In september, a new game was released for the Playstation 3: Heavenly Sword. The reviews noted that it takes roughly 6 hours to finish this game. What a bad game, i thought, and moved on. I thought that everyone thinks so.
But apparently not. Last week i’ve read a meta-review (a summary of other reviews) of the game Call of Duty 4 on www.joystiq.com, where the review mentions that
while everyone agreed that the game was short, many saw this a a positive in this busy day and age.
the final drop in the glass was the video-review of Assassin’s Creed on www.gametrailers.com, where they mention (around at 4:10):
… Assassin’s Creed will last you a good 12 to 15 hours depending on your skill level, which is pretty beefy by today’s standards…
(let’s stop for a second. i’m not a native speaker of english. the following of the post depends on the assumption that “beefy” means something positive here. it’s possible that i got this incorrectly, if that’s the case, feel free to correct me in the comments).
so, why is it GOOD that a game only takes 12-15 hours to complete?
i remember playing baldur’s gate 2, and it was a long game. i do not remember anymore how long it took, but various review sites said things like “the story is absolutely epic in length and you can expect several 10’s of hours just to complete the main quest, not to mention the literally hundreds of side-quests.” or “The number I keep hearing from PR people and Bioware/Black Isle designers is 200 hours, but I’ve got a feeling it will be much more than that for your average player.”.
from some of the games i played more recently, Final Fantasy 7 took around 35 hours to complete, and Final Fantasy 12 around 65 hours (and i did do all the optional quests).
yes, there were also shorter games, like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirge_of_Cerberus:_Final_Fantasy_VII] (lately i’m trying to catch up with the not-yet-played Final Fantasy games ..), which took around 15 hours to complete, but i would never say that it’s length was adequate. it’s story was great, but the length was absolutely too short.
i await from a game at least 25-30 hours of gameplay. otherwise how could i enjoy playing it for weeks? otherwise how could it fill my free time, and make me submerged in an other world every evening?
or such things are not needed anymore?