Why are RPGs too long?

[Gregz]

If a game is good I never want it to end.

[Jordy]

I quite enjoyed FF7 being over 4 discs and a multi week experience.

The problem is when they "pad" them and the story isn't engaging enough.

Three discs. Yep, I'm that guy.
FFVIII was four discs.

[Roguey]

Genre expectation, lengthtards get really upset if any given RPG isn't over 50 hours and don't care if a lot of those hours are spent on bad content or mindless repetitive tasks.

The weird thing is that this is catering to a minority. Most people don't even leave Act 1 of Larian games so they could just make a game as long as a typical first act, call it a day, and have a nigh-perfect experience... and there will be a small but loud number of people complaining that it was too short.

[fkirenicus]

The only game I can think of having had the feeling it's too long is BG3. It should have ended with blowing oneself up at the end of chapter 2.
Otherwise I have had no problems with games I can think of right now; granted, I do not play many games - certainly not those of newer date.
Also, it might be that I just like long games - so long as they are good. After all, I ran a tabletop campaign of Dragon Age that lasted 4 years (w/ summer vacations, sure)...

[Falksi]

Easy sell and good manipulation of the majority of gamers, who are fuckwits.

Firstly, bigger game = more hours = better game right? no, but that's what those fuckwits think.

Secondly, gaming now is a social-media driven thing, where playing a game and being able to talk about it is something which said fuckwits need to do in order to fit in. Games get released, said fuckwits all play it day 1 to gain social media acceptance, but....and here's the key thing....the bigger the game the more which is there to get hyped over. Play a 30 hour game, and more people will finish soon, and thus stop talking about it sooner. But an 80 hour game gets talked for longer, thus more exposure & hype, thus that generates more sale through said exposure.

As a bonus, it also means that reviewers have to rush through these games, rather than being able to analyze them in details (e.g. multiple plays on different difficulties), so it also often covers game flaws too, which results in better review scores, and again more sales.

I ******* love 15-30 hours RPGs. Stuff like Buck Rogers CTD and Beyond Oasis are lush.

[Zothique]

I like shorter, punchier ****. But I'm also a fan of this mentality with the fiction I read as well. A holdover from the Sword and Sorcery genre I guess.

[Tweed]

Easy sell and good manipulation of the majority of gamers, who are fuckwits.

Firstly, bigger game = more hours = better game right? no, but that's what those fuckwits think.

Secondly, gaming now is a social-media driven thing, where playing a game and being able to talk about it is something which said fuckwits need to do in order to fit in. Games get released, said fuckwits all play it day 1 to gain social media acceptance, but....and here's the key thing....the bigger the game the more which is there to get hyped over. Play a 30 hour game, and more people will finish soon, and thus stop talking about it sooner. But an 80 hour game gets talked for longer, thus more exposure & hype, thus that generates more sale through said exposure.

As a bonus, it also means that reviewers have to rush through these games, rather than being able to analyze them in details (e.g. multiple plays on different difficulties), so it also often covers game flaws too, which results in better review scores, and again more sales.

I ******* love 15-30 hours RPGs. Stuff like Buck Rogers CTD and Beyond Oasis are lush.

If you think paying sixty bucks for 15 hours of fun is worth it then knock yourself out.

***.

[Nemesis]

Anything under 100 hours is a demo.

Rephrase to say "Any game under 100 hours is a demo," and add it to the list of logo quotes that appear at the top of the page.

[Schizoid1488]

No such thing as an RPG that's too long. It's not necessarily a metric that should decide a game's quality, just like you don't judge a book by it's length, but the reason why RPGs might feel "too long" is because the disgusting dysgenic fucks making them are lazy as **** and can't be bothered to put in enough work and instead throw in a bunch of filler, it's like those lazy filler episodes from ****** shounen anime. I doubt there's even a single dev that sleeps and dreams about their games, or spends literal years stressing about and thinking of making a great magnum opus to create before dying. The average game dev **** has nothing in their brain except literal ****.

[NotAI]

Nah, these days, games are too short.

The exception (common) is when they are long only because every enemy in the game has an HP bar the size of jupiter....

If morrowind came out today the mudcrabs would have ten thousand HP...

[Rigwort]

Put 100 hrs into Archolos, and I was happy. Put 20 hrs into SKALD and was disappointed at how short it was. Put less than that into games like Devil Daggers and Batsugun and I am happy. It's about having enough "ups" or high-energy moments. The thing about 2D vertical shooters and whatever Devil Daggers is, is that they are 100% high-intensity (barring the startup for DD). So you can spend 20 hrs in them and think "yeah, I got my money's worth". The thing with RPGs is that I haven't yet seen one that is 100% highs, and I doubt that one that is only highs would be anything other than exhausting (unless one of you knows of such a game). I would say that because of that, RPGs tend to be better when they have more content for you to spend time on.

[Norfleet]

If morrowind came out today the mudcrabs would have ten thousand HP...

That's just inflation. You'd also deal a million damage in one hit, so it would die instantly anyway. It's amusing how you can sorta spot the rough time the game was designed just based on the hitpoint ranges involved.

[Orvas Dren]

an RPG does not need to be 60+ hours to be enjoyable.

can we kill this guy?

[Xenich]

RPG's are about developing a character, this takes time and the longer the game is in terms of this, the better. Now this is dependent on a rich development system. If it is shallow and limited, it becomes nothing more than a simple gear grind of power ups, but if it has a progression of starting out weak and simple with its spells, skills, etc.. and then slowly over time builds into more complex, deeper development that results in more options (and obstacles) with encounters, well... I don't want it over quickly, I want it to be a very long and methodically paced game (see Wizardry 7).

[Magick]

RPG's are about developing a character, this takes time and the longer the game is in terms of this, the better. Now this is dependent on a rich development system. If it is shallow and limited, it becomes nothing more than a simple gear grind of power ups, but if it has a progression of starting out weak and simple with its spells, skills, etc.. and then slowly over time builds into more complex, deeper development that results in more options (and obstacles) with encounters, well... I don't want it over quickly, I want it to be a very long and methodically paced game (see Wizardry 7).

many RPGs (especially JRPGs) are less about development of the character, and more about the overall "story", the world, politics, killing god etc. etc.

[rusty_shackleford]

RPG's are about developing a character, this takes time and the longer the game is in terms of this, the better. Now this is dependent on a rich development system. If it is shallow and limited, it becomes nothing more than a simple gear grind of power ups, but if it has a progression of starting out weak and simple with its spells, skills, etc.. and then slowly over time builds into more complex, deeper development that results in more options (and obstacles) with encounters, well... I don't want it over quickly, I want it to be a very long and methodically paced game (see Wizardry 7).

many RPGs (especially JRPGs) are less about development of the character, and more about the overall "story", the world, politics, killing god etc. etc.

Another argument in favor of 100+ hour long games.

[Vickers]

It is better to be hard than long and better to be long than short.

I am not going to read the lame Moorcock fanfic you typed out in any case so if you don't have 200 hours of secret hell-zones and mega-bosses I'm not going to play it. 100 hours of this should be just walking back to things that killed me that last twenty times I fought them.

[Hauberk]

It is better to be hard than long and better to be long than short.

[Xenich]

It is better to be hard than long and better to be long than short.

Is he ********?

[Falksi]

Easy sell and good manipulation of the majority of gamers, who are fuckwits.

Firstly, bigger game = more hours = better game right? no, but that's what those fuckwits think.

Secondly, gaming now is a social-media driven thing, where playing a game and being able to talk about it is something which said fuckwits need to do in order to fit in. Games get released, said fuckwits all play it day 1 to gain social media acceptance, but....and here's the key thing....the bigger the game the more which is there to get hyped over. Play a 30 hour game, and more people will finish soon, and thus stop talking about it sooner. But an 80 hour game gets talked for longer, thus more exposure & hype, thus that generates more sale through said exposure.

As a bonus, it also means that reviewers have to rush through these games, rather than being able to analyze them in details (e.g. multiple plays on different difficulties), so it also often covers game flaws too, which results in better review scores, and again more sales.

I ******* love 15-30 hours RPGs. Stuff like Buck Rogers CTD and Beyond Oasis are lush.

If you think paying sixty bucks for 15 hours of fun is worth it then knock yourself out.

***.

[Hauberk]

It is better to be hard than long and better to be long than short.

Is he ********?

[Lhynn]

My **** is too long, your mom, ***** that she is, can only take so much.

[A Chinese opium den]

My **** is too long, your mom, ***** that she is, can only take so much.

What did he mean by this?

[Arbiter]

I guess modern games suffer from "16 times the detail" mentality - if you have to painstakingly model details like pencils on every desk in your game, you end up sacrificing the game world size and therefore the length of your game. In the same way voice overs reduced the amount of dialogue in games at least 2 decades ago.

[SoLong]

A good game can't be too long by definition because you won't get bored.

The problem is that many "long" games are artificially padded with pointless filler and/or unfinished content because the game designers ****** up or they built the endgame last, running out of time and leaving it as an anti-climax.

[pol_345polex]

It's not that games are too long, but not engaging.

Another logical consequence.

There are plenty of long games that kept me engaged for a significant period of time by being genuinely good.
e.g., I played ATOM(with all the free DLC) and did every piece of content I could find in the game, and immediately booted up Trudograd afterwards because I enjoyed it so much and wanted to continue. It was probably ~70-80 hours of ATOM.

Atom was really a fine surprise for me, and Trudograd became also one of my favourite games.