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Skippy McPants posted:On the contrary, I think games are getting shorter. Not all of them, obviously, but I was dumping 200-plus hours into Baldur's Gate more than twenty years ago. Plenty of games now clock in under five hours, which was considered unacceptable before digital distribution made flexible pricing more viable. I mean, back in the NES and SNES days, you could haul rear end through a lot of popular games faster than that. You had to be able to, in some cases, because there wasn't a save feature. If it couldn't be done in one session, it wasn't an option at all. It wasn't until the Playstation and Playstation 2 era that you really started getting the "I can beat this in an afternoon" thing treated as a problem, if memory serves. (And even then, you still had games hit decent sales numbers with that as a cited drawback in reviews. The Dreamcast Gundam game and Contra 4 seem to have been reasonably successful despite being under five hours, as was Kirby: The Crystal Shards). I think one reason games feel longer now, though, is a genre thing. Open world adventure games are pretty common among modern AAA games, and they're easy to draw out without adding much new content. Horizon Forbidden West, Elden Ring, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla are all ridiculously long, and it's partially a product of their basic structure. Then again, Last of Us 2 is nearly ten hours longer than the first game, so maybe it is just a thing with modern studios feeling the need to justify their budgets. Ytlaya posted:I feel like strong anti-cutscene opinions are usually either the result of playing bad games or having undiagnosed ADHD (because the idea of just getting extremely mad/frustrated because you aren't pressing buttons for a couple minutes is pretty weird unless there's some reason that the very act of not doing things is uncomfortable). If you dislike the narrative of a game that much, just don't play it! There are more games than ever now, and it's not exactly difficult to avoid the ones that are cutscene-heavy. I mean, a lot of really good games have bad plots. Just because you like the core mechanics doesn't mean you like the writing, and spending time watching someone's high school production of a sixth grader's fantasy spec-script while waiting to get back to the fun core gameplay just makes the wait more frustrating. I'd also say, even aside from quality, some of it is cutscene pacing. If you just beat a difficult boss fight after half a dozen tries, or finally cleared out a difficult puzzle, you're probably ready for a breather, so the cutscene can act as a reward. (You did well at the game, so here are more jokes, or some plot reveals, or just cool action scenes that don't work very well with the standard gameplay). However, if you just got a new ability, or entered a new area, or even just started the game, you're more likely in the mood to just play the game. A lot of cutscenes in the wrong place can kill momentum stone dead, delaying whatever you were excited about for so long that you can't even remember why you were excited.
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Jan 29, 2023 11:33
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 02:30 |
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