Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Comfortable length for RPG games

What length do you prefer?

  • 10-20 hours

  • 20-30 hours

  • 30-50 hours

  • 50+ hours


Results are only viewable after voting.

Turok

Erudite
Joined
Dec 11, 2008
Messages
1,056
Location
Venezuela
I always get sad when i found that i am finishing a game that i like, for me more is better.
 
Joined
Jul 27, 2013
Messages
1,567
I would take a shortened game length if it was the cost of having a branching narrative. If the game is only 20-30 hours but has 100s of hours of replayability as a result of reactivity, then It'd be fine. Otherwise the longer the better, when it comes to D:OS and Wasteland 2, the length itself wasn't the problem for me, instead it was for D:OS: The end game balancing, with overdrawn hp bloat fights where enemies were up in tens of thousands(IIRC), for Wasteland 2 it was the diversity of content, funny given how much they touted that, where I start getting bored in W2 is the latter half of the game where you're often fighting the same shitty enemies as the first, but with more hp/damage for no reason.
tl;dr, quality/branching > Length
But if there was a perfect world where I could have both I would take it.
 

undecaf

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 4, 2010
Messages
3,517
Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
I voted for 30-50, but 40-60 would be closer to my mark (not that such a margin makes any real difference; although 30 feels kinda low number for some odd reason). When a single run through of a game goes over the 60 hour mark, I tend to get bored no matter what the content was.
 

tuluse

Arcane
Joined
Jul 20, 2008
Messages
11,400
Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Voted 20-30 hours because I'm tired of rpgs wasting my time with filler.

I'd rather have a game so good and with enough branches I can play through it twice at 20 hours each and both times be fun than a single 40 hour game.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
So who are the Underworld Ascendant apologists who voted 10-20?
 

StaticSpine

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 14, 2013
Messages
3,232
Location
Moscow
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I'm kind disappointed by recent attempts of devs to make games as lengthy as possible (I'm looking at you D:OS & W2) and packing them with tons of filler, so the games become tiresome.

I don't really think D:OS has all that much filler. Cyseal has virtually none and Luculla Forrest is more quality content than filler. I think the latter can feel like filler because the difficulty curve vanishes but the content isn't filler type content at all. The Dark Forrest is awful overall on filler but the Hunters Edge section was good. So to me a good 2/3rds of the game were filler free.

Wasteland 2 certainly has more filler combats.
Far as quests and other content goes though I don't think it's so much filler as it is repetitive. There's only so many ways you can spin the use skill > accomplish/fail task>start combat/avoid combat loop. The limitations on quest structure expose the mechanics.

It's more a case of Wasteland overstaying its welcome rather than being outright filler. If you hacked out all the filler combats there would still be repetitive content. If you hacked out all the filler combats in Dark Forrest D:OS wouldn't have hardly any filler.
I hacked through all combats I've encountered in both in W2 and D:OS. The battles were repetitive in both games. I mean there were few memorable encounters, almost all of them didn't have any intersting tactical situations, just more mobs/more HP of mobs/tougher mobs.

A good example of what I'm trying to say is Blackguards, it really has hand-crafted encounters (some of them still are tedious) and a lot of them are memorable and have different tactics and some environmental tricks to use.

Another one is crisis system in upcoming Torment, it will have something about a dozen of encounters, but each one matters.
 

naossano

Cipher
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
1,232
Location
Marseilles, France
You (the one who do it) dissociate filler and repetitive content.

While it might not always the case, those things work often together.
When you repeat the same boring generic things a billion time, the sum of these actions become part of the filler.

I don't know yet about WL2, but in WL1, there is a ton of combat that look/work the same, and you spend a lot of time using picklock/perception/bomb disarm. After a while, i tend to see those things as fillers that get in the way of the (limited) unique content. They artificially increase the lenght of the game, while the lenght of unique contents is not so high.

Same for Fo3-FoNV. You can safely remove 75% of the game stuff (combats/travelling/looting/travelling/checking random lines) and the game wouldn't suffer for it. It would even be improved.
If you swim into actual unique content, you won't be bored. If you spent a huge ammount of time doing repetitive shit, you won't be impressed by the tiny bit of good content. You would just want to be done with the game.
 

Jools

Eater of Apples
Patron
Joined
Feb 1, 2009
Messages
10,652
Location
Mêlée Island
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Insert Title Here Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
I'm kind disappointed by recent attempts of devs to make games as lengthy as possible (I'm looking at you D:OS & W2) and packing them with tons of filler, so the games become tiresome.

On the other hand I expect a lot from TToN and AoD, because they have a lot of content, BUT most of it will not be available during a single playthrough and the playthroughs are not intended to be lengthy.

What do you think about this?

And what is your preferable length for a single playthrough?

My preference is for 50-60 hours (cutscenes exluded). A well-paced and well-balanced game will have me play through it like a "breeze", always eager for what comes next, and at the end it should provide me decent closure and only a slight feeling of "I want more". There haven't been many such games, unfortunately.

Realistically, these days I'd be happy with anything in the 20-40 hours range of actual gameplay, because that's what I can realistically hope for in a new release.
 

SniperHF

Arcane
Joined
Aug 22, 2014
Messages
1,110
When you repeat the same boring generic things a billion time, the sum of these actions become part of the filler.

But that's the issue though, when does repeating something become filler or too much?

You use the lockpick, perception, disarm example. Mechanically all three of these are the same. The choice of selecting one isn't interesting. So it as usual comes down to the content. Is the map designed in such a way that finding the object you need to lockpick is interesting? It also goes to your character creation. It should be fun on some level merely seeing the world react to your character creation choices. The actual act of selecting your perception skill and using it is not going to be fun. In any RPG really. It's not like a shooter where simply interacting with the game is always the fun of it. That doesn't even account for randomness and different potential outcomes. In RPGs where this is a factor you need to have more opportunities in order to experience different outcomes and adjust on the fly. Either successfully or not.

So I agree that the unique content will play a role in making the game sustainable over a longer period. But I think you are downplaying too much the inherent enjoyability of your actions, interacting with the games mechanics, and the games reactions to it. Regardless of if the content is samey. After all people can play thousands of hours of 4x games or shooters. The actions are pretty much always the same regardless of the content. If you can't find enjoyment out of some of the repetitive stuff then perhaps it's just a case of burnout.
 

Xathrodox86

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 27, 2014
Messages
760
Location
Nuln's labyrinth
I prefer my games fast paced and tight. Not saying that they should look like Call of Duty with an xp system, but Skyrim is so huge that I simply got bored after 30+ hours.
 

Xenich

Cipher
Joined
Mar 21, 2013
Messages
2,104
So I agree that the unique content will play a role in making the game sustainable over a longer period. But I think you are downplaying too much the inherent enjoyability of your actions, interacting with the games mechanics, and the games reactions to it. Regardless of if the content is samey. After all people can play thousands of hours of 4x games or shooters. The actions are pretty much always the same regardless of the content. If you can't find enjoyment out of some of the repetitive stuff then perhaps it's just a case of burnout.

Difference between someone who wants to play a game and that of a person who wants to be entertained. The person wanting to be entertained doesn't care about all those game play aspects, they just want the game to hurry up and entertain them.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2007
Messages
33,053
Location
KA.DINGIR.RA.KI
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Lockpick and safecrack and trap disarm and shit are fun when they're not the ONE AND ONLY way to get past an obstacle or get a piece of loot, but one possible way. You could also use an unlock spell, or one-off electronic lockpicks that are expensive, or bash the lock open with force. That's more interesting because it lets different kinds of characters approach the problem in different ways, while having it like "ok I need skill X for this" in every situation is boring. Also, relying too much on it is boring too.

Wasteland 2 actually does the different approaches thing somewhat right, as you can use explosives to open some containers. But it places too many locks and too frequently, so it becomes routine to use that skill 10 times on any given map. It also makes the horrible fault of making such a frequent action take a couple of seconds with a short animation, rather than being an instantaneous "click it, get result; done in 1 sec" affair.

So, way to make it less tedious: have less locked chests; make animation shorter.
 

naossano

Cipher
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
1,232
Location
Marseilles, France
Even if you have several way to unlock the chest, or even if the chest was not locked, it boil down to how much you do it, how much time you spend doing it in the whole game compared with how much time you spend doing other stuff. If 50% of your whole playthrough is about lockpicking, there is a huge problem with the game. You doing some kind of grind/job/chore instead of enjoying the gameworld. But the lockpicking stuff is just one of those issues.

Genericness takes the cake the most, IMO. I take two post-apocalyptic FPS. In Metro 2033/Metro Last Light, you spend like 30% of the game learning about the lore, interacting with characters, 30% gearing up, walking in the dark wondering about when the monsters will attack and 30% fighting like a classic FPS. (more or less). The FPS parts aren't the majority of the game (at least how i see it), they have some time between them, they are always differents (different environnement, enemies, context), and your behavior is always different. Sometimes you shoot, sometime you hide, sometime you have to look the opponement into the eyes to make them leave, sometimes you just have to use the light. It always keep things fresh, let you ask more.

On the other hand, Fallout 3 is a much longer game, that involve far much combats in a IP that was never about fight, but post-nuclear societies. A good half of the game "content" is made of abandoned metro full of hostiles ghouls and abandoned DC urban areas, full of hostiles super-mutants. Not only it disrespect ghouls/super-Mutants, make you shoot those factions as only interraction, but you end up in a whole lot of areas in which you do the same things over and over. You shoot the same faces, you "explore" the same copy-pasted areas, you loot the same randomized shelved for dozen of hours. It is clearly a case of artificially extended lenght, that would only make you bored with the game. And when the (lame) interactive content finally appear, you are not as much into it, as you consider that you wasted too much time to reach it. And when the next abandoned metro appears... You just wonder if it is worthy to go through that again for the next piece of content, or if you should just log off and forget about that game.

Then when reaching FoNV, the "pieces" of contents are far more than pieces and are much, much more interesting, the in-between are less generic, but you still have to walk in empty places, face generic critters, loot the same random shelves, and other stuff. Sure, the content is better, but the "work" you have to do before reaching the content is still pretty repetitive/boring/un-involving. You just mindlessly go through it, while think about what could happen next. When the number of filler is low, you could go through it without minding. If it represent 50% or more of the games, you feel like all what you did was filler. And if that generic filler is less than 50% but the games takes hundreds of hours, those less than 50% could become still an high number.

In short, i would say that a short game can make those filler be forgiven, but the longer the game become, the more the filler parts become hard to sustain.

So it is something about

(Time spent with fillers/Time spent with unique contents)* Overall Lenght = Chances of quit the game before the end
(you still can defy the stats and end up finishing a game that you have 99% chances to quit before the end)

We are talking about games that deliver unique contents.

Some games are just about repetition, but those are what the players are looking for. When you play Tetris, you know you will do the same thing over and over.
You aren't tricked into tedious task while expecting to interact with that world or feel a well done atmosphere.
 
Last edited:

bloodlover

Arcane
Joined
Sep 5, 2010
Messages
2,039
I always get sad when i found that i am finishing a game that i like, for me more is better.

I'm the same with books :D

hours or inches

lot of 50+ GAYS on the codex lawlelelol

I am one of those faggots. What's not to like about 100h epics where you visit different places, see different creatures, locations, craft stuff etc?
 

Xenich

Cipher
Joined
Mar 21, 2013
Messages
2,104
I am one of those faggots. What's not to like about 100h epics where you visit different places, see different creatures, locations, craft stuff etc?

Well, when they can't pay attention for very long without drifting off, yeah... its a problem. They need a quick game that resolves itself in short time so they can stay attentive. Remember to type in short sentences to them so they actually read your response. Most will lose interest in your comments in less than 12 seconds. Gotta keep them entertained you know!
 

Saber-Scorpion

Learned
Patron
Joined
Sep 13, 2007
Messages
76
Location
Lurkland
Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong BattleTech
I've sunk 60+ hours into both Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin, and I still haven't finished either one of them. Lots of long, overall uninteresting and repetitive fights, with very little reward at the end except some more chests filled with bloody randomized loot. Not even advancement of an interesting storyline as a reward. Heck, it even takes way too long to be rewarded with any new art (new environments, enemies, etc.).

Shadowrun: Dragonfall did leave me wanting more, but I still vastly preferred its shorter length packed with good quality content that never bored me. A slightly longer game with a tad more optional content would have been great, but if I have to choose between Dragonfall and an RPG with 100+ hours of filler... give me Dragonfall any day.
 

prodigydancer

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 16, 2015
Messages
1,399
10 hours? I can't recall any CRPG where a (regular, not a speedrun) playthrough took one weekend.
 

Kaldurenik

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 3, 2010
Messages
895
Divinity: Original Sin
I voted 50+

But at the same time. I would rather play a 15 hour quality RPG then a 50+ boring rpg.
But if i got to pick :D 50+h with quality
 

Xenich

Cipher
Joined
Mar 21, 2013
Messages
2,104
I voted 50+

But at the same time. I would rather play a 15 hour quality RPG then a 50+ boring rpg.
But if i got to pick :D 50+h with quality

See, that is the failure of the poll. They did not ask you to delineate such, and so the poll is meaningless. It reminds me of most political polls designed not to ascertain any relevant information, but to farm for a specific result. Meaningless... Pointless, a complete waste of fucking time.
 

Xenich

Cipher
Joined
Mar 21, 2013
Messages
2,104
Where's kingcomrade option?

Shit poll is shit.

You are all fucking pathetically stupid! No, seriously...Sheep called it. You are fucking sheep, gazelle, Jim Jones disciples... Kill yourself now popamole sludge!
 

GloomFrost

Arcane
Joined
Dec 9, 2014
Messages
993
Location
Northern wastes
The more hours the better. Also really good RPGs can be very long with plenty of content and have good branching (BG2, Arcanum, F2, F:NV, Gothic 2, KOTOR2)
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
Who cares, it's always dependent on literally every other thing about the game (plot, character progression, amount of grind, replayability).
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom