God of war 1 was 12 hours(I should know becuase I beat it)
Heavenly sword = 14 hours so I will enjoy it, besides this is the first out of three.

I liked it better when I could finish a game in 10 minutes. Not totally, but you get the point.

I beat God of War II in like 9-10 hours; 12-15 isn't that bad.

Disc space has never had anything to do with it. RE4 was designed for the Gamecube, so it initially came on 2 discs and nobody minded.

The problem is that making games, especially HD ones with lots of content packed into little time, is horrendously expensive. Ever checked what you do for 75% of the time in those 50h+ jRPGs? Fight random monsters with precanned animations on prerendered backgrounds, and going through metric craptons of text they usually don't even bother to voice act.

Good point Parokki, and well made

Some games have good replayability to make up for their length. For example I played through Gears of War 3 times to get all the skill level achievements.

Why worry about the length of the game?? if you really like it there shouldn't be any complaints and besides if you played the full game yourself thats when you can make judgment but the game hasn't even came out yet...O_O

Oblivion managed to do it, a person can easily spend between 100-200 hours in that game, it has no prerendered backgrounds, and it has lots of voice work.

I think a major problem though is that if a pure action games is really long it runs the risk of feeling like a chore to finish.  Also a problem I find with some action games is that they have a deep fighting system that the developers spent a significant amount of their development time on but that the majority of gamers likely never explore relying instead on a few key moves or just button mashing.

I'm generally a fan of longer games, 20 hours is my personal sweet spot on action-oriented games, but so few ever make it that far.