I'm in the bizarre position of voting for 10-15 and for 30-40.

I've been playing a lot of shorter games recently. Bioshock, Ratchet and Clank: tools of Destruction, Portal, Overlord to name but three. Not a one took more than 15 hours. It's been great! I've had four very different gaming experiences in the time it will take me to finish my current game in progress (Final Fantasy X) without doing most of the optional content. It's nice to reach the end of something after a couple of week's play. Having a completed experience aside, there's a sad little feeling of achievement in it.

Shorter games most often finish just as they are running out of steam. Those longer than this tend to have saggy patches of some variety. Bad levels, difficulty spikes inserted with the sole purpose of slowing the player down, fetch quests ...

When it comes to RPGs it's a different matter. 30-40 is a length I've arrived at thanks to the realisation that most of the RPGs which are longer than that would be a heck of a lot shorter if you didn't spend half your time repeating the same handful of battles over and over. Random battles need to die out, yesterday. Far better to have fewer, more significant battles which give the same rewards. That's why many western style RPGs are around 30-40 hours. 30-40 hours gives plenty of time to build and develop the plot in a meaningful way, and keeps it from becoming overstretched.

Strategy games? I often prefer those like Civ4, GalCiv2 and TW which you can play over and over. There’s no length to speak of.

There’s a lot of console games mentioned here. That’s because most of the PC games on my HD at the moment are strategy games of the above ilk. There’s very little else about which appeals to me. The non-strategy games are either waiting for patches, or waiting for me to feel like sitting here in front of a PC to play. In my pond consoles have a definite lead when it comes to user comfort.

I have more time to play games now than I did 5 months ago. It's somewhat enforced gaming time, stretches of time where I can do something but don't have enough time to do anything other than play a bit of a game or read a book. There's a limit to how much time even a frog can spend reading (141 books read last year!) and so gaming it is. Surprisingly this isn't making me any more amiable to the longer games. It used to be I preferred shorter games because then it only took me a month to complete one, rather than half a year. I wonder why? At a guess it is because most of the games I have wanted to play since my working hours changed have coincidentally been short ones. It's only now that something lengthier has caught my eye.



Quote Originally Posted by Ramses II CP
A game should be as long as it needs to be to entertain, and not so long that it becomes a grind.
Perfectly stated