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

[LegitHyperbole]

Shadow1980 said:

LegitHyperbole said:

No because Contra is really difficult. You can also skip Super Mario's Bros 3 right to world 8 in like 45 minutes and focus on that but it didn't lack content. Double Dragons is short as hell but I can't ever recall beating it because it's designed to be so punishing. Time Crisis on PS1, you can beat it with a light gun in an hour but it takes many, many hours of practice to get that good. Tetris the same. 

However I do think games were a rip off back then and we get so much more for our money these days, plus only recently has the value started climbing back up to the value of games back then. Mid 2000's to mid 2010s was the sweet spot. Lowest price for games ever, not too long and not too short, not designed like they were made for an arcade and MP included, no MP only games. 

However with that said and the premise of this thread, my favourite games of all time, I all have hundreds of hours in and all are very long and full of content but it's just that they are so good that that content remains fun through to the end and in replays without ever getting old. Perhaps the issue is that some games just aren't good enough to have bloat or padding and some are and devs should know QA better and find out if their title should have the fat cut or not before going gold. 

In regards to the bolded, we're just going to have to agree to disagree. Most of my favorite games of all time were old NES & SNES games designed to be beaten in a single sitting. I never once felt like they were rip-offs. If I can play a full-price game that lasts a couple of hours dozens of times over, then I'll have spent as much time in that as I would in some gigantic open-world sprawl that takes 40+ hours to beat. That's why "price divided by hours of gameplay" needs to account for replay value.

I do think 6-10 hours is a reasonable middle ground, though. I can beat most old Halo campaigns within that time range (exact time depending on the specific game & difficulty level). I've also played those Halo campaigns many times over not only because they are fun, but because it's not a huge time investment (having discrete levels with definite beginnings and ends helps with finding good stopping points for the day). Play for a couple of hours, beat the game in three to five days. All killer, no filler. Meanwhile, I've played Infinite's campaign only three times: once on Heroic for my initial playthrough, the second time to get the speedrunning achievement, and the third time as a co-op run with a friend. Infinite has good gameplay, but the campaign suffers from the standard uninspired open-world bloat.

Exactly. A game should not feel daunting to play, we are on the same page. You shouldn't be in the middle of a game and have a life circumstance or just enough time away from it that it's impossible to pick up again without restarting. There are tricks to this like replaying the first hour or two and then skipping to your last save but you should not have to employ them. 

A lot of issues and good points surrounding this topic have been brought up in this thread and I'll add another one. If games are very long, they should be designed in a way that you can play for short periods or long periods and still you get something out of it, they should be easily picked up if you need to take and months break and have no trouble resuming the game. The Witcher 3 is the perfect example of this design.