A common criticism of games is that they are too short. The amount of hours of gameplay the game gives you is normally an important feature and you’ll always hear publisher going on about how ‘Death Shooter 6’ has over 300 hours of gameplay. Who cares? Surely a game being too long is just as bad as a game being too short.
First-person shooters are the worst offenders. How many times have you ploughed through level after level to finally kill the final boss before being treated to a crappy animated ending, if that? Hands up, who can name one good ending to a first-person shooter? The other problem with the FPS genre in particular is that whilst there are invariably a number of great levels or sequences in the games the flipside is that you have tons of sub-standard levels that never manage to live up to the high standards the rest of the game sets. Medal of Honor was a prime example of this. The Normandy beach landing level was one of the greatest levels found in a computer game, ever. But, can anyone honestly say that the rest of the game was as good?
However, it’s not entirely the developer’s fault, as unlike a movie for example, a game has no set running time. The amount of time you spend with a game is largely based on your own skill level and how many mods and extra levels there are available for the game. It all comes down to the old argument of quality vs. quantity. It’s like being back at school where you’re told that a certain piece of homework has to be x amount of words long and you just know that most of that is going to be drivel which you’ve added just to make up the space. Surely, it’s better to have more quality in a game at the expense of quantity. Do we want games that are of a higher quality or average games that we’ll never ever complete?
Just to make things more complicated the overpricing that affects the whole
industry adds another element to the debate. Games are too expensive. End
of story and because of this publishers feel like they have to give us our
money’s worth and therefore pack as much as possible into the game to
provide us with as many hours of gameplay as possible, many of which we’ll
never experience as we’ll get bored and leave the game before completing
it. How many games do we buy that we never bother to complete? Most of them
in my case, its like going to watch a film only to leave halfway through,
It’s a waste of money and time. How about this for a revolutionary idea
then? Drop the price of games by £10, reduce the playing time and increase
the quality of the game. Am I the only one that this makes sense too?
