Do game devs need to respect our time better? Can shorter games be better?

[Shadow1980]

Yes. Too many single-player games suffer from unnecessary bloat as they've grown in scale & scope.

While actually doing so was a skill issue because of the difficulty of many games back then, it was usually the case that most games back in the 8-bit & 16-bit days could be beaten in a single sitting. It makes sense, since most games lacked the ability to save data (though some had battery backup) and memory cards weren't a thing yet, so devs had to make games that players could beat in 2-3 hours tops. The few games that did have battery backup to allow for save data were typically games meant to be long, like JRPGs. Some of those did have problems with bloat in the form of level grinding, but that was arguably a necessity because of how small the game worlds were (you could breeze through the original Dragon Quest in a couple of hours tops if you could start at max level). By the 16-bit era, enforced level grinding fell by the wayside; I was able to progress through Final Fantasy IV without having to grind, yet the game still took like 40 hours.

But as games moved to 3D and the ability to save progress became the norm, games have gotten bigger and bigger. Long games stopped being the sole purview of JRPGs. Now everybody wanted to tell some grand story. In a medium that's desperate to prove itself to older entertainment media, video games constantly sought to make ever more epic adventures with larger game worlds. Games that took 8-10 hours became commonplace. Then open-world games became a thing, with maps growing and growing over time, and more and more games started to take 20, 30, 40 hours or more. Developers had to fill these increasingly large maps with various tasks for players to accomplish to justify a map that big. Sadly, so much of that involves a bunch of repetitive checklist objectives, and even when devs actually try to come up with a good variety of things to do, there's still a lot of repetition because there's only so many unique things to do.

Sadly, gamers are partly to blame as well. "Short" became a dirty word at some point, along with "linear." Many of them boiled the value of a single-player game down to a "price divided by hours to beat" metric (which I think is overly simplistic bullshit, because it ignores a lot of other things, including replay value) and have demanded games that take a ludicrous amount of time to 100%.

Honestly, I'd like to see the return of the "AA" game, something that fills the gap between the massive Triple-A games and indie titles. With film there's a wide variety of budgets and crew sizes, not just "mega blockbuster" and "small indie film" with no in-between. Why not have that be the case in video games as well? We need more shorter games of high quality that I could reasonably beat in just a few hours tops. Single-player-only FPS campaigns closer in scale to the the original Halo. Survival horror games of the scale of the PS1 Resident Evil games (RE3 Remake kinda fits this). 2D platformers the scale of classic 2D Mario or Mega Man. Shoot-em-ups like Gradius & R-Type. I'd be willing to spend full price on such games, though $40 would be a better compromise because of general perceptions of cost/time-to-beat.

Last edited by Shadow1980 - on 10 January 2025