WaltC333
Novice
"X number of hours to complete" generally provides a prospective customer with a rough idea of game content depth and variety. For instance, I will never, ever spend ~$30+ on an rpg that people have completed in 5-10 hours. Ever. If I want something short and mainly passive I'll fire up a movie...
(First-run DVDs are ~$15 on release day.) Granted, there is that idiot (speaking freely of course) player every now and then who spends $50 on an rpg and then cheats and avoids every side quest and parenthetical foray simply to see "how fast I can beat this game." The poor fellow is to be pitied because in the end he simply cheats himself out of much content and presumably a far more enjoyable experience--and he fails to get his money's worth even though it is his game! Why people do this is beyond me. "How fast" a person finishes a quality rpg mostly indicates a substandard-quality player, imo. It does not indicate an achievement of some kind.The second problem here is that the very question itself is phrased as an either-or situation, and as such is a loaded question, like either a game has to be briskly paced and short or else it drags and is long. Wrong. A great rpg can be paced to send the adrenalin surging and still be 60-100 hours long. A 10-hour rpg can be briskly paced and put you to sleep...
A great rpg by any measure constantly entertains even while providing dozens of hours of quality game play, imo. Such games continuously surprise and delight their players.Game developers do not, to my mind, ever set out to create a game that is "X hours long".....Heh...
The notion is laughable. What they do is to create the best game they can which may happen to be 60-100 hours long when they are done! Even the concept that games are created with game length as a primary goal is most likely never true--but if it ever *is true* then whether the developer wants a shorter game or a longer game as the primary design metric then the game will most likely stink when it's done...Good case in point for me: I bought the original Dungeon Siege when it shipped from GPG. I loved the game, and yes, it was indeed a looooooong game. But that turned out to be one of the things I liked about it. Then the expansion "legends of Arrana" (or something like that) shipped which made all of it even longer! Great stuff--very entertaining at the time, I thought. Next thing I know, however, GPG is making public statements to the effect that "We hear you! You told us you wanted multiplayer and shorter games and we hear you!" Problem is--GPG never heard it from me! Then Dungeon Siege II shipped, and quite unlike DS1, the single-player was shortened and dumbed way down and was, I thought, bitterly disappointing as a sequel. I still play DS1/LoA to this day under Win8.1x64--got rid of my DSII copy years and years ago. GPG's "shorter-by-design" philosophy killed the series, and ultimately, I really believe, killed off GPG entirely. DSII is what happens when your primary design goal is to take everything great about the first game and chop it up and out just to make it "shorter". Deliberately chopping a game down saves money for the developer because there's simply not as much to develop--but that doesn't help if the result produces a game that few of your customers like.
