The 40 Hour Game

40 hours is the magic number used by today’s standards to define the acceptable length of an RPG.

However, most games don’t deliver 40 hours of actual gameplay, and that’s perfectly fine with me. For the most part, I’m more of a 20 hours kind of person. Most games are not “good enough” to hold my attention for the full 40 hours, so I usually end up never finishing games that go over 40 hours of gameplay. Games that boast hours and hours of gameplay are usually not that fun because they spent more time making the game “longer” and less making “fun”.

I do, however, disagree with the “promise” of 40 hours of gameplay translating into “40 hours of gameplay, if you replay the game 3 times on the other difficulties”. That just isn’t right. One playthrough should be the gauge for how long a game is. Case in point, Mass Effect proclaimed being one of the longest RPGs ever created with the most spoken dialogue in any game. However, that was only *if* you played through the game multiple times. One playthrough was actually closer to 8-20 hours depending on how many of the side-quests you completed. I hated the fact that I had to play through the main story line over and over in order to get to all the side missions.

I had a great conversation with one of the designers at Cheyenne Mountain about this exact topic. He agreed with me, to an extent, or rather, I agreed with him. I’ll paraphrase but he basically said work on making the game fun first and then any content you make after that will be fun too. That’s pretty much true across the board but many games don’t take this approach, or at least don’t do it well. They make the base game fun but then add systems that are not fun for the sake of content. For example, in World of Warcraft they added “Daily Quests”. These are repeatable quests that you can do once a day and yield minimal rewards. These quests are boring, difficult at times, and a useless addition of content. They are not fun in any way, shape, or form but they add “content” to the game. The quests extend your game time by hours and hours and hours, but they don’t actually “add” to the game itself.

Honestly, these quests were a great decision from a business standpoint. They took very little effort to create and implement while extending game time (paying subscriptions). The quests are probably the best possible cost/benefit ratio for the company.

However, from a design standpoint . . . it’s crap. I can’t think of a designer that would consider them a “good idea”. Which brings us to the bigger problem: publishers. Publishers are to blame for this. Business executives whose sole job it is to make more and more money and haven’t the first inkling of an idea of what the customer (gamer) wants. They are ruining video games and have been for a few years now.

Publishers need something to get them to “back off” a little bit. I know that the designers out there are not that bad of designers (well, some are). They usually have some pretty cool ideas, but publishers force them (as much as possible) to stick the formula. Games haven’t really changed all the much in 15 years. The same basic formula applies over and over with a very few exceptions rocking the game world each year. People said Bioshock would be one of these exceptions, sadly it was just another typical cookie-cutter game, granted a decent one but still the same formula used previously. Portal is considered this year’s exception with an almost entirely new game mechanic, the portal (which was actually already done in Prey years ago, but no one seems to notice).

There needs to be more innovation and less “same crap in a new box”. But, it’s a delicate balance. “Same crap in a new box” is what keeps the industry afloat. Innovation is hit or miss. Unless the company is huge (like Valve) it really can’t take the risk of innovation in the volatile industry. Instead they use the same formula and add “content” to it. Which leads to tons and tons of cookie cutter games that are only distinguishable by which suit of armor the protagonist is wearing and the spelling of the names of the NPCs.

And I have to sit through 40 hours of it . . . no thanks.