Shadow1980 said:
As I've said a hundred times already, maybe games should stop being so ambitious. The scale and scope of these things is far beyond what the norm was just 20 years ago. I can beat Super Mario 64 or a Halo campaign in just two or three sittings. Now it's taking me weeks on end to beat games. These ever-growing game worlds do not come cheap, especially if they have any remotely good graphics. While huge games have their place, they were once rare, limited to genres like JRPGs. Now they're the norm.
"Price divided by hours to beat" was the worst mindset to ever afflict people's perception of a game's value, as was the idea that "short" and "linear" are bad things for a game to be. Video games are the only medium where the average "run time" has grown to such a degree. Movies still average in the 90 to 180 minute range (and the higher end of that range is often bemoaned as "too long"). Music albums still tend to run for the same length (40-70 minutes), and double albums are rare. The average TV season is actually getting shorter. And maybe that's just the inherent limits of their mediums. But video games can be arbitrarily large in scale and scope, and can get bigger and more detailed as tech progresses. Old school Mega Man levels were typically less than 20 screens in size. Now we have game worlds that are dozens of in-game square miles in size and take as long to simply traverse on foot than it did to beat a Mega Man game. Simply navigating these worlds is so time-consuming that the entire concept of "fast travel" had to be invented.
Sometimes it feels like the companies who make these games are never satisfied, as if they constantly have something to prove to older media. Their reach is exceeding their grasp, and games are getting more and more expensive as they take more people working longer periods of time. In less than 40 years we've gone from teams of a dozen people making quality games in less than a year to teams of many hundreds taking half a decade or more. That's an insane increase in manpower, and that increase in overhead is the primary driver of the massive explosion in average budget size. We're already reaching the point where some games (like GTA6) are costing upwards of a billion dollars or more. Compare this to an average of $20-40M for a 360 or PS3 game, or just a few million for a PS2 game. That kind of growth is clearly unsustainable, and something has to give at some point. |
Yeah the notion that every major game has to be a 100 hour long open world extravaganza with hours and hours of cinematic cutscenes, celebrity voice actors, and cutting edge graphics is leading to insanely bloated budgets.
I kinda miss when more games were focused, linear 8-10 hour experiences.
