Lunchtime Discussion: Length

In an age when the price of games seems to be discussed more and more, bang for your buck is becoming more and more important. I know I say this a lot, but I don’t recall the length of games being talked about as much as they are now, but on the other hand games don’t seem to have such a large variance as they do in this generation. Sure you always had games like the RPGs which stood out in length, but I can certainly recall most games being closer together in terms of length.

Part of that is certainly due to storage medium limits that existed in earlier generations. With Blu-Ray on the PS3 and improvements in compression technology for the 360′s DVD-9 storage the amount of space for developers to play with is at an all time high, and not every developer is going to be able to have the resources available to fill all of the space. Beyond the simple issue of filling the wealth of available space, developers are becoming less and less constrained by their medium. It may be that developers can now make, or at least get closer to, the games they want to make with the stories they want to tell. Those games and stories aren’t all going to have the same kind of content, lengths are going to vary far more than has been possible previously.

There’s also the Modern Warfare 2 excuse, multiplayer makes up for the length of single player campaigns and that’s quite true. When people talk about the length of the game it’s generally only considering the single player campaign, but with online multiplayer and co-op modes the majority of most games now doesn’t consist of playing through the game’s story by yourself, it’s now all about the ‘long tail’ of a game. Developers want you to come back over and over, playing the online modes so you’ll buy add-on content and keep the title and developer fresh in your mind.

Are modern games changing in length? Are single player campaigns evolving to push gamers towards online play? What kind of length is right for you,do you focus on quick single player, or are you investing your time in multiplayer to get the most play out of the game?