| Shadow1980 said: Indeed. The thing about shorter games is that I'm more likely to replay them. I've replayed many old NES, SNES, & Genesis games many times over, which is easy to do when you can breeze through them in an hour or two. I probably replay Halo CE once every month or two, and I can beat it on Legendary in like 7 or 8 hours. The RE2 and RE4 remakes I've played several times each since they can be beaten in a handful of sittings. Most of my favorite games of all time are games I can reasonably beat in less than a week's worth of sessions, many of them in one to three afternoons. Meanwhile, Horizon Forbidden West was the first open-world game I replayed, mainly just to experience the remastered version. Before that, the only long games I replayed were some of the old Final Fantasy games. Replay value gets overlooked in discussions of a game's value. Time investment is an important factor in replay value, at least for me. Like, I'd prefer a 6-hour game I'll play at least ten times compared to a 60-hour game I might play once or twice. It's also why it's easier for me to get motivated to rewatch a movie rather than an entire TV show. I only have so much time, and I have to decide whether I want to sink that time into a single big thing or a bunch of smaller things, especially these days when there's so much more stuff competing for my attention and my ADHD-addled mind starts to get overwhelmed by too many choices. |
| Mar1217 said: Going through the HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest I and despite the added touches, I'm surprised at how good the overall package is for ultimately a 15h-25h hours experience. It is definitely possible to keep some of these games runtime down on meandering and keep the overall experience quite plentiful. The problem is a lot of devs and executives don't seem to know how to make these longer form games engaging in the same ways a fulfilling 10-20 hours game can be, hence why Ubisoft and other similar publishers have struggled a lot with their models recently. |
Yeah I also find shorter games more approachable and often better quality than a lot of really long games, which are often padded out with a ton of filler.
I feel like this effect really kicked in last gen, with so many franchises going open world, and enthusiast gamers insisting on stuff like "If I'm gonna pay full price I want at least x hours of content".
Every big publishers tried to outdo each other with bigger and bigger games with better and better graphics, and budgets exploded.
