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Soundwave on 12 March 2024
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Chrkeller said:
Soundwave said:

Depends on the genre, but not that many of them and the ones that really do have decades worth of fanbase built in. 

If you're making a new IP, and you don't have the luxury of nostalgia and you're trying to make a name for your "big budget AAA" game one of the most devastating things would likely be some smart ass reviewer on IGN on GameSpot saying your game can be beaten in like 10 hours and it's not really worth buying because of that and your 5 years of development is tarred and feathered in a 5 minute review. That's why developers prefer to add padding to bring that number up. 

If Square made a 10-12 hour Final Fantasy (mainline) there definitely would be people would be angry and upset about it. 

Sony is spending $200+ million (probably soon $400 million) just to make a God of War game that can be beaten on a weekend, that doesn't really speak well of the future of those types of games. What if you want to make something that looks 2-3x better but also want 30-40 hours of actual gameplay ... what's the budget for that? Half a billion? 

Quality > quantity

Game length is a god awful metric

That's fine and dandy to say when it's not your money or 5 years you've spent working on a game. 

I understand why devs do it, they feel obligated to hit a certain play time so that their game doesn't get negative reviews or it stacks up to other games in certain genre types. 

Open world games? Forget it, 10-20 hours isn't gonna work. RPG/adventure games? Same issue. Not everyone has a Mario or God Of War IP to tack onto their game, those are the exceptions, not the rule. 

Putting in filler content is an easy way to increase the play time of game without requiring tons of new art assets and even time spent by the lead designers as B/C-staff can just be put on fetch quests and it also doesn't require a ton of time to add (which is just as important as money). To make a fetch quest, that's something a designer can do in like a week possibly, to make like a new dungeon or village with new gameplay content ... you're talking months potentially.