Yesterday NowGamer posted an article claiming that Killzone 3 was just “4.5 hours long”, along with proof of the claim by way of a series of screenshots of the level select screens.
As things happen on the internet, a few gamers were a bit annoyed about this, with one saying that they “wouldn’t buy it day one” for the simple reason that the game is, apparently, so short. Indeed, the comments on the N4G post (which was approaching 1000 degrees at the time of printing) were full of similar jibes.
The official Killzone.com twitter account replied back quickly, though, confirming the 4.5 hours claim to be – in their opinion – false.
“That ‘4.5 hours’ number is a misunderstanding of the ‘best time’ stat,” said the Tweet. “Normal playthrough time (including deaths) is 8-11 hours.”
So who’s right? Well, we bombed through the game for our review on a few different levels of difficulty, but we can safely say that even on Normal we were playing a good few hours on Saturday, a couple on Sunday and a few more on Wednesday before committing ourselves to a score.
Was it as low as four and a half hours? No, it was more. Was it as long as eleven hours? No.
The truth is that for games like this, with an upcoming embargo, chances are the reviewer will want to rush through the game and ensure they’ve at least seen the ending. Would that represent an ‘average’ play-through time? Probably not, no.
There’s a chance that the reviewer in question (who was actually writing up for the game for GamesTM, a magazine that shares the same publisher as NowGamer) was above average – he’s almost certainly a better FPS-gamer than myself.
And yes – those times do represent your ‘best time’ through the level, presumably not taking into account the cut-scenes and those times you died – the timer might reset back to the last checkpoint each time you do. So, if you can total up your times and reach a figure of four and a half hours, you can add another hour of cut-scenes onto that time and the time for each of the section retries you had to do.
And on the subject of the 7/10 scores floating around: had the game just been a single player our review score would have been very different. But it doesn’t: Killzone 3 offers both a solid co-op mode and that massive, expansive online multiplayer, and because of that we’re absolutely sticking to our 9/10 score. We know our community will be right behind the game when it’s out.
But the single player length? Well, that’s going to be up to you guys, isn’t it? For the record, we think about 6-8 hours was closer to our estimates.
We’d welcome clarification from Guerrilla on this, by the way.
Michael
I think game length should rated out of enjoyment and not hours.
Kronik76
Huh? That doesn’t make sense! Surely game length can only be rated by time it takes to complete, not how much fun you had along the way!
Snebjnr
I was well chuffed with KZ3’s review and TSA score, 9/10 is great.
I can safely say that when I get it, I’ll score it a 10 because I love killzone and the game looks awesome.
deus x human
dude are you really played the game and its really 6 hours?
plz replay
R4U Eldave0
Personally I get bored if games are too long so I am please with the ~7hour length. Towards the end of Dead Space 2 I was thinking “great game but I hope it finishes soon…”. The only exceptions are things like Mass Effect2 which can go on as long as it likes :D
posem
still waiting for Killzone2 to appear in GameStation on the cheap….
:(
DiscoChimp
you can have mine cheap…..it was shit Total gameplay time was only 378 days :P
E8_BALL_
since playing open.b, it could be 20hrs & not make a difference.
prev there was an article on cntrl revamp, well its gone to the extreme. weight is much lighter than closed.b, which was a perfect adjustment from kz2. it now lies between cod & bfbc2. not as floaty as cod, but not as heavy as bfbc2.
in open.b, i have sensitivity at 10% & its still hard to aim correctly in time.
was hyped for kz3, but this may well be a gamebreaker for me.
DiscoChimp
Well based on the fact I still haven’t finished KZ2, Id bet the length of gameplay of the new one will be perfectly adequate ;)