The Investment Problem in Gaming

Same here, Justin, too many games, not enough time.
I think this doesnt affect all games (MW2 is a good example, 10 to 12 hours to finish, multiplayer optional), but there's been an obsession with making games as extensive and expansive as they can be among developers.
Its not a new thing (Remember CSOTN's inverted castle?), but yeah, its getting annoying, especially when it involves genres that do not need to be padded to hell with content; FPS, action games and so on should be thrill rides that do not abuse their welcome, and leave long ass quests and plot development to rpgs and the like.
Sometimes, all we want is to have some quick, straightforward fun.

Regardless of how much content is in the game, you ultimately decide how much time you spend playing it. At $60 a pop I want as much content as possible as long as it is done well.

Maybe it isn't a matter of there being too much in the game, but of there being too much in the game that doesn't engage you. It used to be you'd see "60 hours of gameplay" and think "Hey, that's worth my money." But when a good 30 hours of that gameplay is slogging across environments to get to the next batch of missions, non-essential side missions, repetitive mission types with a different coat of paint, inventory maintenance, gear upgrading, and cut scenes, you're having more and more dead space between the really good stuff. It's not content, it's padding.

Look at Portal. Yeah, it's a short game, but there's not a wasted level in it. Each one teaches you something you need to learn for the next one, moves the story along, and isn't so frustratingly long that you want to give up. Being able to save wherever you want is a big plus too, but Portal is the video game embodiment of "Brevity is the soul of wit."

I agree. I have a backlog of games I still need to get to that I feel I simply won't be able to because each one requires a 40+ hour commitment. Because of that and the fact that most of these games do not lend themselves to 30 min play sessions. The games I look for now tend to be the type I can get quick 10 to 30 min fixes out of or the games that are so unique that it is a novelty to play them. Left 4 dead 2 is in heavy rotation right now simply because I can start it, hop into a random game and have some fun within 3 minutes.

The last game I found myself devoting a lot of time to was Demon's Souls and that was because the thing was so different than any other RPG I played in a long time.

When I was younger, it used to be that money was the barrier preventing me from being able to play all the games I desired. Now as an adult, the money isn't the issue, I have enough disposable income to get the games I want. But I don't nearly have enough free time to play all the games I buy. And I'm really not buying that many games anymore - it's just that with the job, the wife, our first baby, etc - I'm lucky to get 2-4 hours of gaming per week. A 10 to 20 hour game, which some people are able to digest in a weekend - I'm playing it for a month or more.

Most important to me when I buy a game now, is that the entirety of it entertains me. I don't demand a certain duration for my $60, and a game that feels "padded" doesn't make the experience any better. I don't really have the time or patience to stick with a game if it just becomes a grind. And maybe not entirely fair to the games, but they better start strong - I don't have the free time to nurture a game that isn't drawing me in early on. In that case I'm most likely to move on to something else - and with my large gaming backlog, games I abandon are rarely revisited.

I can't say that there's a simple answer to this for me. For example I finished Portal in less than 5 hours and felt that I got my money back and then some. On the other hand over the last few months I've gladly spent 50+ hours in mass Effect 2, over 60 in Torchlight and 70 + in Dragon Age. And somewhere in the middle after 20 hours of Just Cause 2 I decided to stop playing since I felt satisfied that I've seen all the cool things the game had to offer by then. The amount of time I can spend on a game and the difficulty I can tolerate vary from game to game.

I've run into this problem too. I got a PS3 last year with dreams of Final Fantasy and RPG's parading through my noggin. I invested in MW2, MGS4, Uncharted 2 and Arkham Asylum. Now 5 months later, I've only "beaten" MW2, and it's the only game that gets serious play in my house. With a wife, twins, and a full-time job, I don't have the time to invest in games the way I want to. I can pop in MW2 and shotgun people for 45 minutes while the girls are asleep with little investment and high reward. I've tried to get into the others, but only being able to play in 30 minutes spurts here and there makes most games difficult to enjoy. If I have to spend 5-10 minutes of that time figuring out how to get from one ledge to the next, or figuring out the right combination of things to wound a End Boss, I wind up frustrated. with what little free time I get right now, I don't see me tackling any "you need 40+ hours to win this" games in the near future.

I've got job, wife, 2 kids, puppy all competing for my attention (and use of our large TV). I would say Idon't have time for much gaming these days, but I can't complain too much since I'm nearly through my second play through of FFXIII.

For a 10 hour game, I can spend an hour or so a night and be done with it in a fortnight. That's ok time-wise, but it's expensive. Generally I only buy the big games brand new, and pick up lesser titles when they drop to half price.

I usually play on normal difficulty. I find hard games that I really need to 'learn' to be too much effort. If I get stuck on a level for a while, I'll lower the difficulty or simply stop playing it.

There's a whole other argument that the current Hi-rez generation of games rquire too much effort on developers part to make. I've considered making a thread about the amountof recent games that feels like the delivered content feels short of what was originally envisanged. This adds weight to the idea we may see smaller (and hopefully cheaper) games in the future.

I only got into Fallout 3 this year and it knocked me out how much content there was between the main story, side quests, and what you could find simply wandering around on your own. But what was really daunting were the subway tunnels, which seemed like they were specifically designed to thwart traditional video game exploration methods.

I'd be trying to get to a specific spot inside D.C. but I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything vital so I'd easily spend several hours exploring one underground area before seeing daylight again. The pathways would twist around, branch off (sometimes into lower & upper levels, not just cardinal directions), loop around into each other, and you weren't sure you were heading to your destination or if it'd be connected by a completely separate tunnel system. Took forever.

Regarding worries about value, there's definitely been a "soft" cut in the retail price across the board, in the form of gift cards, trade-in deals and digital distribution. I'm not sure if it's just the recession or a precursor to a "correction" in retail prices, but you have to try pretty hard to actually pay $60 for a game these days.

You mean if you play it twice, once on normal and once on hard? I tend to watch the clock and finished MW2 after two evenings, 5 hours total. Portal in 3. And I wouldn't even say I'm extraordinarily good, I die terribly often. I like renting a game over a weekend and have it finished by Sunday.

As a teenager, it was great having all the time to play large games, but nowadays I only do it with special titles. I think Diablo III or Oblivion II will be next.

Fallout 3 seems like a bad example, since the main storyline only lasts around seven or eight hours. The casual player can burn through the story in a weekend and move on to something else, and the more invested folks can ferret out the side stories and DLC stuff for weeks, or even months. It sold really well, too, and I don't expect Obsidian to revise the formula much at all.

I do believe that an aging gaming population will eventually lead to more modularized and emergent games, but the telemetry thing sounds like bullshit. People don't quit games after only four or five hours because the games provide too much content and are too difficult - they quit because most games are really lousy.

Hey man... I hear this.

I still haven't finished GTA IV (and I bought it when it came out!). I'm pretty sure I'm on the last mission though.

Furthermore, there are PS2 games I haven't finished and some I've barely played.

State Of Emergency
Escape From Monkey Island
The Thing
The Simpsons: Hit & Run
Manhunt
Final Fantasy X
The Godfather
Scarface
Vice City Stories

Couple of these, I just lost interest and ended up selling. But I'll get around to some of the others.

And, just last week, I finally played through Silent Hill: Origins (what a shitty game, by the way. Opens well and the "third act" almost saves it - but that entire midsection, of which a substantial portion is in the insufferable mental hospital - felt like a chore to play. And the awful combat system doesn't help at all)

Things come up. It happens.

Like most of you, time is my biggest enemy. As much as I love RPG's, I just don't have time to play every single one that comes out like I used to. So I really don't mind the shorter games, I just don't like the $60 price tag that they come with. That's why games like Splinter Cell:Conviction are on my wait list till they drop in price.

Basically, it comes down to whether a game grabs me or not. Fallout didn't grab me, despite being obviously damn good, and after a month and about ten hours of playtime, I put it away, and I'm pretty sure I'll never get back to it. Because, yes, the time commitment. Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, I loved so much it became a terrible albatross around my neck, and I spent every spare minute for ten days or so playing it just so I'd be free of the damn thing.

I've found this has been a huge problem for me as I've gotten older. I think it comes down to some OCD tendencies that I have.

When I was in 9th grade, I could afford to spend hours on end playing out every possible permutation of every encounter in DEUS EX in order to ensure that the story progressed exactly the way I wanted it to. However, when I got to a game like FO3 last year, there were so many different options for any given scenario and so much to do that I ended up putting over 500 hours into the game (only 70 of which were saved as progress on my story, the rest was just experimenting) and had done barely anything at all. I'd not even gotten to Paradise Falls. When I started to have nightmares about Nuclear War, I knew that I'd been playing too much Fall Out and took a "break". The game has not been in my XBOX since. I know that there is still that whole world out there, waiting for me to explore it. It's beautiful and frightening and fun, but it's also so huge as to be overwhelming enough to scare me off. One of the last times I played it I spent SEVEN HOURS in an abandoned vault and not much of anything happened. I know that if I sit back down, I still won't make a sizable dent in the game without a Herculean effort

I like knowing it's there and I do intend to finish it one day.. but right now I just don't know when. I don't have the time or energy to invest in playing FO3 how I want to play it, and playing it sloppily (where I feel like I'm missing possible options ETC) is just not an option for me

When I get in the mood to smoke and play a game, it's so much easier to just pop AC2 in the Ecks Bocks and run around on Italian roof tops for a few hours till I get bored. Popping in FO3 feels like I'm about to sit down and read Moby Dick cover to cover

I think this is a good point, it's all about immersion for me. If a game grabs me by the throat, I'll make time to play it, squeezing it in whenever I can. With Fallout 3 I hit a wall with it after about 30-35 hours and just pushed through to finish it, but by that time it was a bit of a chore. Dragon Age I literally lived and breathed every spare moment with and could have gone another 60 hours once I'd finished it, Oblivion was much the same and with that I clocked in nearly a hundred hours over a few months. Mass Effect 2 was the right amount of time at about 25 hours, I was ready for that to finish when it did, same with Assassins Creed 2. Then you have the odd much shorter game that's the exception like the last Prince Of Persia, which I personally really enjoyed so didn't mind the length.

It's true tho, I simply don't have the time to devote to games I used to, but I'm paying AUS$100-120 for these damn things, I want the option to devote the time to them and get lost and immersed in a good deep game if I can, a 5-6 hour game is simply going to piss me off in that regard. I can't justify paying that sort of money for such a short experience, it just makes no sense.

Do you get angry, as a gamer, living in Australia, TRD? I am always curious how Australian gamers make do with the constant banning going on down under

FF13 is the worst for this. Too many assholes telling me "stick with it, at around hour 30 it gets good!". I'm sorry, no. I put 17 hours into the game hoping people were wrong. They probably aren't.

Shorter games like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge are still in my collection because they were great experiences in and of themselves and there's still stuff to do in them. I don't mind waiting a year or so to revisit them either. I still have PS2 games in my collection that I've never really beat (Rise of the Kasai being the main one) and games I like to dust off and play almost annually (Killzone and Shadow of the Colossus).

The point being that a good game will stay a good game even if it's 5 hours long. I couldn't commit to Oblivion but I totaled Fallout 3, both Mass Effects, and especially Dragon Age and consider my time well spent as far as videogaming goes.

A big, complex game isn't something to scoff at or stop producing. GTA4 and Red Dead Redemption are overwhelmingly complex games with almost too much to do, a lot of it very challenging. This is their charm and to lose this to serve that elusive 90% is asinine. Just because all the burroughs of Liberty City are in the primary package doesn't mean you can't slowly work your way through them as if they were released one by one as content packages so you have space to stay interested and not burn yourself out. It's the habits of gamers that create issues, not the way games are made (in this sense anyway).

I am free to slowly and methodically work my way through a game or try to go through it all at once. Episodic packaging helps TV shows be more palatable, but the lines in most big, long games are visible enough to mark your place and allow you to parcel out the content in whatever way you wish.

If the game doesn't have it for you enough to not shelf it for the next big thing, that may also be a habit of yours as opposed to a problem with games just being too long or something.

The entire dilemma is extremely interesting and personally relevant as my free-time has collapsed since I've become a father. As the average age of gamers rise, the industry has to decide on how to address the problem of continuing to replenish it's audience while maintaining it's earliest constituents.

Even if you love Final Fantasy XIII, it has one of the slowest ROI's in the history of gaming. On the other hand Square basically has pretty much lost it's mind so it could very well be an outlier. But modern WRPGs have decided to address the problem in having a 10 - 15 hour, relatively easy, main story (which I am always shocked at the number of people who will play that way) and 60 hours of side story and DLC.

Action based games have started to employ Dead Space-like systems, where the game beats the player on the head pointing out where to go next.

Sports, shooter and music games (which was a significant reason for their rise in popularity) are disposable, more importantly easily accessible. DLC allows the more hardcore players to return. The ROI is instantaneous.

This seems like the way the industry will be (actually a shift to shorter cheaper games with tons of DLC will be the norm 5 years from now) barring some sort of gaming apocalypse.

I've got the wife, kids, AND a hellish number of hours devoted to school. My future career is also a bit time-consuming.

The silver lining to this long-term lack of gaming time is that I'll never find myself playing a bad game ever again. I have a HUGE backlog of "AAA" titles that I'll someday get around to playing. I'm not even halfway through GTA IV, and I still haven't touched the AC2 DLC.

I don't think it's the banning that's a major problem. Some titles it matters (Left 4 Dead 2 was ruined with censorship so I hear). And the main political figure who was problematic in allowing more mature games had to resign, so there's hope that will get fixed up anyway.

The big issue for me is price. Super Street Fighter IV is $80AUS which is bullshit. It should be no higher than $50AUS. We've been screwed on DVDs and CDs for years.