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It was the other day that I was surfing the net as I am wont to do. Traveling through the many varied fields of cyberspace, reading, cavorting, and making a genuine swine of myself of the vast amount of information that is there for our enjoyment. Came across this little article on the generally awesome webcomic Penny Arcade. Read through it once, nodded along, found it all well and good. Nasty way of saying things, but hey, it's the truth, no?
Then I thought about it a touch. I pondered that something in it felt wrong and off. Considered it a mite more and looked through it a second time. It was an aside, a sort of 'this is really given to be true so I'm not even including it in my main dialogue' bit. Here: "ironically, teams are getting bigger AND games are getting shorter because of how long it takes to make the higher quality art". Sounds sensible to you?
I admit I just ate it up as sensible. Then I thought a bit harder about it and realized: That's suggested every so often and I don't believe I've ever seen it justified or refuted. It's just sort of taken as reality. The gameplay is less as so much of it is content and so much energy is forced to be expended making things look really, really pretty. Huh? Wait a second there. That's not true.
I recall the old days. Most games weren't very long at all. Sure, there was an occasional fifty level game on the market, but that was rare, even as it's rare today. Most that went above twenty were really simple games that upped difficulty by increasing speed or some arbitrary generator number. RPGs are getting shorter? I remember the ones that for the most part were ten-twenty hour affairs. SNES era raised it to fourty. We're now around fifty and up as a pretty darned common figure to see. These aren't getting shorter. What about action games? Well, sure, I remember commando and its four levels repeating. Contra had what, ten? I forget. Then I look at Ratchet and Clank, clearly an excellent modern example of the action game. Short? I wouldn't call a game like that short; fulfilling, sure, but not short. Heck, the original prince of Persia was an hour. As much as folks whined about it being too short, the Sands of Time weighed in at easily twenty times the length, complete with better sound, cinema, and just overall delivery on all fronts.
So, a simple thought really for today. There are plenty of grudges that folks hold against today's game industry and the inhuman factory it can be. Let's not though pretend that they aren't giving us plenty of well made, fun, lengthy, and entertaining games to spend our time on.
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