Six Good Hours

In the interest of saving you any suspense, here’s where I land on the issue. If a full-price game provides 6 good hours of a dense, fun single player campaign, then I can be satisfied with that. In fact, in many cases I would prefer that to 15 hours where any substantial part of that time is spent slogging through extraneous “content” just for the sake of dragging out the time commitment.

This is not, like most of my notions, a universally held opinion. For some — perhaps even you — purchasing decisions can quickly reach defcon DealBreaker if the game in question doesn’t cross some volume of time. I understand this philosophy, even if I don’t necessarily subscribe. To pay sixty dollars for a game that’s over in a long afternoon, can feel a lot like paying two-hundred for fancy cuisine that’s half the size of your average portion at Chili’s. If you can only buy one game and that has to get you through the next two months, do you really want something that’s gone in less time than your average work day?

Probably not.

But, that’s not the same thing as saying the two-hundred dollar meal is necessarily a worse value or even over priced. In fact, if I remember that two-hundred dollar meal five years later, even though it was smaller, even though it didn’t leave me feeling as though I needed to be hauled from the restaurant on a forklift, it’s still to me the better experience. Six good hours is enough.

However, six good hours also isn’t easy. In fact, I’d dare say for many studios it would probably just be easier to make a game twice as long that’s more mediocre and less evenly paced. And, honestly, I think that’s what we see in a lot of what’s available in the mid-market gaming world: games that hint at greatness, but can never get to a consistent state and end up drifting around for a dozen or so hours until they just kind of stop.

That, or games that provide a handful of not abysmal single-player hours, and then talk about replayability and value in terms of its multiplayer — a multiplayer that in far too many cases is likely to be a ghost town three weeks after release, unless it’s a Call of Duty or Halo.

To me, these are far less valuable products. Though I admit I can tend toward being a relic of the great single-player games of yore, I would vastly prefer to dive into a dense experience that leaves some kind of lasting impact or emotional resonance regardless of the time involved. Of course, that kind of game has become exceedingly rare. Unless you can come to a publisher with a clear example of why your single-player game will both sell boatloads of DLC and become a property with strong possibilities for sequels, they may not give you a second look.

And, I admit, in this kind of world, it’s easy to be skeptical of even those six good hours. It’s harder and harder to look at a game and not wonder what was held back so it could be sold in three months as an add-on pack. There is, even with a game thick with action and story, that niggling thought always at the back of my mind that wonders why there wasn’t more. It is a cynicism that bothers me, because what does it matter if I get to the end of the game and feel like I have something meaningful I can take away?

I think it’s also that cynicism that makes us sometimes feel happier when we get a game that has dozens and dozens of hours of gameplay. Time, after all, is a much more quantifiable and understandable measure of value, and if you’ve put in twenty hours into a game, then who cares if the studio held back some measly three hours for post-release DLC?

But when I start thinking this way, I’m reminded of a recent study that says experiences make people happier than possessions do. I’ve always had trouble spending money on something like a nice vacation to somewhere amazing, because think of all the things I could buy with that money, and wouldn’t those things last longer than some one week vacation? The answer, I know, logically, is both yes and no, because the experiences and memories that make me the happiest are never that one time I got a really nice washing machine or that day I bought a new sofa. It is always the experiences.

I think something similar is true of games. Games that I remember fondly I never remember because of how long they were or how much time it took to finish the campaign. I remember my favorite game and game moments regardless of time. Somewhere along the way, the way I measure value for a game changed — without my ever necessarily wanting it to — from dollars and hours to memories and moments. A great moment in a game is independent of its features, its DLC, its multiplayer, its price or its length.

So, I try not to think about those things too much when I’m picking what to play next. It’s not that they aren’t important, but none of those things are a deal-breaker for me, particularly if I have reason to believe that a game, even if it is full price, even if it is only six hours long and even if it has day-one DLC can provide me an experience I can carry for long after I’ve stopped playing.

Comments

I agree that a tightly focused, engaging short game makes for a better experience than a longer one that lacks such polish, but 6 hours is a bit too short for a full price game in my opinion. I'd pay $25 for a game of that length without thinking twice, though.

15 hours is just right for me for most games, though I can be convinced to go for much longer in an RPG with a good story. Playing many games feels like reading a book that didn't have a good editor, where the meandering side stories become annoying. Risen 2 is a perfect example; at 32 hours, I'm nearly finished, and overall it has been very enjoyable. If it had been cut down to 20 hours, with only the best parts remaining and all the fat (errands and the like) removed, it could have been a fantastic game.

I was trying to do the mental calculations on this after Elysium mentioned how disappointing Impire was on the Conference Call. I shared your feelings about the game and was busy trying to do the movie ticket cost translation algorithm (i.e. a movie ticked cost $11 for 2 hours of entertainment) and was coming up short with Impire.

I don't think the movie ticket algorithm stands up these days, but I think the 6 hours is about fair. I put about 15-20 hours into Farcry 3, didn't finish it, but had a perfectly wonderful time playing it while I did. I felt I got my $70 value from the game. I think this varies from person to person, depending on their budgets (money and time), but being in a similar place to Sean (kids etc.) $20 blown on, well an odd, if not bad, game is a big chunk of gaming budget.

Thank god for Firaxis and Paradox grand strategy games. Geez I get value out of them.

Now to stop myself buying compulsively - there's my problem.

I think the possible death of the used games market on console might change the game a lot. I was perfectly happy playing 80% of the COD 4 campaign and a handful of online matches when I picked it up second hand. I would never pick it up full price though - it doesn't help that games in Australia have an arbitrary seeming 'tax' on them (which is reflected in some titles on Steam).

I like these games enough to go that far but as soon as the combination of ridiculous story and game difficulty spikes get to me I'm usually out. $90 for a COD game is too rich for me.

Amen! Partly because tackling shorter games means tackling the pile is that much easier, but shorter games that are well put together are also easier to go back and replay at a later date. If I want to replay Dragon Age: Origins, that's a good 30-40 hours of time spent on just that game. If I want to replay Catherine, that's what, 8 hours?

I imagine this is one of the reasons through the years I've replayed Mega Man X more times than I can count, yet I've only replayed Chrono Trigger a handful (and Final Fantasy Tactics fewer than that).

While long games have their place, it's like rereading a book like 1984 versus The Lord of the Rings. They're going to consume time, but one is a much more monumental task.

I long to clear my pile, if only so I can one day not give a sh*t about length anymore and replay any game I want as long as there is nothing new on the horizon.

And to add to the point:

Mega Man X can take what, 3 hours to complete? 4 tops? If I've played that game 10 times in my life, that's 30-40 hours. And there's nothing to stop me from beating it in another 3-4 hours.

Shorter games that are tightly put together can have plenty of replay value, and if I play a short six hour game in two evenings after a day at work five times in a year, it has just made itself worth the $60 cost a 30-40 hour game has.

Buy a sick, sexy sofa. Make sweet, sweet love on it. Get the thing. Remember the experiences on the thing. With the thing. Forever.

Now there's value, right there!

Joking aside, my main take away from the article is that it is really hard to make 6 really compelling, really good hours of singleplayer gameplay.

But I don't think gamers necessarily eschew the proposition of paying sixty bucks for a really good experience. They might twist their nose as they check the price as they hold the game in their hands/hover the mouse cursor over "Checkout", but if the buzz is really good about it, they're going to buckle. Most of them do. Well, I do, if I have the cash in hand.

However, considering paying 60 bucks for 6 hours of something that's just less than orgasmic? Where's that sofa?

ccesarano wrote:

I long to clear my pile, if only so I can one day not give a sh*t about length anymore.

I still have a ridiculous pile to get through, but I think I actually have reached that place where I no longer give a sh*t about the length of the games I play.

40+ RPGs can be an intimidating time investment at first blush, and $60 for a sub-6 hour campaign can seem like a poor time-to-money ratio too, but I don't really think of it in those terms anymore. My media value scale goes something like this: if the game, movie, book, etc. feels too long as I'm experiencing it or after I've finished it, it was too long; if, on the whole, it felt too short, it was too short. Not exactly the most profound statement on the topic, but it's a good rule of thumb for me.

To me, Persona 4 Golden was too short. I put 70+ hours into that game, loved every minute of it, and wanted more when I finished it. On the other hand, I'm a huge Dead Space fanboy, but I'm about half way through Dead Space 3's campaign and I'm already tired of it, even though I had wished both of the previous games were longer.

Of course, I'm also the type of guy that will hem and haw about devoting an entire two hours to watching a movie and then proceed to sink 3-to-4 hours into my third play through of FFT without blinking an eye (because, of course, I haven't beaten it on iOS yet...).

So what do I know?

Clearly, you're buying the wrong sofa.

Great article. I know I've found myself wishing for shorter RPGs lately, mostly brought on by re-playing Chrono Trigger last year which is about 20 hours long and is exquisitely paced. I loved Persona 3's 120 hours epic, and don't get me wrong, but I would be a very happy man if I could have that game condensed into a 30 hour experience instead of hours upon hours of just killing time until the next story sequence.

Also, Parasite Eve which is the closest thing to a JRPG novella that I've found so far.

In theory I don't care how long a game is. Cost per hour feels mostly meaningless*.
Portal 1 was short and awesome for example. That would be hard to deny.

But.
The type of games I like the most are coincidently also games I don't think fit well with short games. As in; RPG's.
6 hour Skyrim, Mass Effect (ok, wanna-be RPG) or Baldurs Gate? I don't think it could really work.

Sure, those long games tend to have less "quality" per hour. But if you removed the lower quality parts of these games, and finetuned the experience like some sort of CoD campaign I don't think it would be the same.

It kinda has to take 2 months walking to Mount Doom, instead of just taking the Eagles from the start.

*Then again, I buy $5 steam sales games and play them for 0 hours. Thats like infinity cost per hour!

Six good hours is all well and good, though for me it does feel a bit overpriced.

Modern Warfare 3 was five bad hours start to finish though. I'm still totally annoyed about the $30 I spent on it.

So, I guess part of the problem is that one person's six good hours isn't necessarily the same as another's. If a game shoots for 15-20 hours of content though, its easier for even a negatively biased person to acknowledge that there is value present.

But, this is all pretty subjective.

polq37 wrote:

But, this is all pretty subjective.

That's where I find myself standing. I'm reminded of the phrase about how long an essay should be "Like a woman's skirt - long enough to cover the basics, but not long enough that it becomes uninteresting." You just can't put a number on it, at least not for every game and type of game.

Perhaps comparisons to other similar games would be better than a number - Like Game A but without the hour of X, or Like game B but more Y. Just as I remember big red lines through paragraphs of my essays with "waffle" written next to it, we need game creators to ensure that what they spend time on for us to spend time on is worth having. It's a balance that has to be struck between cloning encounters out to pad the game (something the long games of old were often guilty of), but also not being stingy with enjoyable gameplay.

Also I'm sure hindsight is a wonderful thing. We're seeing game length from the perspective of playing the finished products rather than developers who have to make a bunch of bits, conceived years before, and then they assemble them into something that hopefully works.

"Games that hint at greatness, but can never get to a consistent state and end up drifting around for a dozen or so hours until they just kind of stop."

Oh my god, this is such an apt description of so many disappointing games I've played, even if I did enjoy them. Darksiders 2 was probably the most recent example of this to me. The first half, great. The first third, really f*cking great even. Second half...yeah what the hell are we doing again? Right, collecting some rod thing. Um...why? Oh, this is the final boss? Oh hey, the game's over. That's...cool? I guess?

I never understood the focus on time for older gamers. As a child/teen, yes: you have less money and need to make those games stretch out into the long drawn-out hazy days (especially during summer holidays!). But as an adult?

I don't think I ever really looked at any game and saw that it was "X" hours long and decided not to buy it. I thought I did - or may have done - but I realised later that it wasn't the amount of time or lack thereof that was holding me back and my wallet closed, it was the perceived quality of that experience.

I may have baulked with all the rest upon finding various Call of Dutys to be 4-8 hours long but having played those games via rental I know it wasn't the time that made me wary of placing my hard-earned cash on the table. Games like Ico, a 4 hours if you stretch it title, that I've purchased and played multiple times never had such a reaction from me.

No. It is not time that is my enemy... merely games and game design that I do not care for.

I like games that are both great and give me a lot of hours to play. Every one of the hours I spent doing ME3 was awesome, and each run was a lengthy one. That's my standard. If you're not giving the awesome (I'm looking at you, Rage), I'm just not going to even bother playing, even if it did cost me full price to buy. I already lost money; I'm not going to lose time to a mediocre experience when the sun is shining and there are tropical seas to swim.

I didn't finish Crysis 2, nor either Darksiders. I have plans of taking up the Darksider games at some point later on; maybe they'll click then. Red Dead? Nope. Too boring. If I wanted to shoot something, I'd put Vanquish on the tray. If I wanted to putter around a mostly empty environment with ultimately pointless tasks, I'd be playing Farmville.

DorkmasterFlek wrote:

"Games that hint at greatness, but can never get to a consistent state and end up drifting around for a dozen or so hours until they just kind of stop."

Oh my god, this is such an apt description of so many disappointing games I've played, even if I did enjoy them. Darksiders 2 was probably the most recent example of this to me. The first half, great. The first third, really f*cking great even. Second half...yeah what the hell are we doing again? Right, collecting some rod thing. Um...why? Oh, this is the final boss? Oh hey, the game's over. That's...cool? I guess?

I pretty much have to agree with your assessment here, though I actually liked what the ending COULD have been. It just needed more padding and focus on the character.

But when it comes to all that second half stuff...

Spoiler:

I feel like the game stops being so awesome once you reach the tree. That's where I started to notice that everything involved Three's. It's a game about Three's, everywhere. Go here and get three of these. Go hear and unlock three of these. Death, fetch my Three generals, each who require you to fetch three things before they'll join you. It was repetitive, and felt like padding.

Compare that to the first Darksiders, where you hit that Desert dungeon and it breaks away from the "Like Zelda, but Rated-M" trend a bit, providing a sense of variety between the dungeons to help make them more memorable.

Darksiders 2 would have definitely been better if they weren't so focused on making it a bigger game. It had better combat, and could have had a better story. The loot system is debatable. But they had to make it bigger, and as a result it wasn't better.

I'm not at all a completionist. If a game catches my interest, I'll play until I'm ready to move on, not until it's Platinumed, or the ending reached necessarily. On the other hand, I've just throw 63 hours into Persona, and I see another 20 or so hours of NG+ in my future, so exceptions do prove the rule.

I don't care how long it is $60 is a hell of a lot of money to spend on a game. Maybe it's the fact that I'm a starving parent that makes me feel this way but there are very few games that I would be willing to pay $60 for and they must have tons of replay value in them (Diablo 3 (definitely not worth $60 but Blizzard games never go on sale) and Starcraft 2 come to mind). Most $60 games will be $30 or $15 in a year or so. Paying $60 at release is just an impatience tax.

oMonarca wrote:

However, considering paying 60 bucks for 6 hours of something that's just less than orgasmic? Where's that sofa?

Console gamers do it on the sofa.

I fiddle with my console standing u...

Wait, what were we talking about?

oMonarca wrote:

I fiddle with my console standing u...

Wait, what were we talking about?

Probably some sort of intelligent conversation that tboon would be involved in.

I honestly just don't have a whole lot to say on the cost / hr thing. Which is odd considering I actually track those stats on a spreadsheet, but mostly since it's easy since I already track the price for financial reasons and time so I know how the pile is going and I get some odd satisfaction out of the tracking process.

I just like good games. I spent 101 hours in Dark Souls (1 playthrough and 1 1/2 months) which was a game I was completely and totally unsure I would be able to stand before I hit the buy button. It blew me away and grabbed me like few other games ever have. Guess I could say that was the best $20 spent (from a gift card) in a long time.

For me a six hour game is the equivalent of a 30 minute film. It's too little time to become immersed in the world and the lives of the characters. I want all the faff, all the travelling about, the inventory sorting, the side quests and the many and varied battles.

All my favourite games of recent times have been twenty to thirty hours long and many of them, even then, felt like they ended too soon. The Assassin's Creeds, the Red Dead Redemptions, the Mass Effects, the Far Crys all feel like full weighty games that I would cut nothing out of. Yes there are dodgy missions and bits that don't work but I suspect that, in an world where the six hour game prevailed, the same would be true.

I feel, and yes it's a matter of perspective :), that the quiet moments, the 'wasted moments,' the stuff that isn't the meat of the matter, is what fills out a game and what gives it weight. Some modern movies have a tendency to 'cut to the chase,' to drop the dull bits in favour of a quick transition from one spectacular moment to the next. Far from making the film a more perfect experience I feel something important is often lost.

On a recent cookery programme Michel Roux Jr was judging a nouvelle cuisine style dish prepared by an amateur chef. It was a small peice of cod sat on a moderately sized bed of mashed potato and decorated with other edible bits and bobs. Michel, clearly an exacting but kind man, said, "It's a nice dish but there it just too much potato there. No one could eat that much mashed potato." My first thought was, I probably could.

Higgledy wrote:

On a recent cookery programme Michel Roux Jr was judging a nouvelle cuisine style dish prepared by an amateur chef. It was a small peice of cod sat on a moderately sized bed of mashed potato and decorated with other edible bits and bobs. Michel, clearly an exacting but kind man, said, "It's a nice dish but there it just too much potato there. No one could eat that much mashed potato." My first thought was, I probably could.

Americans everywhere think "Challenge: accepted."

This article pretty much sums up my thoughts on Alice Madness Returns. It had solid core gameplay, some interesting puzzles, a beautiful setting...and by about halfway through the game I just wanted it to be over. They took all of the good stuff and repeated it ad nauseum until I wanted to throw my mouse out the window. At six hours the game would have been damn near perfect, but as it was I finished it once and can't see myself ever playing it again because the idea of slogging through the slow sections turns my stomach.

At least I can still play the original Alice (whose pacing was damn near perfect IMHO).

I find there to be an inverse correlation between engagement and my memory of the price I paid

I loved Portal 2. I loved Skyrim. The latter cost twice as much, and I spent five times the hours in it. I also loved From Dust, in which I spent about the same amount of time as Portal 2 but paid I think half of the cost. And then there's Pudding Monsters, which cost me 1/10 of Portal 2 but kept me engaged for 1/5 the amount of time.

What it comes down for me is not whether I got value for my dollar. It's whether I got value at all. If so, then I think about the remaining franchise or future titles in the series. Sometimes that value requires many dozens of hours to unfold (like GW2, or Skyrim). But sometimes, it doesn't