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Warren Spector: 100-hour games are on the way out
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 18th June 2008
Warren Spector thinks that games with 100-hour campaigns are on the decline. What do you think?
Spector, who is one of the most respected game designers in the industry for his work on Thief, System Shock, the Ultima series and the original Deus Ex, has made it clear in past interviews that his aim going forward is to make games that will make people smile and to move away from games like Deus Ex.
"One-hundred-hour games are on the way out. How many of you have finished GTA? Two percent, probably," said Spector, according to Kotaku.
Spector then admitted that the reasons for this had roots in the selfishness of game designers, saying that "If we're spending $100 million on a game, we want you to see the last level!"
Honestly, it's a little odd to hear the designer of the lengthy Deus Ex say that considering that members of the bit-tech team (i.e. Me) have replayed that game dozens of times. That said, the man does have a point - but the question should be whether that's the fact that the attention spans and priorities of gamers are shifting, or whether game designers are artificially inflating their games and losing the audience along the way.
What do you think? What's the longest time you have spent on a single game? Let us know in the forums.
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Comments (42)
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I think developers want to do shorter games so they do not have to come up with clever stories and can cut it short to save budget. The best example of this was MM Dark Messiah. I liked the game although it was not great, but the SP was done so fast and the multiplayer was not that good. Good thing I did not pay full price for it.
I found the CoD4 single player to be the perfect length, if I wanted more there's always a higher difficulty/multiplayer.
Sands of Time was a short game - maybe 15 hours or so? - but it worked. There was no padding, no filler and the story felt like it was always moving forwards. The characters were always evolving and changing. There were sections where the Prince and Farah were separated and the game felt like it might just be padding things out a bit, but the developer was still using this time to most it could.
Warrior Within however responded to claims that the first one was too short. It was double the length, with multiple endings. Unfortunately, it also felt a bit fluffed up as the Prince had to spend time going back through previous levels and tackling objectives which were needlessly complex (the two towers, anyone?).
I like both games, but I prefer SOT purely because the game doesn't waste my time. A shorter game isn't always a worse game and as long as developers are using the time in the game to the maximum then I don't mind if the game is 100+ hours or 12 hours. If the game involves me then I'll play it to the endand then probably play it again and again. If a game feels loose and full of meaningless sections then it's lucky if I get halfway through.
It may be because as an adult there are more important things that demand my time and just can't justify wasting large chunks of it playing games. I stopped playing RTS when I realised that I'd waste 6 hours destroying other people over the LAN.
There are exceptions though, games with a solid story I will set time aside for, games that make you feel like you've achieved something by playing them. Deus Ex was one of them.
"Laputan Machine"
One problem i do see with games in general nowadays is that they spend less and less time trying to draw a player into the story. FFVII, Half-Life, Halo, Baldur's Gate... even Monkey Island. All games that would not have been half as good if they incorporated one of the excuses for a storyline that games use these days. GTA is a positive exception, but games as a platform for compelling storytelling is losing ground.
Maybe I'm too much of an olsdschool Civ player to be counted in with all those console kids but still: I like 'em big.
I do care a lot about stories which is one of the reasons why I think Crysis wasn't too great after all. Same with the new Indy movie... wtf with the aliens? :|
Anyways, I don't agree with Mr. Spector on this 100% though I have to say if a game does feel stretched or the story isn't up to the task it's less fun.
As mentioned in a post above, my increasing age might be a factor in this - i have less time and am less tolerant of games that arent consistantly interesting, and now tend to drift towards pick up and play games that i can mess about with for 30mins then go do something else (especially since i went cold turkey from WoW).
The only games i put 100 hours + into are engaging multiplayers (like cod4) where theres a genuine interest in playing purely to improve your skill and understanding of the game.
So on that level i think he is right, but i would be interested to hear what he thinks should replace it - is he a proponent of arcade style games which you complete in an hour of intense play, or is he planning on going the multiplayer content/plot free route, or something else?
QFT. I don't really care how long a game was, I found CoD4 too long because those damn respawning enemies were just so frustrating. Although I thought I should have enjoyed the campaign, most of the time was spent cursing at the screen because I got killed by some enemy I couldn't see.
I do quite enjoy short games, there are so many games I have on my list of games I want to complete, I just have to say no to many of them because they are just too long, JRPGs are generally guilty of this, although I usually enjoy the stories, I find the save point system and long winded dialogue to be really annoying. As Joe said, shorter games tend to have a better storyline as well, as there is much less filler there for the sake of making the game longer. If a long game can have a good story all the way through then that's great, but it's rare that people can pull that off.
I will usually only play a long game if it's truly exceptional too. The problem with a long game is you have to play it for a long time, if the game is very good, then that's great, but the longer you play a game, the more those annoyances with the gameplay start to bug you. I can only play a JRPG for about a week before the random encounter system gets on my nerves. The random encounter system is the JRPGs crutch to make the game last longer, I don't want to have to take 2 hours to get through an area because I get a random encounter every 5 steps, I just want to get through and progress the story.
TL;DR: If you want to make a long game, that's fine, just make sure the gameplay and story are up to scratch throughout, otherwise people will lose interest. Even then, people will probably still lose interest when a new game comes out, but if you make it good, people will want to come back to it over and over again.
EDIT: Also, your new avatar is awesome
The single player was too short, yes, but you cannot say that the multi player was useless (says he who has spent about 5 days playing it over LAN)
I like long games, so long as I get into them. I enjoyed CoD4, I enjoyed ES4: Oblivion, I enjoyed GTA:SA. I have completed them (Oblivion and GTA twice).
I also enjoyed STALKER but not enough to complete 90% of it again when I reinstalled windows and forgot to backup the saves.
So long as a game is good for the amount of time you are playing it, then I am happy. I am really happy if that goes on for 100+ hours
As for mass effect, It might cover 360 rpg asparations but it falls way short of what i expected. Knights of the old republic was about twice its size. ( did they run into disk space issues i wonder)
If im paying £40-50 i want value for money not a 8hr expereance. £5 an hr isnt great value. ( cinimas is nearly better), Also played duex ex at least 3 times doing it 3 diffrent ways. I like games that are open about the way you play. Having to only go in guns blazzing gets rather old fast.. Thats what was maybe great about farcry and crysis. There was at least 4 diffrent routes into everything. You were encouraged to do it diffrently
And warren were is system shock 3 ( we want to play it )
If the new generation of gamers don't have the attention span to complete a 100+ hour game then stick with going straight into online game play and keep away from the single player campaign.
I read about how short the COD4 single player campaign was and decided I would never buy it.
I agree that a long game with a poor story line or poor content designed to pad it out will fail dismally but that is no excuse for shortening games and it is just that, an excuse, it seems the game developers are getting short attention spans and increased greed, they just want to get it out the door and get on with the next one rather than create a truly compelling game, which is to the detriment of the game, how many games when released as supposedly 'gold' are just the latest beta, Frontlines: Fuel Of War is a good example, I played the open beta and when it went 'gold' I was going to buy it until I read that it was little if any better than the buggy beta I had played for free, when I read about people not being able to play the game they had just purchased until they had downloaded a patch and a hotfix (a patch by any other name is still a patch) I decided I would NEVER buy it.
When I buy a game I expect quality, quantity and I expect it to work straight out of the box, if they can't make a game that fulfils all of that then they can't expect me to pay the AU$60 - AU$100+ that they want for it, it makes me think of [cough]p2p[/cough] as the better option to get games.
...I'm still not through GTA:SA
Depending on how long it's going to take for Part IV to get to the PC, I might just make it yet.
Finished COD4 though, so yeah, it was pretty short, but okay. (could have had +50% maybe.)
HL2 had the right length...
Far Cry was too long...
I might buy a new game, play it for a few hours a day and get half way through.. Then, on my next rip into town buy another new game, and then I'll begin to play that and forget about the other one.
Content =/= playing time. Modern games are very expensive to produce, some games even having the budget of hollywood movies, it's very difficult for a handful of people to make a decent modern game now, especially difficult if you want it to be a big game with lots of areas.
i want quality and length, one is nothing without the other.
Oblivion was good in this respect as there are always about 14+ quests on your plate at any given time, and all of different style (except when you get to the last 14)
other good time consuming games were the LoZ series and the Metroid series.
FPS games don't benefit from a longer story line or open-endedness like an RPG does, simply because the scope of the gameplay is so limited. STALKER was an interesting twist trying to blend the two, but the reality is it doesn't work very well.
going forward I can see FPS's becoming more Multiplayer oriented, while I can still see longer and more interesting RPGs.
unrelated: anyone know the average complete time for Okami on the Wii? I'm at the dragon palace, with about 18hrs of game time.
Case in point? Doom 3. No-one can accuse it of being a short game, it wasn't at all, but were it shorter it probably would have been better as a result.
But I will say this I would probably prefer a game that falls in the 15-25hr range but if it has a great story then I could play it for however long it last.
But does anyone ever just stick to the main quest that religiously?
If you're payer £30 for a game it needs to give you plenty to do - and for the majority of games I don't think adding a multiplayer counts. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but playing through Starcraft took nearly two months of my evenings and weekends. By the end I was a wreck - and then came Brood War. Now, I loved World in Conflict, and played the demo to death just like I did with the Startcraft one 10 years ago, but WiC only had 15 missions, only a couple of which I had to play more than once beacuse they were hard. Sure, there's an infinite amount of online play to be done, but that can be pretty hit-or-miss, and I find the single player much more immersive.
No question, making good, long games is hard and expensive, but if you're asking for $50 of my money, i expect at least 20-40 hours of gameplay. Otherwise it's a ripoff!
No, which is why 100 hour games are always going to be around to some extent, i think Spectre is wrong, wouldn't be the first time.
But for my money if it's between a 100 hour campaign and a short campaign I'll take the long one every time. As long as it doesn't suck.
Well there were all those people that followed the arrow in Bioshock and didn't bother to explore.
i hate CoD is so short, and hate that stupid GTA is so long and tedious.
i kno different people has different sweet spot on how long they wanna play a given title, but there should be some generalization if developers would listen to their community more........
just my 2c.
You can make any game 100hours by just including mindless repetitive filler content in it, but that won't improve the game at all, the opposite infact.
Some of my favourite games include portal (tiny) up to MMOs (pretty much infinite)
if the game length is sensible for the amount of content it works, i don't want more games like doom3 that felt like a game extended 4x by repetition just to make it longer...
Wow I finished GTA:SA in 18 hours (with a few cheats just doing the missions nothing extra)
You can.....but you needn't.
Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape Torment, cases in point..
There's too much money in gaming now, and like everything that 'turns mainstream', it gets poisoned by a shift in direction towards mass-appeal for maximum profit, rather than quality for the sake of artistry and achievement.
It saddens me to see one of the greatest visionaries of gaming so swayed by this shift in perception (which as others have said is due to more non-gamer-types buying games now than before, rather than an actual change in attitudes from those of us who are longtime, dedicated, 'hardcore' gamers) and honestly makes me feel a little bit betrayed, as irrational as that may be.
The people who actually appreciate the sheer artistry of games like Planescape Torment, Deus Ex and System Shock are now a minority in the market and therefore we no longer hold any sway. To be 'forgotten about' and marginalised by people like Spector simply because we're no longer financially viable is painful, to say the least.
That may just be "how it goes", but knowing that doesn't lessen the disappointment.
Joe, you disallowed me from saying anything bad about Spector before on the topic of Invisible War, but you know... I'm not going to accept that this time, and when I think about it, I recall a video interview Spector did, along with a printed-magazine preview, extolling the virtues of DX:IW's gameplay and 'accessiblity' (keyword) in the later stages of the game's production timeline.
So... in light of the above, this very article and Spector's public shift towards "games that make you happy", I'm inclined to suspect he wouldn't have done a great job on DX:IW had he been more heavily involved anyway.
And believe me, it kills me to think that about him. I grew up on his games and return to them regularly even now, as many do.
For the record, I think he's right that long games are on the way out, but I don't think it's anything to be happy about and I don't think it's a forward step for the games industry.
QFT.
200+ hours on the first run through, and well over 100 on subsequent runs too, of which there are many..
And then stick another 30-40 on for the expansion. Every time.
The games we can say that about are the ones that go down in history as groundbreaking or classic.
Oblivion won't be remembered on that count, for instance, but Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 will.
Now that's quality gaming, and value for money. Developers & Publishers please take note. Warren Spector, go back to making good games please.
:?...I'll need more than that just to finish the cars list, as i have to drive to and fro between towns...