Game Informer - Can a game be too huge?

In a way I kind of wish game length wouldn't be such a big deal for RPG's. It often feels like the game could have been a few hours shorter (10h or so..) and instead it would have been really delicious (like having a really nice milkshake). Instead you get a milkshake diluted with water, lasts longer but very meh.
 
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It depends on whether it keeps being interesting. Might and Magic VI lasts for 150 hours and is entertaining the whole way. Dragon Age was 50 hours of tedium with the same few enemies over and over again.
 
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No a game can't be to huge,if its fun to play and you lose yourself into the lore,and get connected to the npc's and the land its placed in..
 
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I started thinking games could be too big when oblivion came out. It was big but bland IMO. I'd rather a smaller game with C&c that really matters, interactive environments, improved AI, really fleshed out companions, etc. basically everything I like in an RPG but done much better.
 
As with any media, it can be too long if there's poor pacing and lack of interesting content. I'd rather have a memorable 30 hour experience than something you have to force yourself to finish while coping with mountains of mediocrity.

There are very few RPGs indeed that haven't overstayed their welcome, as developers are forced into recycling concepts to simply get the title out the door on time. And if you're Bethesda, you recycle the same 5 dungeons 100x over.
 
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I think games can be to long.
I'm also to blame though as I try do the majority of side quests and such.

Ingredient gathering also makes games to long. Put me off the latest DA, I spent to much time picking flowers I lost interest. (Will try get back into it at some stage.)
 
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As others have said, if the quality is there, it can't be too long, especially when it comes to RPGs. I think the author would be better served to point out that gamers NEED behemoths like the upcoming Witcher 3 but that there's no lack of variety out there for people who aren't into that.

lackblogger said:
The guy answers himself when he says:

Well, not quite. What he meant to say was "as I've gotten busier", which he thinks is getting older, but only because he's lead a life which has made him busier as he gets older.

Oh, nearly forgot, the answer's a resounding "no".
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Agreed. Age has nothing to do with it. I'm in my 40's and have never slowed down with gaming but to me it's a passion and priority. I'll still be gaming when I'm 80. I'll still be shredding on my guitar and banging my head to metal too. I'm a married professional but have always gone out of my way to ensure I have plenty of time for my "hobbies."
 
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I don't believe a game can be too large as long as most of the content is optional. That's why I don't understand the knock against Bethesda titles. You can finish those games in 20-30 hours if you choose to. No one is forcing you to do the optional quests.

What I don't like are grindy end-game sequences. I recently finished M&M X, and, while I like the game overall, the final area was extremely tedious and much too long for its own good.

Divine Divinity is another example. Great game, but it would have been even better if they had shaved off the last 10-15%. The final area was a boring slog.

Same thing for Risen 3.

A better question would have been "Can a game be too long?"
 
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Kordanor said:
It definitely can be too long.

That is because some game mechanics can be nice, but get boring after a while.
Now with RPGs that is mostly not the case, or at least not to this degree.

But one of the last Games I played was Gunpoint. Whilt it was a nice game, it only lasted for about 4 hours. Gunpoint is a game about logical puzzles. Which at first are nice, but after 3h or so the diversity of what you can do with that concept was used up. It became repetitive and ended at just the right amount of time. Would it have been twice the size, it would have been to long.
The question is when you have reached the point of having seen "everything" regarding mechanics and when it becomes repitition and the only thing keeping you playing is the story. And this can also be the case in RPGs.
Lots of players say that they feel like they don't feel much motivation anymore if they hit max level. A recent example for that would be Pillars of Eternity. Fallout 3 was a much more extreme case. Both games of course had it's own flaws. PoE had some quests which gave too much XP. Fallout 3 just had a "broken" level curve alltogether so that you reached max level at not even 50% of the game. But that said even if games have a better level curve at one point you will hardly get anything new per level or at least mechanical new per level, so that you feel going into repetitiveness.

Imho the leveling curve of Might and Magic X felt ok. But the content was just more the gameplay could handle. The last part of the game was just repititive as you were almost godlike. Now with DLCs this game would have been too long for sure.

A problem RPGs have more than other games is balance. The longer a game is, the more serious balance problems are. Might and Magic became more trivial once it reached a certain point if you had a good group constellation and you knew what you were doing.
But I think the best example is Skyrim, which has horrible, horrible balancing.
In Skyrim you have so much content in the game, that you can do lots of stuff just while exploring and questing, like mastering the professions, which just provides you with a boost which make the complete game totally trivial. If Sykrim was just a 80h game, this would not have been an issue to this degree.

So all in all:
-When is the "freshness" of a game mechanic used up
-When is the amount of stuff the player has available (like skills) that anymore would be overkill or repetitive
-When do you reach a point where the balancing of the majority of the players reached a state where it is either well below the required power-state, or well above. The more freedom you give to the player the more complicated
-How interesting is the story you can tell

On the other hand there are also games which were just too short. So short that they kinda broke apart. My favorite example in this case is Shadowrun Returns.
Shadowrun returns is an extremely short game with just around 15h or so.
But it wanted to give players so many possibilities that it was impossible to implement it in just 15h of content. So most of the conversation skills only had a use once or twice in the game. If you decided to learn them at the second half of the game, and the possibility to use it, alread passed, you took it for nothing. It was also extremely obvious that they tried to add ways for every character to use the skill at encounters. So at each encounter you saw a drone shaft so that you could actually use the drone skill. If the game was longer, they would have been able to spread this out. Integrate more possibilities in the game, without compromising the games content.
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I basically agree with you here.

Not enough time to post a long message, but the game that comes to my mind is Gothic 3.

I played it for over 100 hours, exploring, fighting and doing quests. I just didn't do much of the main storyline and by the time it was time to start liberating cities or some things like that, I just got bored of the gameplay.

It's unlikely I will ever finish that game unless I focus solely on the main quest next time.

So, yeah a game can certainly get too long for me, even when it is a good and enjoyable game.
 
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joxer said:
From a fan of series that airs that long, wolfling, honestly this was a surprise. :p
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Well, Doctor Who is different as every few years the Doctor changes, and when it happens it's like a brand new series :)

But on games, specially RPGs, my mind can only remember things for so long. After 40 hours I'll have to go and re-read the journal as I probably won't even remember what am I doing there in the first place. And after 60 hours I'm already checking my Steam list to see what's next.
 
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wolfing said:
Well, Doctor Who is different as every few years the Doctor changes, and when it happens it's like a brand new series :)

But on games, specially RPGs, my mind can only remember things for so long. After 40 hours I'll have to go and re-read the journal as I probably won't even remember what am I doing there in the first place. And after 60 hours I'm already checking my Steam list to see what's next.
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But TV shows are not that bad for a comparision though.

The following may contain very minor spoilers, but I try to keep it generic:
I don't watch Doctor who, but I have watched several TV Shows which basically were too long, which used all they had right away.
Of course this is also somewhat of a sickness of TV shows: Some of them are unable to keep it small. Which then means that the story gets more absurd with every season.
A good example is Supernatural. They started small (hunting ghosts, looking for father) and at some point they started to rescue the world from Evil X. And the next Season Evil Y shows up and wants to destroy the word. And of course this is nothing compared to Evil Z which shows up the following season and wants to destroy the world. Luckily they realized it themselves and managed to tone ot down a bit. But there are some Shows which just died that way. True Blood for example. It's a show which went on for much too long. The story in the beginning was great but it went havoc and absurd up to a point where almost everyone found out he/she was some kind of mythical creature. The initial setup of "Integration of Vampires into Society" did not play a role at all anymore.
I'd also explain that Shows like Breaking Bad ended because they ran out of believable, new stuff to do. If the amount of viewers are still acceptable and the actors are still on board, there is normally no reason to cancel a show as long as it is earning money. But it also might just be better to end it when it makes sense the most (now I haven't seen the ending myself, and I also don't know if there were other reasons).

Another TV Show related to the topic is "Once Upon a Time" which started as a show in an US Town where the inhabitants were figures from, well, Fairytales, who were cursed, put into "reality", unaware of being a fairy tale character. Now this certainly has some charme. But you can't hold it up forever and when this changes, the whole story, the whole setup changes. It basically becomes a completely different series. Much like if in shows like NCIS, Castle, Mentalist, White Collar and whatnot at one point they don't solve crimes anymore but do adventures in a jungle or get abducted by aliens. In the case of "Once Upon a Time" that would have been the point where the show should have ended imho.

While based on some real facts apparently, Fargo is a Show which does it completely differently and only keeps the story for one season alltogether. Each season is one criminal case, each season they change out the whole setting, actors and so on. It just keeps the name name of the show: Fargo. They are aware they can't keep the story going on for ever. So rather than making a storyarc spanning multiple seasons which might become unbelievable and boring, they just say one season-one story, which might just be the right thing to do in this case.
 
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Amasius said:
Aren't your Skyrim-saves somewhere in a Steamcloud, so that if you reinstall the game you will be able to continue the old savegame?
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Will have to do that and try. Would be great to get them back :) It`s just always sth new I had to play first ;)
 
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Depth > Beadth/Size/Length

But I've pretty much given up on RPG developers ever getting this into their thick skulls. Somehow everyone seems to believe that they must make their game super-epic long with filler crap and timesinks.

CD Projekt is my last hope in that regard. I thought TW2 was almost perfect. It had lots of depth and it had just the right length. I just really hope that they haven't compromised too much on the depth front for TW3.
It's also disappointing to me that apparently the KS developers like Obsidian or Larian have not used their freedom from traditional publishers to try and make a deeper game in favor of an "epic" game.
Why does everyone think their RPG needs to be as close to 100 hours or even above that?
How about instead making a deeper game with a very interactive game world, meaningful c&c, smart dialogues, smart NPCs with awesome AI ("awareness"), day&night cycles, seasons(!), weather effects (on the gameplay!) and so on and so on.
OK, maybe it will only be a 20, 30, 40 hour game then but so what if it is infinitely more interesting than grinding trash mobs?
 
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Exactly. If content is bad or mediocre filler ... just cut it out, I don't want to see it!
 
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I think things can be too long and become tedious but it depends on how the game is structured. I agree with the comments saying as long as a good deal of the content is optional then it's not a game killer. If it's open world this is easier to achieve if not then I'd prefer a bit less length and more depth as alluded to by Moriendor.

For me a bad example is the NWN2 OC - I've started it twice and both times gotten bored, mainly with slogging through basically linear area's with an uninspired encounter every 50 meters performing exterminatus on the locals - gets tedious. And I really want to like NWN2 as much as I like the first one (perhaps I should give up on the OC??). I agree DA:O was like this but not as bad.

On the other hand I've been on an Oblivion kick lately - has taken me this long to get a mod setup I really like - and have around 40-50 hours on the current PC and haven't touched the the MQ at all.

Part of crafting a great game is finding this balance. However such a thing is very subjective and is therefore very difficult to pull off.


-kaos
 
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Agree with the consensus here, if the content is just filler: fed-ex quests etc. then even a small game can be too large. A massive game where there's always something new and different to do (Skyrim) or one that keeps moving the plot along (GTA V) manage the balance.
 
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