?” They replied that they didn’t know they were supposed to.
Some people are, indeed, like robots. Wildly efficient and amazingly skilful, but never asking any questions in the process.
So ArenaNet put in the scouts, then the focus group members talked to the scouts and ran off to do the dynamic events. You won’t have to talk to the scouts yourself, of course, it’s an option. But some people will need that linear path to follow. It’s just a difference in playstyle, some will do the mad rush along the linear path, and some will get off the path every chance they get.
20/04/2011 at 14:43 trjp says:
I’ve just taken a peek at my ‘played’ times on Steam and they’re often clearly nonsensical.
I have < 1 hour played on a game I've gotten every achievement in (and recently too) – and comparing Steam's played time to Raptr's (which should be less accurate given the way it works) I've generally got LESS time clocked in Steam (it should be the other way around!)
20/04/2011 at 15:05 Archonsod says:
Yeah. My first clue for that was when playing Civ V and the “last played” part of the client gave me a date three days in the future.
Either that or I’d discovered the hidden “time manipulation” tech.
20/04/2011 at 15:12 shoptroll says:
My favorite is the time Magicka crashed on me, but the process was still running. I didn’t realize it until a day or two later that Steam was showing me as playing Magicka despite no Magicka task icon was in the task bar.
20/04/2011 at 14:44 Sirico says:
sv_unlockedchapters
map d4_Bigbossbadaboom_03.bsp
Hey guys I completed it in 5 mins god your all noobs
20/04/2011 at 14:44 Swanky says:
John, quit feeding the trolls.
20/04/2011 at 14:50 Frantics says:
argh what’s up with the comments here it’s being really annoying
yeah, anyone else finding it increasingly hard to give a shit about what noisy entitled people care about on the internet? would annoy me if it was worth caring about or any of the issues marginally important
thanks for the WiT john, well written and hiding story details definitely the way to go with a game like this. every time I play a bit more something great happens, and jesus that voice acting and writing. just shows how amateur most games are in that department.
easily one of the best experiences I’ve found in gaming. i stopped to watch those turret manufacturing bays and pretty much everything cool for far too long so it’s taking me a fair amount of time, though I think my steam count is wrong saying 6 hours to the start of chapter 7, feels like quite a bit more.
with that said anyone get the occasional nagging feeling that for many of the best sections of play they may as well be making a cgi movie as you just watch, move and barely interact? don’t think this even a bad thing, no-one does first person storytelling and detail like valve. i like the hard edge everything has in terms of atmosphere, and could watch the robot animations and room rearranging all day
20/04/2011 at 14:52 magnus says:
Probably they’re people who’ve downloaded so many torrents they now confuse the time it takes to download a Portal 2 torrent with the time it actually takes to complete the game.
20/04/2011 at 15:11 poop says:
DISLIKE HOW A GAME IS TOO SHORT <- YOU FUCKING PIRATED IT
i like the game but please shut the hell up
20/04/2011 at 14:53 Robert says:
I’m sorry, I can’t read the comments over all the: “HOW DARE YOU QUESTION MY OPINION, YOU MUST BE A FANBOI/HATER. RAEG” in it.
20/04/2011 at 14:55 AdamK117 says:
To feed to the fire:
Stephen Merchant was cast pretty well in hindsight?
20/04/2011 at 15:05 Ovno says:
ooo don’t get me started….
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1850764
Warning may contain spoilers….
20/04/2011 at 15:46 thegooseking says:
I watched a couple of episodes of The Office and I loved his minor role in Hot Fuzz, but other than that I’ve pretty much ignored Stephen Merchant, so I was taking it without all the associations of knowing that this is Stephen Merchant.
That being the case, I thought he gave it a good performance on his own, but I don’t think the chemistry between Wheatley and GLaDOS was quite right.
20/04/2011 at 16:04 Deano2099 says:
Yes and no. I thought he was really good, but he’s Stephen Merchant. Voice is too distinctive and he’s playing that same sort of character, made it harder to get in to the game.
20/04/2011 at 16:49 Wulf says:
…and again I agree with Deano.
I’m not going to make a big deal over it, but I did slightly prefer the original voice rather than the new one, as the stand-in voice wasn’t quite so OTT. I did get used to it quickly, but I think that the original might have been better. It didn’t make that much of a difference though because despite being a bit OTT, a good job was done of the voice acting.
20/04/2011 at 14:55 Urthman says:
I sure hope Valve is ignoring all the butt-hurt idiots better than Mr. Walker is.
20/04/2011 at 15:07 Archonsod says:
The joy of running your own site is you can rip the piss out of idiots all day long and the suckers just keep coming. I suspect this is pretty much why most websites actually get formed in the first place.
20/04/2011 at 14:56 starclaws says:
Ya while some people just press the forward key and stop to look at the doodads, ferns, and screens every 10 feet. I bunny hop or 2 directional run or some other form of speed boosting to get the the next point in every game I play. Games are sooo linear that you are forced into the story usually anyways so it isn’t like you missed shit. I could care less about easter eggs as well and little scribbling notes on the walls. I can go find those on the second playthrough (since you basically have to play through more than once to get even half of your moneys worth).
I bought the game for 3D FPS Action Puzzling. I didn’t buy it for interactive 3D art or an interactive 3D Story or because it has lasers.
20/04/2011 at 15:09 Neut says:
["I have failed to realise that bullying someone about their grammar is really tedious and argument provoking. Especially because it's just something Americans do, for various reasons which I would know if I wasn't being so tediously Literal. I will try and avoid doing it again." - Ed]
20/04/2011 at 15:12 starclaws says:
["I have failed to realise that I can't insult someone directly, even I was provoked a bit. - Ed]
20/04/2011 at 15:38 StingingVelvet says:
The funny thing about that “error” is that it has you saying the complete opposite of what you meant to. It’s odd that people consistently make that mistake, like saying “I can’t do that” instead of “I can do that,” which would be pretty crazy.
20/04/2011 at 16:06 Kieron Gillen says:
It’s at times like this which makes me realise that when British mock the Americans for not understanding Irony, we’re living in a glass house.
(I’ll admit, this one bugs me. Because if a whole country of people are doing it, my response is to go and try and work out *why* they do it rather than just saying they’re wrong. The answers’ only a google away, so there’s no bloody excuse.)
KG
20/04/2011 at 16:06 Dozer says:
I’m intrigued by your attitude to gaming, Starclaw. You make it sound like there’s a boss hovering over your shoulder demanding that you extract entertainment from the game as quickly as possible. Why did you say you’ve ‘got’ to play through twice to get ‘value for money’? You’ve purchased the game! You own it now. There’s no pressure, you can play as many or as few times as you feel like.
Playing Portal just for the puzzle-solving does seem a bit like going to a restaurant and buying a meal and carefully separating 2/3rds of your food onto a side plate and not eating it. While wolfing down the remaining 3rd
20/04/2011 at 16:53 Wulf says:
…those are the most appreciably polite edits I’ve ever seen.
Reminds me of when I got edited once though. I did slip up at the time. I freely admit that, I’m prone to it, but because it was pointed out to me and in a way that wasn’t insulting, I did learn from that.
There are sooo many Internet forums who could learn from this. You have no idea.
I just wanted to say that, anyway. Sorry if I was wasting your time with this, but… yeah. It takes a patient person to be that kindly with edits and that’s the kind of thing that deserves praise in my opinion.
20/04/2011 at 18:41 Deano2099 says:
I had no clue it was an Americanism. I just thought it was bad English. Dunno what the person pointing in out wrote, but I watch a lot of US TV and didn’t know this was a thing.
20/04/2011 at 18:55 Neut says:
Ah sorry guys :(
/handslapped
20/04/2011 at 15:03 toady00 says:
I’ve played through the single player 3 times now. The last time I used a stop watch and clocked in at 2 hours and 36 minutes from start to end, including load times. I still stumbled on some levels here and there, and feel sure I could probably do it again at closer to 2 hours.
Which really makes me wonder if I am missing something. There are some videos of gameplay from before launch that appear to be single player, but I haven’t come across them. Like the video with all the orange goo and the long row of spiked smashers that has to be timed correctly. I was really looking forward to that level, but I never saw it. Maybe it is a coop level, but if it is single player than I definitely missed some section.
20/04/2011 at 15:08 starclaws says:
Portal 1 maybe?
20/04/2011 at 16:00 Spliter says:
Those levels appear in portal 2 as belonging to the old facility.
Btw how the hell did you manage do do it in less than 3 hours?
I nocliped through all the puzzles stopping only on interesting parts like the escape or certain parts of dialogs, and still spent 4 hours on it.
20/04/2011 at 16:58 Wulf says:
I think I must have skipped the orange goo, too…
Huh!
Time to play through it again! :D
20/04/2011 at 17:48 Flobulon says:
If it is possible to skip the orange goo chambers/spheres, then that would account for maybe 30/45 minutes.
20/04/2011 at 19:18 toady00 says:
Oh I played the levels with orange gel, I just never saw that specific level I was referring to. I actually just played through it again since this post, and tried to record the video to put up on youtube. Unfortunately I didn’t realize that you have to purchase fraps to record for longer than 30 seconds and so I have nothing to show for it.
PS. I did take my time the first time through. I listened to all the dialog, looked at all the signs and actually stopped to take a couple of screen shots of just how epic some levels where. The first run, taking my time took about 6 hours. The last run took right at 2 hours.
20/04/2011 at 15:10 shoptroll says:
4 hours according to Steam, although I’m only just getting started in Chapter 5. I’m certainly baffled as to how people are beating the game in this amount of time.
The internal Steam timer is a little on the flakey side. I know it rounds upward in certain circumstances, and their services seem to be getting hammered (girlfriend had a hell of a time trying to get her password retrieved so she could get the PS3 to integrate) so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the stats gathering is way off for some people.
What would be nice, is if they had a proper stats page for the game by now like they used to do with Half-Life 2 and TF2. I’d be very interested to see how long it’s taking people to complete puzzles and how far people are getting. The best completion metric we have right now is the achievements… which would certainly indicate that only 50% of the owners have progressed past chapter 5. People certainly aren’t stopping and smelling the roses, there’s a handful of option achievements that are pretty obvious and 35% or less of players have those currently.
I wouldn’t rule out an AI director either. The game is built on the L4D branch of Source. Although, with the rumors of rampant piracy on the console side and the mysterious two patches prior to release, I have to wonder if maybe the console pirates are getting a smaller slice of the game?
20/04/2011 at 15:11 neofit says:
Who cares that it’s not 4 hours but 8? Still very short.
20/04/2011 at 16:09 Dozer says:
Well, so was Napoleon but he didn’t let that stop him.
20/04/2011 at 16:38 Kaira- says:
Well, Napoleon wasn’t actually short, he was about average height or even a little big taller than average man at the age.
20/04/2011 at 16:48 Dozer says:
Just like Portal 2 then!
20/04/2011 at 23:14 Teddy Leach says:
That was amazing.
21/04/2011 at 09:55 MonkeyMonster says:
Genghis Kahn was veritcally challenged, use him next time ;)
20/04/2011 at 15:13 Donjonson says:
Huh. Well. I’m enjoying a brilliantly made game, I enjoyed the ARG (though I obviously didn’t enjoy it as closely or as angrily as a lot of people seemed to) and soon I’ll be enjoying the co-op… this whole thing is KARAZY out of proportion. It’s a good size, isn’t it? ISN’T IT?
20/04/2011 at 15:13 ChainsawCharlie says:
Not complaining about the length, but I really though that this had been closer to 15h. Must have misunderstood the interviews
20/04/2011 at 15:56 Spliter says:
it is, 7-8 hours of single player and about just as much coop. in total should be rounding 13-16 hours
20/04/2011 at 15:16 HermitUK says:
It took me five hours, which I’ve estimated from three different sources in the last thread. I do not care if you think this is too short, or I missed stuff, or rushed it and missed the point, or whatever. No, I didn’t skip past dialogue. No, massive chunks of the game did not vanish as I played. At no point did I think to myself “God, this is short”.
It’s the best game I’ve played this year, without a doubt. I’m already playing through a second time and poking around a bit more – Already came across a couple of Rattman’s hidden spaces that I missed last time. And the Final Transmission achievement was a nice touch (brought back amusing memories of waving radios round the Portal 1 maps at 2am to find the hidden broadcasts for the first ARG :p).
If anything, I’d say that it’s the puzzles themselves that explain the time differences. I like to think I’m pretty good at puzzle games. Certainly in Portal 2 I had to stop and think about the puzzle chambers but never really got stuck for any length of time. Proabably helps that I replayed Portal 1 less than a week ago.
I’m certainly not saying the game was too easy, and I thought the challenge was pitched about right, especially with the greater focus on story. I’m just saying that at no point did I become properly stumped on a puzzle for a significant length of time.
That said, I’m hoping that Valve will release some properly difficult challenge maps at some point. The Overclocker achievement for doing GLaDOS’s chamber 10 in under 70 seconds was good fun, so more of that could be interesting. But I also noticed in the commentary a lot of talk of testers getting irritated by especially hard chambers when they wanted to continue the story. Those chambers sound like an excellent challenge, and I want them :p
20/04/2011 at 15:21 eduh says:
between single player, developer commentary. finding the easter eggs, achievements, co op, you have dozens of hours of entertainment.
the game is a master piece, just a few minutes ago i found an hidden room with turrets singing, while noclipping through the levels.
Its one thing to say you didnt enjoy, but if you enjoyed the game there is plenty of stuff for you to explore.
20/04/2011 at 15:23 starclaws says:
Oh and by the way … On youtube with a quick search. There’s already a speed run on youtube. No where near true speed run quality but he still completed almost half the game in 1-2 hours. I am sure he can finish the rest in another 3-4 at his above average pace. Totaling around 6 hours I’d think. Just a guess though. In the coming weeks when true speed runners start kicking in and recording though I am sure they can get it in under 5 hours.
20/04/2011 at 15:28 Joshua says:
Someone speedrunned Portal 1 in 10 minutes.
20/04/2011 at 15:29 Myros says:
Maybe it’s just me but it just feels ‘off’ to me to see journalists spending so much time defending the product of a for-profit company. So ok metacritic users tend to hyperbole, agreed … but what is that to RPS? Why are you taking on Valves detractors? Arent they more than capable of doing that themselves?
According to reports they have already sold over 4 million copies, so why would they (and RPS) even care.
20/04/2011 at 15:37 shoptroll says:
Remember when Fox News was making grossly inaccurate statements about Bulletstorm? Is that much different than people making grossly inaccurate statements about the supposed brevity of Portal 2?
EDIT: I expect journalists to cut through the bullshit and shed light on the truth. If people are torpedoing the user score on the game over bullshit unrelated to the gameplay itself I expect someone to say something. Just like I expected someone to speak out when Spore received the same treatment over DRM.
20/04/2011 at 15:50 poop says:
fox news is a *sigh* major news source in the us and unhappy people on the internet are unhappy people on the internet
20/04/2011 at 16:12 Deano2099 says:
Because those detractors were:
Posting those comments on RPSs review
Saying some of the statements in that review were straight up wrong
Saying RPS had been paid off for a good review because of the adverts on the site
Complaining that RPS wasn’t covering certain ‘negative’ aspects of the game because they’re Valve fanboys.
I think that makes a rebuttal quite prudent.
20/04/2011 at 16:22 Dozer says:
I don’t think RPS is trying to persuade the ranting detractors that they’re wrong. I think they’re talking to the marginal people, the open-minded ones who would really enjoy Portal 2 if they get it. The ones who could also be dissuaded by the ‘Valve are cheating scum’ mob.
It’s hard to persuade someone that they’re wrong. It’s much more useful to persuade someone that someone else is wrong. I think that’s what John’s been doing these days!
20/04/2011 at 16:24 poop says:
the great thing about running a website is that you can choose what to publish, honestly i think rps should probably have given all of this portal 2 fact checkin and un/intentional defense the miss unless they were setting out to make people angry in the comments thread
20/04/2011 at 15:53 Spliter says:
I played it through on noclip only listening to commentary and sometimes stopping on my favourite bits (there were quite many of them actually).
Started at 22:00 pm, ended at 2:00 am (pun intended), you do the math.
I also clocked my first single player a bit over 7 hours.
Today after work I’ll try out the coop with a friend see how it goes.
20/04/2011 at 15:53 madAzrael says:
Dont get angry at me, but i finished the singleplayer campaign yesterday in 4 hours 50 min. Based on the first and last achievment. And this is no error. the time is correct
I didnt speed and i didnt miss anything, because today i replayed it to get some achievements.
i think it is short, but it’s okay, because there is a coop campaig! yay!
i definitely dont regret buying it. it is a great game!
But please dont say you need at least 7 hours. That’s bullshit :/
20/04/2011 at 17:05 Wulf says:
Not everyone plays at the same pace, so it can hardly be bullshit. 6-8 hours seems like a good estimate for the majority. You got through it a little faster than that, and if you really did complete it and get absolutely everything in that time, viewing all content, finding all hidden locations, doing the areas that can be skipped over and all that, then you did better than the average. Really, good for you!
But it’s hardly bullshit if there are people who will take more time than that.
20/04/2011 at 20:31 madAzrael says:
I didnt see all secrets on the first playthrough and i never meant that by saying i didnt missed anything.
I’m an experienced gamer and found the puzzles too easy overall. Where are the challenges like in Portal1? I loved that. I miss it!
Let me rephrase my point:
Please dont say that at least 7 hours are needed to complete the game ‘properly’. That’s bullshit :/
20/04/2011 at 15:54 Jetsetlemming says:
I spent the entire last 24 hours, minus sleeping and other misc. functions, playing Portal 2. After one run through of coop and one of sp, my account timer said 13.2 hours, which felt pretty accurate. Coop took 6 hours, we started at 12:30 when the game unlocked and played until 6:30 in the morning. By the end we could barely talk, let alone solve things, but somehow we blundered through. Best coop experience ever.
20/04/2011 at 16:00 silverhammermba says:
According to Steam, I played Portal 2 for 2.9 hours yesterday, even though I had the game open from 2:30pm to 11pm (I took a few long breaks and just paused the game).
20/04/2011 at 16:03 NegativeZero says:
I wish I had enough spare time these days to wring everything I can out of a game before something new comes out. Got enough disposable income to be able to afford anything but not enough disposable time to enjoy it. I find I tend to try and push my way through stuff as fast as I can, but also try to be thorough.
That said for a game as good as Portal I make time.
20/04/2011 at 17:18 thegooseking says:
That’s when you prioritise. I wanted to take the time to appreciate Portal 2, and arguably that is, as John said, because I spent £27 on it. I’m less likely to take my time over a game I picked up for £3 in a sale, because I literally don’t have as much invested in it. As a result, I have a massive pile of games I haven’t finished. But I’ve finished just about every game I paid full price for.
21/04/2011 at 00:06 Creeping Death says:
I envy you. I fall into the “too much time, no cash” group of people :(
Oh well, massive Steam backlog here I come!
21/04/2011 at 08:26 Dervish says:
You guys realize that honoring sunk costs is irrational, right? The amount of time/care you spend on games should be based on expected return–how good you think the game will be. It’s inaccurate to even call the price you paid an investment, because it’s not as if you’re turning that investment into any sort of gain. Whatever you get out of a game is irrespective of what you paid for it. If anything counts as your investment, it would be your time.
20/04/2011 at 16:06 Milky1985 says:
They probably fiddled with the timers to fiddle with the ammount of CPU’s gained during the arg and forgot to put it back :p
20/04/2011 at 17:08 Wulf says:
…
…
Hahaha…
Hahahahahahahaa…
Haaahahahahahaha…
*mad facepalm laugh ensues.*
You know what just occurred to me? The reason that the GLaDOS@Home countdown timer didn’t go as fast as it was supposed to is because of these timer bugs. So if someone spent 11 hours in a game, it was only counting them as having spent two hours in it, largely ignoring the actual amount of time that they had the game open for. Combine that with the minimal turn-out of people that chose to do the GLaDOS@Home thing, and everything makes sense.
20/04/2011 at 17:11 Tei says:
Quick!, somehone edits the Wikipedia article for irony and adds this!
20/04/2011 at 16:12 der jester says:
Anyone think that the timer was thrown off by the early release? Mayhap it didn’t start clicking time until the actual release date?
Sadly still waiting for my copy to arrive.
20/04/2011 at 17:21 thegooseking says:
Actual release was… 7am PST, right? Which was, let’s see, 3pm in Britain? No, then my timer would have been even lower than the 85 minutes it did show, since I finished it at about 3:30.
Nice idea, though.
21/04/2011 at 00:32 bleeters says:
It unlocked in Britain at around half five in the morning.
20/04/2011 at 16:13 Nethlem says:
Just once again an great example of gamers/the internet beeing a bunch of annoying little kids.
There is ALLWAYS something to complain about, no matter how harmless it is..
The worst thing is that even the gaming press is jumping on to profit from all this hype.
http://uk.kotaku.com/5793317/did-valve-just-take-everyone-for-a-ride
One such example… the whole article is pure flamebait to generate some controversy which in turn generate page hits. At least some people are keeping a level head..
Haven’t played portal2 yet but judging from the reactions on the internet so far the game has either to be God packed in a piece of code or the devil packed in a piece of code..
20/04/2011 at 18:26 MCM says:
Harmless? If ripping off your customers is harmless, I suppose.
If I buy a $50 game I want it last more than 10 hours. What I find ridiculous is everyone arguing about whether it takes 4 hours or 8 hours to finish.
I mean, the total loss of perspective by RPS here is astounding.
The game is too short for $50. I don’t care that 6 hours is “half again as many as 4″, ooh you really showed him, didn’t you? If I paid $50 for a 6 hour game I’d want to find some way to get the other 15 minimum hours I expect out of a game. Like driving to Bellevue and… anyway.
Seriously $50 for a 8-10 hour game? This is why people started pirating games in the first place.
21/04/2011 at 00:08 Creeping Death says:
“Just once again an great example of gamers/the internet beeing a bunch of annoying little kids.
There is ALLWAYS something to complain about, no matter how harmless it is..”
I wouldn’t say this behaviour is only found in gamers. Everyone does it, it’s just unfortunate that games are also really vocal about it on the sites that we, as gamers, visit.
20/04/2011 at 16:14 Deano2099 says:
I started yesterday and haven’t slept. Still haven’t finished it. Starting to figure it out now. The yellow and blue openings are connected somehow yes? Very arty.
20/04/2011 at 16:16 Radiant says:
Ok so people completed it in 4 hours.
So what?
It’s not that deep an issue.
And just to end this internet argument I’m now going to mention Hitler.
20/04/2011 at 18:35 MCM says:
It is if they spent $50 on it and aren’t happy about that.
21/04/2011 at 00:09 Creeping Death says:
If they are so worried about wasting their precious $50, there was nothing stopping them from waiting 24 hours to hear other peoples reports of the length before investing.
20/04/2011 at 16:21 Lumi says:
Completion took about 7-8 hours for me, because I loved to explore, listen the dialogue and mess around with the gel. Found quite a lot of secret stuff too, which made me a happy man. I later replayed some of the chapters to collect the last SP achievements, so overall “100%” completion on SP alone took me 14 hours.
Co-op seems pretty fun so far, even that the store thing is pretty silly. Though I’ve already unlocked 3 of the items from the store just by playing, so that’s quite curious.
Oh, and you cannot beat Portal 2 in 4 hours unless you use a walkthrough and skip the optional stuff.
20/04/2011 at 16:25 Dawngreeter says:
Sometimes I feel like my enjoyment in life is lessened by interacting with people. Or maybe other people diminish my life experience without interaction necessarily occurring. Like when I read their comments.
It is a problem. I can’t read EVE forums at all, for example. It can wreck my enjoyment of EVE like nobody’s business. I don’t think less of EVE, I just have a strong desire to separate myself from anything connected to such a toxic atmosphere. And I love EVE. I want to play it.
Similarly, I take weeks long breaks from keeping up with politics. I have a vested interested in knowing what’s going on with people who determine the circumstances under which I am to live but after a while I just can’t do it anymore. The batteries need recharging. And it’s not because of the bastard politicians, oh no. It’s because of the people who comment on them. I am ready for politicians being loathsome bastards. I am not ready for people voicing what I am sure they would call opinions. Being a hater doesn’t upset me. Many would call me one, under some circumstances. It’s not the criticism, it’s the content therein. Or rather, the profound lack of it. And the obvious, sickening reveling in voicing it that way.
I am not sure why I go around reading things I know will make me miserable, but I do it. And then I feel miserable. Normally I’d settle for a passive-aggressive conclusion to this tirade in which I’d thank people for putting so much effort into killing any and all sense of wonder and joy they can find in others. But, eh, I hate everyone too much for my aggression to stay passive. So fuck y’all, you empty husks of bile.
And I don’t even plan on playing Portal 2 any time soon.
20/04/2011 at 16:36 Donjonson says:
Aw dude, quarantine yourself for a week from the repugnance of political rhetoric and internet shite, and give Portal 2 a go. It’s a very, very, *very* good game. Go on.
20/04/2011 at 16:39 Dawngreeter says:
Oh, I expect it to be awesome, I’ll probably check it out in a couple of weeks, when my time schedule is a bit more relaxed. I’m just saying I have no vested interest in Portal 2 currently. Yet still, the Internet Bastards annoy me to no end.
20/04/2011 at 16:25 Chris D says:
If we’re going to spend all day arguing anyway…
Best puzzle game of 2011: Portal 2 or SpaceChem?
20/04/2011 at 16:46 Dozer says:
SpaceChem made me quit in frustration right before the end, when you get the factories you can’t alter the plumbing for.
20/04/2011 at 16:31 ds8k says:
Ok RPS, I like you guys, but damn. Would you like to know why I think it only took me five hours to beat Portal 2?
I’ll tell you why. I started the game up at noon. That’s 12:00PM.
Then, the credits finished rolling at 5:15PM.
If I do my math properly, that gives me approximately five hours and 15 minutes.
20/04/2011 at 16:49 Recidivist says:
That’s 5 hour and 15 minutes. That still doesn’t explain why you think it took only 5 hours.
20/04/2011 at 16:33 thegooseking says:
Possible spoilers follow.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/thegooseking/stats/Portal2/?tab=achievements
Wake Up Call: 8:24 am
You Monster: +20 minutes
Undiscouraged: +4 minutes
Bridge Over Troubling Water: +30 minutes
SaBOTour: +40 minutes
Scanned Alone: +17 minutes
Stalemate Associate: +14 minutes (Act 1 total: 2hrs 5 mins)
Vertically Unchallenged: +44 minutes
Tater Tote: +22 minutes
Stranger Than Friction: +30 minutes
White Out: +25 minutes (note: I got stuck here and ran into a bug where I got the achievement before completing the puzzle) (Act 2 total: 2hrs 1 min)
Dual Pit Experiment: +67 minutes (including time spent solving the previous one)
Tunnel of Funnel + 59 minutes
The Part Where He Kills You: +18 minutes
Lunacy: +28 minutes (Act 3 total: 2hrs 52 minutes)
(end at 3:22 pm) (6hrs 58 mins total, not including intro and ending)
I can see some points where people might have done it faster than me (especially the White Out puzzle, because I spent quite a bit of time trying to do it the wrong way, whereas if people just did it the right way in the first place, they could have done it a lot faster), but I’m not seeing where people are shaving three hours off that time (for an average of 13 minutes faster per achievement, or on average doing the first two acts twice as fast, and the third act one and a half times as fast).
20/04/2011 at 16:45 Recidivist says:
Completed Co-Op in ~9 hours – (Best co-op game I have ever played.)
I am 2 or 3 puzzles into the bit with the gels on SP with around 7/8 hours played.
~20 hours of amazing campaign.
The only thing that disappoints me about Portal 2 is that it ends. I hope they continue to update it with new levels and I look forward to user created maps.
Also, those saying that this article is ‘fanboy-ish’ should have been drowned at birth. Shooting down your moronic, nonsensical ‘opinions’ (If that’s what you want to call them), is not fanboy-ism. They aren’t defending Portal 2 from criticism, they are defending it from your stupidity. Portal 2 does not deserve to suffer because of your lack of a brain. To those of you ‘quitting’ RPS because of these articles, you think anyone cares? That’s one less moron we have to suffer.
20/04/2011 at 16:50 Mario Figueiredo says:
Valve clearly increased the number of annoyed customers with this whole Portal 2 mess. The game being too short, the day 1 dlc, the console port, all are the typical fist clutching that comes as a result of disappointment. No doubt it’s trollish behavior, no doubt they are overreactions, but not anything we haven’t seen before by the same people that are now saying everyone overreacting is an idiot. It just depends on which company messed up and which game we are talking about. I’ve seen worse overreactions to EA messes, many of which don’t even come close to a) announcing a game will be released earlier if people buy and play a game bundle and b) the game being launched just a few hours earlier.
Valve messed up in my opinion with a poorly thought out marketing strategy for Portal 2 that ended producing a lot of flak. I sincerely hope they fire whoever thought out the utter nonsense that was the ARG/potato/whatever fiasco and go back to clear, simple message, non idiotic high-quality marketing campaigns they always have been known for. What I don’t like though is seeing the company being accused of scamming its customers. This is no longer just an opinion, as some like to hide behind. It’s an accusation. A grave one in fact, which, depending on the circumstances of how and where it was uttered, could earn them some well deserved jail time. Some people would do well commenting on a thread with the same level of responsibility required by them if they were sitting on an editor’s desk.
I don’t care much about the game length. To me it is in fact to be expected that a game the likes of Portal is bound to be relatively short. But can understand that this may weight on the decision of some people to only buy it later when it’s on sale. A recent article on RPS made me want to buy the game sooner than I was planning. I’ve decided to buy it next week. Not ever this week. I profoundly disagreed with Portal 2 campaign and thus will not add my number to their first week sales report.
20/04/2011 at 16:56 Dawngreeter says:
“I sincerely hope they fire whoever…”
Why do people say that? It can’t be “I hope they don’t do this again”? It has to be “I hope the person who did this thing I don’t like and his family become existentially endangered”?
I’m so glad you think people are commenting in inappropriate ways.
20/04/2011 at 16:58 Recidivist says:
“The game being too short, the day 1 dlc, the console port, ”
The game is not too short.
There is no day 1 dlc.
It is not a console port.
NEXT.
20/04/2011 at 17:00 Mario Figueiredo says:
@dawngreeter, fair point.
@recidivist, the game being or not too short is entirely subjective. It is in the eye of the beholder. 8 hours gameplay is short for me. It’s definitely not something I care about. But it is short. To you is not. And that is just fine. Just don’t produce “the game is not short” as if it was an universal truth. It isn’t.
20/04/2011 at 17:17 Wulf says:
I’d like to quote Cooper from the first page, who’s basically said what I’ve been saying but in a more eloquent and succinct way.
Cooper Said: Quantity =!= quality.
I’d take 6 fantastic hours over a 60 hour padded-out slog anyday.
Complaints about the brevity of a game are only meaningful if it’s also a bad game.
It’s detrimental to fixate over the amount of time that a good game lasts for if it’s actually fun from start to finish. Sure, they could’ve added padding in the form of repeated puzzles, annoying minigames, and so on, but they chose not to. It just goes smoothly from one set piece to the next. If I had fun from start to finish and I end up thinking of it as one of the best games I’ve ever played, the amount of time I was playing it for becomes irrelevant.
Whereas there are some games I’ve bought that have lasted me for weeks, but if I’m being honest I’ve likely only gotten an hour or two of enjoyment and fun out of them, and the rest was just monotonous and dull.
If we keep fixating on how short games are, then everything is just going to turn into World of Warcraft – an unforgiving grindfest with repeated content. And if that’s what people want for the future of single-player videogames, then so be it. But if that happens… count me out.
It deserves to be said again: “I’d take 6 fantastic hours over a 60 hour padded-out slog anyday.“
20/04/2011 at 17:25 thegooseking says:
@Wulf: Not only did Portal 2 not have repeated puzzles, it even had a joke at the expense of repeated puzzles. But did have a repeated “puzzle” in the course of that joke. Ah.
20/04/2011 at 19:00 Mario Figueiredo says:
Let’s see..
If quantity does not equal quality, which I agree, what does that mean to you exactly? That people can’t make decisions on a quantity versus quality basis? Or you really think that quantity and quality are two different things that can’t ever become related in a video game and one can never be considered in terms of the other?
An example: There’s this pastry you absolutely adhore. It can be sold in large and small sizes. The large size comes with a more competitive price. Wouldn’t you choose the larger? That is, wouldn’t you consider the larger a better deal… and more enjoyable?
You have been told before you have been producing a false dichotomy. But somehow you insist on this argument. What you are failing to see is that “quantity != quality” is simply a formal comparison between two terms. It does not describe the relation between them.
Like everyone else, for that matter. But that doesn’t say anything about games that are both long and enjoyable. You are only talking about games that are short and enjoyable. When someone complains the game is short — I’m here excluding anyone doing it for trolling purposes — they obviously wish the game was longer. Isn’t this obvious to you?
As such, some of us immediately turn into analysis mode: Do I wish to buy now a short and enjoyable game at X price, or do I prefer to wait a bit and buy it later at sales price?
This is so wrong I don’t even know where to start. Besides, didn’t you just say quantity and quality are not the same thing? What is it then?
20/04/2011 at 20:19 Recidivist says:
I loved it when you said
“This is so wrong I don’t even know where to start.?”
What Wulf said made sense. Everything that you said made little. You have the most backwards point of view I have ever seen.
Also, I agree with Quantity != Quality, but I don’t think that it is relevant to Portal 2. There was no issue with quantity, there was more content there than most other games. All of which was of amazing quality. Before you call me a Portal/Valve fanboy – I didn’t like Portal 1, and was hesitant to buy Portal 2 because of this. Portal 2 was just an amazing game.
20/04/2011 at 21:18 Mario Figueiredo says:
It totally doesn’t surprise me you couldn’t understand a thing of what I said.
But you should try…
20/04/2011 at 17:08 fallingmagpie says:
I completed the single player in 2 hours and 41 minutes and the co-op in 1 hour and 17 minutes and I got all the achievements, including ‘Speed Douche’. I did it by using rocket jumping like in Quake.
20/04/2011 at 17:17 Teddy Leach says:
… The timer is a lie.
20/04/2011 at 17:17 fallingmagpie says:
Oh, and for me ‘Could there be a big, ugly bug that’s skipping a chunk of game?’ is the only thing about this story that actually matters. Would be pretty funny if Valve had gone to all the trouble arranging the ARG to release the game early, and then it turned out they hadn’t QAed it properly.
20/04/2011 at 17:22 Juiceman says:
The game’s length is fine, whether it took you 4 hours or 8 hours. I loved the game, but I think if it was any longer it would of felt like it was just dragging on for the sake of it.
20/04/2011 at 17:34 The Magic says:
So much anger, so much rage… It makes me a sad bunny. So then I listen to the new Portal 2 music, and fall in love again.
oh yeah and Steam Timer says 6 hours, I count 8
20/04/2011 at 17:35 Dante says:
When I was downloading Portal a freind warned me that to verify the game cache because the strain on the steam servers when it was released meant some people had dropped files; could this explain the missing sections?
20/04/2011 at 17:45 rayne117 says:
Not a chance, I believe. When a file for a whole mission is missing the program can’t just “continue on” by skipping right over it.
20/04/2011 at 17:43 rayne117 says:
“People’s desperation to finish games quickly has always bemused me.”
Is it impossible to you that someone could like a game so much that they want to try and do EVERYTHING they can with it? You know, the “1000G” approach you mentioned. Last time I checked, a speedrun is a “thing you can do to further your playing of a game.”
20/04/2011 at 17:52 thegooseking says:
There’s nothing wrong with doing a speedrun. There is something wrong with doing a speedrun and then claiming that that’s just how long the game takes.
And given that speedruns are only really feasible with a good working knowledge of the environment and objectives, it’s also not something that I think people are going to do on day one.
20/04/2011 at 18:21 Tei says:
You confuse explorers with completionist. There are people that enjoy story on games more than gameplay or action, and like to explore the games to read and see all the lore. The drive is to know the world, not to collect points.
There are a lot of different type of players where you seems to see only 2.
20/04/2011 at 18:00 subedii says:
Reply fail
20/04/2011 at 18:18 Urael says:
Ah, Internet, you never fail to push that envelop of idiocy.
What should have been one of the brightest and most celebrated moments in this year’s gaming calendar is now tarnished by whining Kidults angry at Valve over precisely nothing, and accusing anyone who attempts to rebut the more ridiculous claims of subversive complicity (at best).
It’s practically a given that none of the pricks and trolls on this thread act that way in real life situations – making it a constant source of wonder to me how they don’t crush themselves beneath the weight of all that towering hypocrisy and double-standards. “My boss didn’t let me go home five minutes early like I wanted, so now I’m going to be a cunt on the Internet! Grr! Snarl!”
If it were me running this site I’d turn the commenting system off. I’ve been a gamer for nearly 30 years and never have I been less proud to say so.
20/04/2011 at 18:36 MCM says:
They’re angry over the fact that they spent $50 on a game that takes less than 10 hours to complete.
I’d be mad, too.
20/04/2011 at 19:42 Urael says:
You pay $50 for any game nowdays, you’re an idiot. Let alone pay that for a game who’s prior version lasted, what, four hours? I don’t know if anyone’s noticed but Valve haven’t exactly been chucking out games noted for their epic length lately.
And if you can’t use the wealth of information sources available to you these days – hint: INTERNET – and maybe wait a few short days before picking up your copy of the game to see what everyone is saying about it then you jolly well deserve everything you get (or don’t get, ha ha!).
20/04/2011 at 20:18 Wulf says:
“They’re angry because they bought a game that wasn’t padded out with monotonous busy-work between the beautiful set pieces.”
Eh what? Why would anyone be angry about that?
“I’ve been a gamer for nearly 30 years and never have I been less proud to say so.”
I know, right?
20/04/2011 at 21:54 Urael says:
Perhaps it’s me, Wulf. Perhaps I’m just getting too old for this games malarky. At times I feel like I’m battling an entire generation of people with no manners, no real intelligence to speak of and no sense of goddam perspective.
You saw Keiron’s return, right? One of the finest journalists the games industry has ever enjoyed, shining knight of the UK writing scene, makes a rare appearance on RPS….to play truant officer to a thread gone mad. And poor old John, our avenging angel against the likes of Fox news, who really should be winning grown-up journalism awards for that, is accused of selling out for advertising bucks. How fucking sad is that? How wrong is that? Makes my blood boil. :(
20/04/2011 at 23:15 MCM says:
@Urael
So, in short, they deserve it. Haha, of course they got ripped off, they’re dumb!
Wow. Can’t imagine why I didn’t come to that conclusion myself. Have fun with heartless cynicism. I’m sure it comforts you on your lonely nights.
But, no worries, I’ll be off your lawn any minute now.
In the mean time, jesus, you want to talk about blood boiling? That was me when I read:
“It’s practically a given that none of the pricks and trolls on this thread act that way in real life situations – making it a constant source of wonder to me how they don’t crush themselves beneath the weight of all that towering hypocrisy and double-standards. ”
Can you POSSIBLY be serious? These are people that are legitimately unhappy with a product they purchased. That’s well within their rights as consumers. Did you buy it? Are you here arguing their dissatisfaction is misplaced because the product is actually quite good?
No, you’re not. In all honestly, YOU are the troll. You are a bigger troll than anyone who has posted here yet: You first say that the release of Portal 2 should be “one of the brightest and most celebrated moments” of contemporary gaming, and then almost instantaneously switch to “well Valve doesn’t make long games anyway” and “they’re idiots for buying it”.
“At times I feel like I’m battling an entire generation of people with no manners, no real intelligence to speak of”
I didn’t realize Roberta Williams was posting on RPS.
Insults, check.
Sweeping generalizations, check.
Shifting arguments immediately when confronted, check.
Stop trolling, trollmeister.
20/04/2011 at 23:31 UncleLou says:
So, what exactly is the complaint? That the game is too short, and would have been more enjoyable if it had been longer? Or is the complaint that it is too expensive for its length? That’s two different things.
(Not that I understand either, at all, but I am trying, hard.)
20/04/2011 at 23:35 MCM says:
Uhhh… pretty much an either/or situation, UncleLou. If the game had been either $20 or 20 hours long (in single player), I doubt we’d be seeing a fraction of the complaints we’re see now.
I mean, Dragon Age 2 was quite a bit shorter than DA:O. Brevity was one complaint among many, but it was still far longer than Portal 2.
20/04/2011 at 23:53 UncleLou says:
Well, you’d see me complaining if the game was 20 hours long (most likely), as I thought Portal 1 was a step in the right direction for gaming, or at least certain genres – an experience you can finish in one sitting that does not outstay its welcome.
I’ll admit I expect certain games to be reasonably long – I’d be disappointed if I finish, say, an “epic” RPG in less than 10 hours, or got bored of Civ in 5 hours. But Portal 2 (from the 2 hours I’ve played it) is such an obvious labour of love, with an unusual amount of effort, care and polish, that the sheer quality makes it worth it and justifies the price. I am finding it a bit – hm, unrealistic, to expect this to last longer or to be cheaper. On an only remotely related sidenote, seeing how you mentioned DA2: yes, it’s a longer game, but personally I quit playing it at one point where I saw the exact same dungeon layout for the 5th time. When it’s between quantity or quality, I am always for the latter.
The only games I can think of in recent years that were reasonably long while being of similar quality are first-party console games, and they never quite count as there’s the ulterior motive to sell hardware.
21/04/2011 at 00:23 MCM says:
@UncleLou
“Well, you’d see me complaining if the game was 20 hours long (most likely), as I thought Portal 1 was a step in the right direction for gaming, or at least certain genres – an experience you can finish in one sitting that does not outstay its welcome.”
Yes, a step in the right direction because it didn’t cost $50. It was an excellent game, short, and cost something like $20 for day 1-retail, IIRC.
21/04/2011 at 03:21 Dervish says:
“You pay $50 for any game nowdays, you’re an idiot.”
…
“At times I feel like I’m battling an entire generation of people with no manners, no real intelligence to speak of and no sense of goddam perspective.”
Not very self-aware, I take it. Maybe some people just have more money than you, eh?
21/04/2011 at 03:53 Hidden_7 says:
Yes, but Portal 2 is inarguably longer than Portal 1. Portal 1 took me, I think about 3 hours the first time through. Portal 2 took me six, and I definitely missed stuff. That’s not including co-op either, which so far has added an extra four hours to that, and I’m not even finished it. I paid $45 for Portal 2, which is just over twice as much as Portal 1 cost. Portal 2 has easily twice as much content as Portal 1 (I’m over 3 times as much so far), and all at higher quality. Seems like the dollars to content ratio has remained constant from Portal 1 to 2.
Also, no one seems to complain when a CODBlops or various takes less than ten hours to finish, despite costing 50-60 dollars.
21/04/2011 at 08:20 Urael says:
@MCM – Heh. Got to you, did I?
Being a consumer these days is complicated. There are now much better ways to approach it than dropping huge money on something the instant it appears. One of the war-cries of this site is “I’ll wait until the inevitable Steam sale”, an acknowledgement that games these days decrease in price faster than at any time in gaming’s history. So if you generally wait fora bit, maybe a month or two, you’ll find significant discounts.
Buying games Day One has repeatedly proven to be a bad thing in many cases. Bugs, unpolish, etc have spoiled several big name titles over the years – hence it makes sense to wait a little bit to see how the game is received, or like with Magika, you simply have to wait for the patches to bring the game up to the required standard.
Expectation for this game in particular – what did everyone expect? A 50-hour gaming novel? 30-hour? 20-hour? The original game took roughly four. It was a short-form game, beautifully polished, that I believe cost £20 on release. The sequel costs £30, lasts longer and seems to be even more polished than the first. Wulf’s point here is valid: There’s very little in the way of pointless filler activity to bulk out the playing time. So in terms of expectation, whining because you got something a bit short demonstrates poor awareness of what you’re buying.
Judging a game by it’s length is also a poor way of measuring value. I’d much rather have a relatively short, beautifully crafted game like Amnesia or Portal than suffer something like Halo’s re-arranged jigsaw level design or any JRPG’s tactic of filling every tiny space with as much repetitive activity as possible.
My comments about the game being a bright moment in this year’s calendar (note I didn’t say in gaming itself) are based almost entirely on the RPS Wot I Think. No, I haven’t played it, because I’m waiting before I purchase it. But, with this being arguably Valve’s flagship product (now that the Half-Life series seems to have disappeared) I doubt they’d have released anything that is anything less than excellent. In terms of game creation I trust Valve to make something fun, with the right amount of polish, and most of the praising comments here are bearing this out. This is different, however, from liking Valve itself. The criticism I levelled at them – and it’s not much of one, to be honest – is that Valve don’t seem to make long games anymore. HL2 was the last really big release, and then they started down the episodic path apparently, ironically, because that game took too long to bring out.
So, yes, if you’ve paid full price on Day One for a game you don’t understand or are judging by poor criteria then I get to call that idiotic.
Sweeping generalisation? Not really. Read that sentence again. It starts with the words “At times it feels…” It FEELS. This is different from saying “EVERYONE IS…” It’s a purely subjective statement of my internal state, not a pronouncement of fact or judgement. Learn the difference, please.
“Shifting arguments immediately when confronted, check.” Erm, no, I didn’t. I responded to the argument you presented? I wasn’t “confronted” in any way – you didn’t call me out on any point, did you? And I think this post means my argument is precisely what it was in my original post so no, not shifting either.
You’re making stuff up now, dude. And the Roberta reference was lost on me. And your little trolling checklist is just adorable.
20/04/2011 at 18:25 wcaypahwat says:
Well, I don’t know how long it took for me. It was well before noon when I started, and well after a reasonable persons bedtime (3am) when I finished. I did, however, take several long breaks. I also painted the entire White Out chamber. Because I could. Missed a few secrets and easter eggs, but not for lack of trying. So probably around [nine.nine.nine.nine.nine] hours.
So yeah, the only game(s) I’ve spent any reasonably longer time on in the last six months would be pokemon.
I’m glad to see some folk around here remaining so stoic in the face of such adversity, too.
20/04/2011 at 18:31 bit_crusherrr says:
I started playing at 11am, finished at around 5, factor in a pot noodle and steams “5.5″ hours seems likely.
20/04/2011 at 18:39 R1pperZ says:
I agree Portal 2 is not a game to try and rush through, I take my time listening to all the brilliant humor even if I’m able to figure out the puzzle in a reasonable time. Save the speed run for the second time through. BTW Valve ty for the amazing game.
20/04/2011 at 20:24 Wulf says:
Yeah, there were some amazing bits in there that were just for the humour of it, and what a sense of humour Valve have. Like the broken turrets and the template, for example. Great stuff.
20/04/2011 at 18:48 Miidgi says:
Like I mentioned elsewhere, steam told me that I took 4 hours. I checked, and it actually was 4.9 hours, but even that is still a little low. I believed it at first, but that’s because it was 4 am and I was tired. Now that you point this out, it probably was more like 6-7.
Does anyone know if this issue is restricted to portal 2? Or is time logged in other games suspect as well?
20/04/2011 at 18:55 arleas says:
I haven’t yet finished this game because I’m taking my time, playing a little at a time and not worrying too much about being the fastest on the block. I’m also using Raptr to log my game hours. Steam right now tells me I have spent EXACTLY 4 hours playing portal 2 (which I find hard to believe).
Raptr on the other hand says I’ve spent 1 hour 56 minutes in one session, and 2 hours and 44 minutes in another session. That does NOT equal 4 hours. Also, it could be that valve is up to some kind of trick since GlaDOS did say something about time being distorted. OR it could be like Youtube, and how every popular video always seems to hang at 300 views (or around that much) for several days before finally exploding at 468,285 views a day or so later.
If Valve isn’t being very forthcoming on this, perhaps it’s something we’re supposed to figure out on our own? I mean, there was another part to the ARG that hinted that it was still going.
20/04/2011 at 19:04 bwion says:
You know, quite a lot of the HOW DARE YOU BE UPSET IT IS AN AWESOME GAME WHY DON’T YOU LIKE FUN rhetoric is at least as inane, and as threatening to one’s blood pressure, as the OMG POTATO WAS A LIE GAME LASTS 5 MINUTES AND IS A CONSOLE PORT DESIGNED TO SELL YOU HATS stuff.
I’m not taking a side. My side is the side of “I’ll play Portal 2 when I’m good and ready, thanks.” I’m saying that all sides are presently being represented largely by ranting maniacs, and that reasonable people would do well to step up their reasonableness and maybe try drowning out the idiocy in their respective camps.
(Obviously I’m not including Mr. Walker’s attempts to introduce some actual facts into the environment in the above.)
Or, you know, everyone involved could just get on with their lives. That is always an option.
20/04/2011 at 19:08 Blackberries says:
The Steam timer is without a doubt broken. On my profile page it says I’ve played 380 hours of Team Fortress 2, but if one clicks through to my Stats page for TF2, it claims I have 540 hours on record.
It claims it took me just over 8 hours to finish the Portal 2 singleplayer, which is about correct I think.
20/04/2011 at 19:19 arleas says:
Depending on when you started TF2, that may be because you started playing before steam started counting game hours on the main profile screen. I started playing TF2 back in the beta, I’ve got over 1300 hours logged in it (according to xfire and Raptr), but Steam only says 921. That’s because they didn’t start recording hours till Late January of 2009 I think.
20/04/2011 at 19:17 Frantics says:
I tried to post earlier but it kept getting eaten I think so hopefully not repeating myself. Knowing my luck I’ll get 4 posts portalling in earlier in the thread and look stupid, ah well.
What a great game/experience. At least people ruining that for themselves by forcing some bullshit dislike are only hurting themselves really. Steam saying 9 hours, seems a bit lower than reality to me I spent ages staring at all the cool stuff (the animation on anything robotic, just amazing), exploring, replaying bits with short possible forks and taking ages about prompted stuff to listen to the rediculous amount of alternative recored lines. Valve should just give in and make a full length cgi movie at some point you can see they want to! Even though some of the best bits were fairly uninteractive they are absolute masters of taking full advantage of the first person perspective and the sense of actually being the protagonist when compared to a movie. Concepts were used just the right amount and the difficulty perfectly pitched to make you think but never be frustrating or get you stuck for long. Some challenge maps would be nice, I’m sure they’re coming.
pretty bored of the internet. Why can’t people just enjoy stuff? Would be annoying if it was worth caring about. That guy who compared the graphics to crysis and the story to ps:t and found it wanting was pretty awesome though.
20/04/2011 at 19:18 jstar says:
I just think it’s amazing. Quite frankly I am happy to pay however much (within reason) for a game of Portal 2′s quality. I don’t really care how long it takes to complete. Every moment of it is magic and beautifully made.
20/04/2011 at 19:26 yeana says:
That’s what would happen if you play with portals!
You bend time and everything comes to a stand still.
Until you realized the surprise is a lie!
She want you gone!
20/04/2011 at 19:28 yeana says:
BTW great game! I would buy any upcoming Portals even how long it is, I would play the same puzzles 20 times over if I have to!
20/04/2011 at 19:35 DeepSleeper says:
Took me about eight and a half hours according to Steam’s clock. I know for a fact it chopped at least an hour off the front. (I died a fair bit in two of the chambers, and looked for secrets I didn’t find.)
Took the roommate from 6 AM to 1 PM, so that’s about seven hours (and he found a bunch of secrets I didn’t, must go back for those).
Neither of us feel ripped off, let down, run around, or hurt by the quality of this game.
20/04/2011 at 19:36 PaulMorel says:
lol. According to Steam, I beat Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, finishing literally every quest and getting nearly every collectibel … in 87 minutes. An amazing speed run, if I do say so myself.
20/04/2011 at 19:39 lunarplasma says:
Steam says I’ve logged in 150+ hours playing Empire: TW… which is odd, considering that while I have played the game, I actually quite detest it, and I sincerely doubt I could actually spend so much of my life on it.
20/04/2011 at 20:52 thegooseking says:
Haven’t played it myself (though I have it), but I’ve played Rome and Medieval II. I never took to them, either.
If Steam thinks you’ve played that much, you probably alt-tabbed out of the game and forgot to quit it.
20/04/2011 at 20:23 Frog100 says:
I can link you my achievements, 5 hours 20 minutes according to steam. Minus my afking im guessing it took around 4 hours 30/40 minutes to complete. So yea.
“one of the aspects I highlighted was that the game simply couldn’t be finished in four hours. But we’ve since received so many comments, tweets and emails from people claiming to have finished between 4 and 5 hours that we became a little suspicious”
I found that whole article suspicious you claimed it took you four hours to reach the second act going as fast as possible im guessing you associate with “press the button” Which took me under two hours
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197972862969/home
There’s my profile
I dont come here much and ive only seen these articles since they’re on the recent news for portal 2 and unfortunately all i’ve seen is a rabid fanboy insisting that’s it’s impossible to finish a 4-5 hour game in 4-5 hours. You can also see that there’s around 5 and a half hours in between the first and last co op achievement, minus one hour for eating and watching a hon game that’s 9-10 hours total for the co-op+single player and again, I wasn’t trying to rush.
20/04/2011 at 20:52 mwoody says:
I wonder… I wonder if this is related to the potato sack games? There was a lot of argument over whether just leaving a game running in the background would generate CPU time for the contest. Perhaps Valve implemented – or rather, attempted to implement – a system for determining how much time you actually played a game vs. just had it running. And then it went horribly wrong.
20/04/2011 at 20:58 thegooseking says:
As much as I’m not cynical like some people, and I don’t think the Potato Sack was just a moneyspinning scam for Valve (any more than their regular sales are, which they’ve noted does make them more money, but can hardly be said to be a scam), and I do think they wanted people to actually play these games, I don’t think they wanted them to play them enough to justify the cost of adding functionality to make sure they were actually playing… (if that convoluted sentence makes any sense!)
But then, yesterday it said I had only played 85 minutes; today it says I have played 9 hours, which is actually accurate, so perhaps it was just taking a while to update.
20/04/2011 at 21:00 metamorphyse says:
i’ve done it in 5 hours in my 2nd full play through
inbetween i did lots of random lvls and got all single player steam achievments
so lotsa practice before i got myself that fast
20/04/2011 at 21:35 Zodd says:
CHeck my achievements http://steamcommunity.com/id/Godstopper/stats/Portal2
first one 3:01
took a break after I got SaBOTour had to change the rotors on my buddies truck.
came back 1.5 hours later
last achi 10:29
- 6 hours total to beat the game for me first play through. Hail Satan!!!!
20/04/2011 at 21:36 absolofdoom says:
Yeah, I’ve noticed that in game I have around 300 hours in TF2, but the steam timer only says like…202 or something, it’s way off. And I played Portal 2 at least 4 hours yesterday and it only says 2 hours.
20/04/2011 at 21:53 ds8k says:
http://imgur.com/HoMG8
5 hours 24 minutes. I got stuck on a few tests, mainly the three laser puzzle. I did not speed run at all.
20/04/2011 at 22:20 Makariel says:
It will be a sad day when the trolls finally win. When the masses of crazed anti-fanboys scoring games on metacritic 0 or 1 out of 10 will result in companies not making games like Portal 2 anymore. While games with map-packs for 15 bucks sell like cupcakes. When Valve just doesn’t bother to make games anymore and is contempt in being an online retailer. When the “for 45$ I want to play at least 40 hours” argument leads to even more pointless MMORPGs and other grindfests, because enough people consider it “fun” to collect 10 wolf pelts for a rusty krongok axe of repulsion.
On that note: I just got an email that my copy of Portal 2 has dispatched, looking forward to play it.
20/04/2011 at 22:40 Vinraith says:
5 hour $60 games are bestsellers, long games are an endangered species, what are you complaining about again?
20/04/2011 at 23:40 Makariel says:
Endangered species? MMORPG are still growing like mushrooms and very successful. Squenix alone releases a constant stream of JRPG on various platforms. Call of Duty is played for millions of hours online.
20/04/2011 at 23:46 Vinraith says:
I don’t have any idea what MMORPG’s have to do with anything. I’m talking about single player games, multiplayer doesn’t have a “length” in any meaningful sense. The best selling games out there right now (the CoD titles) are $60 for a piddling 6 hours of single player. Portal is $45 for 8 hours of single player. What’s the difference?
20/04/2011 at 23:49 Wulf says:
So it’s five hours now? I thought we’d agreed it was at least six. Those goalposts just keep getting pushed back. :p
Teasing aside, I think the point is is that this isn’t just a triple-A game but a genuine bloody novelty. Long games are becoming endangered for a reason. Just… think back to the Deep Roads in Dragon Age: Origins, because that was what finally killed that game for me. I actually took the Deep Roads as some abstract form of torture, it actually felt like some bizarre experiment that Bioware were conducting to test my will and resolve. It was the Deep Roads that blew my anger toward Origins out of proportion.
I’m fine if a game can be as novel as Portal 2 for 60 hours, that’d be great, so sign me up for some of that! But whenever I think of a long game, I also think of a dull game. Let’s go back as far as five years, even. Name me one long game that didn’t drag on and wasn’t padded to oblivion and back. (Puns possibly intentional, but if they were, it was a subconscious thing.) I mean, seriously… this is brilliantly fun, I was smiling from start to finish. It’s great!
I think that what people are worried about is that we’ll be telling Valve that, no, novelty is a bad idea, stop doing that, stop being genius, stop being clever, stop being funny, stop making us happy, stop making us laugh, stop presenting us with brilliance, stop all of that, right, look at the Deep Roads, see the Deep Roads, Valve? We want more of that. And that… that is what I will combat with the burning passion of a thousand suns.
I hate long games. Not because they’re long, but because the techniques which make them long lead me to hate them. Look at Mass Effect 2, quite the marvellous game, and yet there’s something to it that tarnishes my memory. What is this something? The bloody resource gathering minigame. It was thrown in there to add a couple of extra hours to the game, where we’d be doing nothing but sweeping over a planet… up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down… next planet… up and down, up and down, up and down… @_@ I hate you, unfun resource gathering minigame.
Sure, Portal 2 could’ve been longer, but if it had been, what tricks might they have thrown into it to tarnish it? It was a pure puzzle game, it didn’t need to be longer than it was, it was one beautiful puzzle after the next, interspersed with story and humour, they made the best game they could, and the longest game they could with all the content in there, and they left all the chaff on the cutting room floor.
Other people seem to want to bring films into this, so I’ll mention films, fine… the first Lord of the Rings film suffered padding. It probably would’ve been an hour shorter if they didn’t spend ages doing long, sweeping love shots that served no purpose. “Yes, we got that it’s pretty the first time, why are you now doing this for the 15th time over the same piece of land?” That’s the kind of thing that Portal 2 left on the cutting room floor.
I just want to give Valve some positive feedback, I want to say to them that… yes, they’re doing the right thing.
21/04/2011 at 00:05 Vinraith says:
@Wulf
So it’s five hours now?
That’s the length I’ve heard reported for Modern Warfare 2, yes. 5 hours for single player and a $60 price tag = bestselling game of all time at last check.
I confess I didn’t read the rest of your post, because it appears you started from the fundamental misconception that I believed Portal 2 to be $60 in price (it’s $45) and 5 hours long (I take John’s word that it’s 8).
21/04/2011 at 00:18 Vinraith says:
OK, I read it anyway.
Wulf, you seem to think that the only reason a game like Origins is 80 hours long is because of the padding. Remove the deep roads completely, cut any amount of other padding, and you’re still going to get a game that’s considerably longer than 10 hours.
Personally, I like to have some time to inhabit a world. I played Morrowind for hundreds of hours. Was that “padded?” I don’t know, I just know i had an enormous amount of fun being in that environment. I feel the same way about a properly modded Oblivion, Fallout 3, New Vegas and so on. If those games were 8 hours long I’d be screaming for more, I like that they’re expansive and hefty enough that I can spend a lot of time with them.
When you think of a long game, you think of a dull game. When I think of a short game, I think of a shallow game. A game that doesn’t have enough novel or interesting ideas and enough depth and variety of gameplay to sustain more than a single digit length. I was hoping for more from Portal 2, and would hope for more from any game I was going to pay $45. I’m mostly an RPG and strategy gamer, I look at the $50 I’ve spent on AI War and its expansions and the hundreds of hours of enjoyment I’ve gotten out of it, the $30 I spent on SotS complete and the hundreds of hours I’ve gotten out of that, and countless other examples of small investments with huge returns, and there’s no way on Earth I can take seriously the idea that 8 hours of game with little to no replay value is worth anything remotely resembling that sum of money.
I’ll pick it up in a Steam sale, one will be along soon I’m sure. Valve have more money than god, I don’t think they’ll miss my $30 or so.
21/04/2011 at 00:22 MCM says:
@Wulf
“So it’s five hours now? I thought we’d agreed it was at least six. Those goalposts just keep getting pushed back. :p”
Yawn, just stop posting until Portal 2 reaches 15 hours in length, ok?
20/04/2011 at 22:29 Dances to Podcasts says:
You know what this means, right? It means VALVe will be working even longer on Half-Life (Episode) 3 for fear of people saying it’s too short.
20/04/2011 at 22:33 Teddy Leach says:
It must be three weeks long now. At least.
20/04/2011 at 22:42 Teddy Leach says:
Hmm… With all the loading screens, it wouldn’t surprise me if a bug was stripping away sections. Or the director’s doing it, which I must say would be a novel use for it.
Either that, or you’re all just really forgetful. Or the levels are forgettable.
21/04/2011 at 00:09 BunnyMaz says:
A random thought to throw into this exciting mess of comments.
I love games. I love playing them. But Portal and Portal 2 aside I have never, ever completed a game or even gotten close to it. I never saw the final boss battles in Sonic on my old sega thingamajig. I never completed any of the Abe games.
In most games, that doesn’t matter. The plot is there, but it isn’t integral to the experience of the game.
In Portal and Portal 2, if you don’t get to the end of the game, you’re missing immense amounts of plot, storytelling, humour and the payoff of everything you’re finding and learning and doing.
I have never finished any other games before because I’ve never had the time. As a child I was always too busy with homework, chores and hobbies. As an adult I’ve always been either a student with too much studying to do or employed full time and living on my own with housework and everything else to do. Even now I’m unemployed I’ve got hobbies outside the house, a small business I’m trying to set up and I just simply do not have 20+ hours to dedicate to a game.
Portal and Portal 2 are not really as short as some people are claiming – not realistically, in any case – you’d might as well take my little sis-in-law’s terrible, terrible blonde gaming hiccups and conclude that the games were 20 hours long as the 3 hours I’ve heard people claiming. But they are a lot shorter than many other games like DA2 etc. That is not a bad thing. Valve have seen two options – make a long game, in which the plot and humour is dragged out and which many, even most, players will never get to see 2/3 of, or make a short game that is perfectly paced, leaves you feeling pumped and ready for more and which most players will be able to see through to completion.
I am grateful to them for that. I’d hate to have missed the final levels.
21/04/2011 at 00:20 Mario Figueiredo says:
There was an article on Ars Technica recently about long and short games, in which it was trying to pretty much establishe that long games suffer from higher production costs and this is why companies are leaning towards avoiding them. It was a weird article in fact, in which there was not even one single reference to “replayability” both by the article author as well as by the developers interviewed. I was heartbroken to see that the length of a game was being officially discussed simply in terms of playtime vs cost. And not a single word about the consumer or an concept as old as old are games; replayability.
Now, Wulf, you seem adamant to keep wanting to spread the creed that short games are better because long games can only exist through tricks (grind, repetitiveness, padding, etc). And yet, long games have been devised on principles quite different. Who will ever forget Baldur’s Gate? Or more recently, titles like Witcher, Diablo II, Titan Quest, Borderlands, Neverwinter Nights, Fallout 3, New Vegas, Bioshock… I could go on forever…
These games aren’t representative of the playtime sins you seem to want to see in every game that is longer than Portal. Now, personally, Portal 2 is its own breed of game. I see no problem in this game being 8 hours long. I said it before, I don’t care. What I do care is reading someone complaining or noting the shortness of the game and seeing the cries of “foul!” as if the appropriate length of a game wasn’t entirely a subjective matter left for the individual tastes of every player. You see, some people actually liked the Deep Roads…
What I do find slightly annoying is that some people actually feel entitled to negate someone their right to say a game is too short, too long, or just the right size. I’m taking notes, and I will be pleased to see the next RPS article in which a game length is being discussed in positive or negative terms and the replies that article will get. Should be interesting to note the hypocrisy of some of the people posting on this thread.
21/04/2011 at 03:01 Deano2099 says:
“Witcher, Diablo II, Titan Quest, Borderlands, Neverwinter Nights, Fallout 3, New Vegas, Bioshock”
Loved a lot of those games, but they were all… let’s not say padded, but more padded than Portal. Taken to extremes, padding is whenever the game has you do the same thing with no additional challenge. That was basically all of Bioshock except the Big Daddy fights, tons of random battles in Fallout, NWN, TQ that are easy. Ditto The Witcher. They’re still lovely games for the plot, world and story, but the combat is just busy work.
Since Portal takes that out of the equation, there is no combat, so it’s really hard to pad at all. That said, they give it a fair go with the outside bits in Act 2, but still.
Thought: you could double the length of Portal 2 by giving Chelle a minigun and dropping Combine soldiers in to every test room that you need to kill first.
21/04/2011 at 11:20 Lilliput King says:
Diablo 2 is a game where you repeat one action every few seconds for dozens of hours. It is the very definition of padding.
21/04/2011 at 00:32 Zwebbie says:
I actually thought the original Portal was too long when I first played it – true story. It’s because it gives the impression that it’ll end shortly after you finish all test chambers, but then keeps going for another hour, which threw me off.
21/04/2011 at 00:33 bleeters says:
Steam informs me my current played time is 474 hours.
Not broken at all.
21/04/2011 at 01:57 Shark says:
You’re obviously a pirate who played a magical leaked version that worked on steam
21/04/2011 at 00:34 Shakermaker says:
The timer worked for me. It took me ten hours to finish the game.
21/04/2011 at 01:00 Angel Dust says:
I’ve currently put 6 hours into it myself and am currently a few chambers into what I assume is Act 3. I’ve blazed through some chambers and gotten stuck for a while in a couple of places, stayed to listen to most of the dialog and poked around for secrets fairly regularly. So I guess I’m looking to finish around the 8 hour mark which is more than reasonable considering the quality, the fact I’m probably going to replay it right away (and several more times over the years) and the co-op campaign still awaits me too. Regarding the co-op: how long is that campaign on average? is it just a series of chambers of somewhat narratively driven too?
21/04/2011 at 07:55 Hidden_7 says:
The co-op took me about 4-5 hours or so, though I imagine this is fairly variable. Me and my buddy were fairly on the ball, but there were definitely moments where our execution started falling apart in a cascade of humorous mistakes. Which is you know, part of the fun.
There is a plot, but it’s much less involved than the Portal 2 single-player. Maybe roughly on level with Portal 1. There’s a narrative reason for going through the chambers you go through, and you do accomplish something at the end, but there’s not a lot in the way of character development and twists along the way. Still good though, it’s mostly about the story you and your buddy make along the way (as it should be).
21/04/2011 at 01:00 Lazaruso says:
This thread made me laugh so hard I choked to death.
Good job internet. :(
21/04/2011 at 01:35 steamingnewell says:
I thought the whole potato sack thing was because since gabe’s a big fat guy, he needed more potatoes to eat.
21/04/2011 at 02:42 GibletHead2000 says:
In case anyone is interested, I finally managed to start the game at 7pm this evening. It’s now 2.30am and I finished the game about half an hour ago, and then watched the credits several times because I love the song and the ending. And played through the extras.
I didn’t play through too quickly… Spent a while looking around and playing it for entertainment purposes, and not just to get through. I’ve now read the Wot I Think, and probably I missed some hidden things… I only found one of the extra songs, for example.
Planning to play the co-op on Sunday, and thoroughly enjoyed the whole game. Fantastic… But it was 7 hours. I wouldn’t really call that full length, although I’m playing through DA:O at the moment, and am about 70 hours in and still not finished, so maybe I’m spoilt.
The only criticism I have is that for some of Act 2 a slightly-annoyingly large number of the puzzles were of the ‘look very carefully for the portal-accepting wall a long way away’ variety, rather than being more inventive. For the bits in-between the test chambers I got a little sick of pixel-hunting.
21/04/2011 at 02:55 Serenegoose says:
This is eerie. I also started playing tonight at 7pm and finished at about 2:30am.
Though I don’t care about the length. As with portal 1, portal 2 felt -perfect-
Wait. I didn’t mean it like that at all.
21/04/2011 at 03:43 suibhne says:
I am most displeased. I had the chance to play 92 minutes of the game this evening – NINETY-TWO MINUTES, my fellow gentlemen of leisure – and despite this prodigious number I appear to be far, FAR from the game’s conclusion. Unacceptable!
21/04/2011 at 03:52 JackShandy says:
I live in Australia, a country where the average price for a game is $100. (Our money is worth slightly more that the US dollar). As such, I don’t think I have the right perspective to understand the enormous amounts of passion erupting at the game’s $50 price tag.
Let’s be clear : 10 hours is more time than almost any other type of entertainment will demand of you. At $50, you’re getting your jollies at $5 an hour. That is a good deal. The fact that some insane developers make games big enough that you’re paying 50 cents an hour doesn’t change that.
I can’t think of any other medium that would even have this debate. The idea that you need your entertainment to consume as much of your time as possible is something peculiar to our little backwoods, and I don’t think it’s a good thing.
21/04/2011 at 04:03 Serenegoose says:
Almost being the operative word. If we’re going purely on money and time, books are the most entertaining things on the planet.
I mean they are, but not for that reason.
21/04/2011 at 04:07 Mario Figueiredo says:
Having lived down under for 4 years (Glenelg, Adelaide), I of course cannot fully argue with you, a born and breed Australian. However, I found that to be the general aussie way and not just something you folks take into computer games.
On the case of computer games though, prices were always too high for comfort. So for any battler you must agree a game like Portal 2 can be a problem down there. I think the last game I bought there was Civilization IV. I cannot recall how much I payed (I think 80 AUD would be about right). I ended up buying another copy for a friend so we could play together. He just couldn’t cough up the money for a game like that. How do you think he would feel about Portal 2?
21/04/2011 at 07:01 wutlolski says:
So just gonna toss in my 2 cents and put it out there that instead of calling everyone who ran through the game in 4-5 hours a liar, that maybe you should consider that not everyone takes 20 minutes to solve each test chamber.
Both my roommate and I ran through the game from launch til 5:20, thats 5 hours once the decryption finished (Yeah the steam timer said 2 hours, so yes its buggy), and both of us got in the ballpark of 30 odd percent of the achievements for exploration etc.
Its not absurd. I have been running through the developer commentary and knowing the solutions have been on pace for about 4 hours. It’s not a long game, and the dialog continues into the elevators if you move too quickly, so its not like we missed anything story-wise.
So again, is it as long as they promised (sans co-op)? For most people prolly, but not everyone. Is it worth it? I sure as hell thought it was.
21/04/2011 at 07:43 Sorbicol says:
It’s not just Portal 2 the timer is currently borked for: My first play through of DA2 took me 41 hours – so far the timer tells me I’ve only been playing for 32, and I’ve put that amount of time into m second playthrough easily
21/04/2011 at 07:58 Corion says:
The game is between 4 and 5 hours length for anyone who already understood the new gameplay mechanics. Having played TAG:The Power of Paint, I had a headstart on the gels, and I had a headstart on some of the other mechanics from trailers.
The puzzles were not nearly as challenging as they were in Portal 1.
21/04/2011 at 08:19 Urael says:
.
21/04/2011 at 08:27 Synchrony says:
According to steam I completed Portal 2 single player and coop in 6 hours. so either Tuesday was a unusually short day where breakfast and supper were 6 hours apart or valve haven’t deciphered how those clock things work yet
21/04/2011 at 10:00 MonkeyMonster says:
I don’t know, you bust a gut being part of a cracking elite games review team that produce some of the worlds finest articles and some people just try to crap in your 3 course meal and say eat it. As someone said previously – your Fox updates were brilliant and while you may not be the best healer in the world there are more than a few here who understand this site and the guys who write for it. We still like/appreciate/love/adore/wish they could write/sleep with printouts of*/generaly dig your work and long may it continue!
*not me personally but I’ve heard rumours…
21/04/2011 at 10:06 arghstupid says:
I took 9 hours but that did include a good hour in one of the first gel chambers as I didnt get the mechanics of how it worked and thought the ridiculous acrobatics that had got me most of the way to the exit were the correct thing to do. I thought it was the right length to be honest, I was actually surprised they’d managed to flesh out the portal concept so well – there’s only so many ways you can make these puzzles. I did think that perhaps the game was a little too easy. I’d have liked some really fiendish rooms toward the end and the final area was a bit too obvious imho. There is a fine line between challenge and frustration and no obvious way to include a ‘hard’ setting so a difficult call to make. A really great game overall, probably the most fun I’ve played since machinarium. A couple of things occurred to me reading this thread however.
1) Usually dialog is tedious in games and so I stick the subtitles on. As you can read far faster then you can listen this can shave off a fair chunk of time without actually missing anything. I didnt do this in p2, but others might have.
2) Unrelated but I was really impressed by the music. there’s a boc-esque track earlyish in the game that I just sat and listened to. Sound in general suffered from source’s abrupt environment changes and occasional buffer glitches but the design was fantastic.
21/04/2011 at 13:16 vagabond says:
I love that she doesn’t always say the same thing to both of you. One of you will occasionally get paranoia inducing stuff about what the other robot said, while the other player gets more standard glados chatter.
21/04/2011 at 13:30 dangermouse76 says:
The comments section of RPS portal articles shows that comments sections are dead as a means to literate discussion. Goodbye…..
21/04/2011 at 15:53 cantimatt says:
The first time through, it took me about 8.5 hours to complete single-play. Second time, though, it took me 5. I didn’t skip anything — in fact, I went back and completed several additional achievements. I also got stuck on two puzzles (despite having successfully completed them only a day or two earlier!) for a few minutes each. So where’d those 3 hours go? I’d wager that it went into deciphering most of the puzzles which wasn’t as necessary the second time through.
All countenance of time was based on various clocks telling me what time I started and ended (not the Steam game timer).
21/04/2011 at 17:50 SirDimos says:
So, I know that people have been saying that 4 hours isn’t possible, but I did a somewhat casual playthrough and finished the single player in about 5 hours (not using the steam timer, but clocking my time).
I even got quite puzzled a few times, so I could see how somebody who does these sorts of puzzles easily could finish the game in 4 hours.
I seriously only thought I was like half-way through when the game ended. I’m not necessarily disappointed (as it was still a very fun 5 hours), but just wishing there were more :(
21/04/2011 at 20:45 starclaws says:
So just finished my first play through of portal 2… Saw this thread before I started so I threw up a stopwatch to it… 4 hours, 21 minutes, and 58 seconds from title menu to credits. I flew threw the majority of the puzzles but a couple gave me some trouble. I know if I went back I could get it near 3 hours easily start to finish. Look for speed runners to get it done in under 3 hours as well. Hardly recommend buying it until it comes down in price.
22/04/2011 at 11:35 Hardtarget says:
Just beat the SP, steam told me it took 8 hours and that seems to be right