Games – Too Big, Too Hard?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 4, 2010

Unable to resist an easy double entendre, GamePro EVP John Davison writes about how we now have solid evidence of something gamers are frequently loathe to admit:

Too Big and Too Hard

The upshot of the article is this: Now that game developers are including stats reporting in their games, they are learning our actual gaming habits. While we talk a good talk about wanting long, epic experiences that really challenge us, most of the time (90%) we play a game for four to five hours and then give up.

I remember the then-president of Infogrammes Bruno Bonnell telling my studio this belief more than a decade ago, so this isn’t actually a big surprise to the industry. It’s probably not a big surprise to most gamers, either. Really. How many games do you have on your shelf which you’ve not only never completed, but never played more than a few hours of? Yet you still buy more games…

Now, Davison’s take on the issue isn’t the inevitable “dumbing down” of games. (IMO, that’s already happened!) But his conclusion is that this will encourage game developers to make increasingly modular games (read: More DLC) that reward behavior other than the basic hardcore gaming path.

Me? I consider myself an optimist, yet even I think Davison’s view is a little on the rosy side. If it were strictly up to the designers, sure, but I suspect most publishers think like Bonnell did eleven or twelve years ago, when he told us we were wasting time and money making bigger games. I think the average publisher will take this data back to the developer and demand, “Cut this game in half. We’ll sell the first half for full price, and then break the second half into four pieces that we can sell as additional downloadable content! We’ll make twice as much for each game! Muhahahah!”

That won’t b the case, I guess, if some brave pioneers make hella money doing exactly as Davison suggests. Publishers may generally be conservative, uncreative, money-grubbing suits, but the successful ones didn’t get there by being idiots. They’ll follow the money.

But I want to take another step back, as I do have a little bit of an issue with the premise. With a couple of notable exceptions (like, for example, Portal, and some old arcade games), my favorite games with the fondest memories were never short and usually not all that easy, either. Most clocked in at 30 hours or more (some at over a hundred) of game-time. Those games I only spent a few hours on and eventually gave up on? It wasn’t necessarily because I, as a gamer, am a wuss. Though I’m sure that’s part of it.

But sometimes it’s simply that the game really isn’t all that good. If I’m getting bored after four or five hours, why would a game designer assume it’s my own fault?

This is the same kind of thinking that led publishers to declare RPGs “dead” in the mid-90’s – that the market had changed and was somehow at fault. Then, with the explosive success of games like Diablo, Baldur’s Gate, and Final Fantasy VII, they announced not that they’d been wrong the whole time, but simply that “the market had changed” once again, and was now it was more accepting of games from the role-playing category.

Hmmm…. you didn’t stop for a minute and consider that the market being inundated with low-quality product from said category might have had something to do with it? That maybe the market wasn’t accepting of your product because your product was bad?

Now granted, some of these statistics are coming from very good, popular games, so my counterpoint doesn’t exactly explain it all away. And I’m the first one to say I’d rather be delighted every minute of an eight-hour game than slog through a bunch of filler in a hundred-hour game. Besides, any gamer can tell you that time is subjective when you are playing a game. When you are playing a great game, you don’t know where the hours go, anyway.

Filed Under: Biz, Design - Comments: 13 Comments to Read

Samrobb said,

“… my favorite games with the fondest memories were never short and usually not all that easy, either. Most clocked in at 30 hours or more (some at over a hundred) of game-time.”

I’m going to bet that these were all intermediate goal games. Sure, they may have taken you a hundred hours to finish… but along the way, there were probably plenty of points in the story that you could look back on and say, “And here, I had accomplished something”. You may not have saved the universe (*yet*!), but had at least made a tangible step in that direction.

More importantly, it was probably a story-related step of some sort, not just a “Wow, I gained a level!” thing. You cleared out this dungeon. Fought off the invading army. Exposed the plans of the evil high priest. Managed to escape the insane asylum barely alive, but with the information you need to go on to the next objective.

Table-top gamers have know for years: you play a hundred-hour game in 4-hour chunks, and make sure you either reach a plot point or a cliff hanger at the end of each chunk, in order to keep things moving along. FPS games manage this by slicing things up into game levels. WoW accomplishes it though zones, instances and quests. Strategy games manage it through campaigns.

If the intermediate goals of the game are interesting, then you’re hooked, and you stick with it. If they fall flat… well, then you play for five hours, say “Meh”, and go on ot the next thing.
Flux said,

‘Now that game developers are including stats reporting in their games, they are learning our actual gaming habits.’

I think this is a lot of the problem. Generally, if developers are able to provide stats on how their games are being played, then there’s probably little variety in the gameplay. The player likely needs to keep doing the same thing over and over in order to increment those counters. Its called grinding, and its not exactly a new concept. Some games may hide it better than others, but it boils down to the same thing.

Now, I’m not saying that games necessarily need to vary gameplay constantly. That’s extremely difficult to do. But something needs to be done in order to tweak the mechanics enough so that it doesn’t feel like you’re doing the exact thing at the beginning of the game as you are doing at the end. I don’t want to just face Generic Bad Guy #507351, whose only difference between him and the other thousands of opponents before him being a model and texture map. You can’t blame people for not finishing a game when they’ve seen 90% of what a game has to offer in the first 15 minutes.
Justin Alexander said,

Color me skeptical. While I certainly think it’s true that games, in general, could benefit from less boring/repetitive padding seemingly designed solely to bloat the playing time, that’s a common sense conclusion. (Or at least it should be.)

But the basic research here seems fundamentally flawed in its conclusions. It’s like saying that all television programming should be 60 seconds long because most people watch less than a minute of a particular program before flipping the channel.

Basing the length of entertainment on the amount of time people spend channel surfing past crap they don’t want to watch is fundamentally idiotic.
Calibrator said,

I think several things are getting mixed up here.

First of all I think we are talking about plot-based games of some sort or the other and not racing games or high-score based shooters. Not that they aren’t difficult but it’s much harder to measure the progress. Where is the limit of the personal high-score one can attain or the minimum lap time one can race?

Plot-based games – ranging from adventure-type games to RPGs are more easily to grasp: How far did you get? 50%? And it’s here, IMHO, where one can get the biggest feeling of remorse.

Games are often aborted because they aren’t too hard but because they are often repetitive, boring, “unsurprising” and sometimes so predictable that it’s sickening. No, not every title is a winner – back then it wasn’t and today it isn’t either.

Occasionally a game is really hard in places but I often discover, after successfully mastering the sequence (or cheating my way through it ;)), that the next sequences are often not as problematic. These games provide a certain challenge and often generate enough motivation to overcome them and continue (the Uncharted-series is a good example from my personal experiences).

There are, of course, games that are bothersome through and through, naturally, and those get shelved even though a solution is readily available on-line.
Back then before the “internets” you had to *pay* for solutions and perhaps less motivation to spend even more money on a pesky title…

Personally, I can also confirm that I have often shelved a game because something better came along. Perhaps something I really waited for and the title I was playing earlier was used to fill a gap. I often swore to continue the game but I either forgot about it or it was already too late: Continuing from a really old save game is one thing, remembering important stuff well enough is another and beginning anew is usually more work than fun for me.
Games – Too Big, Too Hard? | Juegando said,

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Brian 'Psychochild' Green said,

Lots of issues here.

I think the big issue is that it’s hard to understand the data, especially without context. If the vast majority of people are quitting a game after 4-5 hours, was it because the game was too long or too hard for them? Not necessarily. As others have pointed out, it could be that the game was too boring or too easy, so the people moved on. It could also be that some other game came along and distracted them enough that they never returned. We are still largely a hit-based industry, so people might only be interested in your game until the next big-budget game with a big marketing campaign comes out.

I think there’s also the issue that the market is changing. Not just the hard-core getting older, but a wider variety of people playing. Mom didn’t grow up playing multi-hour epic RPGs, so she’s not likely to stick with one, for example.

Ultimately, I don’t think the traditional type of game is going away. There’s going to be a demand for longer gameplay for younger people to spend their time on. I think some of us older guys might also still buy the occasional epic RPG, not because we want to finish it, but because we want the opportunity to sink or teeth into a deeper game if we are able to. Putting “now shorter and easier!” on the package isn’t going to move more units to us.

Some thoughts.
WCG said,

I almost never complete a game. But 4-5 hours? I’ve barely had a chance to read the manual and design the perfect character(s) by then! 🙂

Seriously, even I play a lot longer than that! Of course, I like complicated games with a steep learning curve. I’ve barely begun to get a handle on the game in 4-5 hours.

But it’s true that I almost never see the endgame. With the exception of Wasteland and Grim Fandango (one of the few adventure games that appealed to me), I can’t think of a game I actually finished. No matter how much I like a game, I just get bored and want something different after awhile.
Silemess said,

Younger players have a chance to play a game for a longer period of time. The rest of us have only a few hours a day to play.

Even if the game doesn’t actively drive us away in that span of time, it still actually has to convince us to come back when we next have a chance to play. Because next time we can play, it is on equal footing with the other half-played games or the new/unplayed game that’s waiting.
LateWhiteRabbit said,

A lot of games are too long. That might not be a problem if the gameplay was constantly upgrading and dazzling you with actual new elements, but most don’t.

I tried playing Final Fantasy 13 recently. I should have known better. I spent 3 weeks getting 20-30 hours into the game, and I was still getting damn tutorials. I finally hit a hard boss fight (one of the summons) and couldn’t get past it. So I said, “Screw it, I’m not riveted by the gameplay and I sure don’t feel like playing another few hours to get to the ‘good part’ everyone keeps telling me eventually happens.”

I used to have nothing but spare time to play these epic RPGs when I was a teenager, but I can’t set aside 50-80 hours of my life anymore for one single game. I think one reason I used to spend so long on games was that I couldn’t afford to buy a new one often, so I squeezed everything I could get out of each one. As an adult, if Game A isn’t thrilling me, I can always go down to the store and buy Game B. Or download a new one instantly over services like Steam.

4-5 hours sounds right to me. Most of my favorite games fall into this time span – Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Princess Maker 2, Cute Knight, Dead Rising, etc. None of those games take more than 6 hours to “beat”, but they also share another common trait. They have massive replay value, to the point where no two play-throughs are likely to be the same.

A short game time lets developers focus on quality and gameplay, and always maintaining a fast and exciting pace. Mario Bros. could be beat in minutes if you knew about the warp pipes, but it’s still fun to play through over and over.

I get the impression a lot of games that stretch out past the 15 hour mark are dragging out the story and game just to pad the time. People are going to hate me now, but I’ll use Deus Ex as an example. That game climaxed 3 or 4 times, where if they had ended the game after those fights I would have felt everything had been explained and finished in a satisfying manner. Instead each time you finished one of those fights a scene occurred that was basically “But wait! The conspiracy goes deeper! OMG!” (By the way, I still do love the game.)

Collecting stats for games is a wonderful idea too, especially for large game or RPGs. Things like:
-How long was the player’s average game session?
-How many guests were completed in each session?
-How many NPCs talked to?
-How long did the player spend it each area?
-Favorite tactics?
-Favorite weapons?
-Did a majority of players stop at a certain spot?
-How often did the player die? Did they continue immediately afterward? Did they continue later? Did they never come back to your game?

All those things can be used to make your game better. I don’t think it’s dumbing down a game if developers decide not to include something in a new game that drove away or stopped people cold in their old game.

Valve has been collecting system specs from their players for years now, and it tells them exactly how far they can push each new game graphics wise. Crytech learned this lesson the hard way with Crysis it was so demanding that few people played it – certainly less than they would have liked. With Crysis 2 they are optimizing the engine for consoles and lower-end hardware. That’s just good business.
Code Ugly » Chrono Trigger vs Suikoden on the DS said,

[…] Games – Too Big, Too Hard? […]
Wavinator said,

It’s too bad we can really only go by “anecdata” in the form of our own personal experiences and those we know. It would be nice to be able to see the raw data ourselves, especially so that we could compare our own gameplay experiences with these industry conclusions.

I think the assertion in the GamePro article that gamers are prideful and claim to want something they don’t is a very risky conclusion– one that comes down to whether or not you think your consumers are stupid. Usually when people say they want something *they really want it.* Evidence that they’re behaving to the contrary is often evidence that they’re not getting what they want.

For me it’s the damnable insistence on “repeat and die” gameplay that bores me to tears. Games like Morrowind and Civilization that let me pursue my own goals and inject my own creativity into the world I play constantly, even if they’re years out of date. Games that insist that I endlessly perform the same specific moves, hear the same dialog, watch the same scripted sequences ad naseum/infinitum until I play exactly as the game designer intended are just not worth my time.
WCG said,

Speaking of Civilization, I was just thinking about how the latter part of Civ II (I was writing a blog post) was different from the beginning. At the start, I enjoy exploring the map and trying to find – and grab – the best locations for cities. And note that barbarians are a real threat then.

Later in the game, I’ve finished exploring and/or run out of new locations for cities. Instead, I’m focused on making my cities huge, with every terrain square optimized. Barbarians aren’t a problem, but I have to worry about unhappiness and pollution, as well as my neighbors.

And after that, I become a warmonger, with tanks, artillery, and aircraft, and railroads tying my whole nation together. Partly this is forced on me, since taking the lead causes every other nation to keep declaring war. (In this respect, Civ IV is much more realistic.)

But it’s also the case that my previous interests in the game (exploration, founding new cities, research, even most terrain improvement) are pretty much over by then. Civ IV is more realistic, but I still think that Civ II is more fun. Even if you try to play as a peaceful nation, you can’t continue doing that throughout the game. In other respects, too, the latter game is very different from the earlier.

So is this how an RPG could keep my interest longer, by changing what’s fun about the game as I continue to play? This already happens, to some extent, in games where designing your character(s) is almost a game in itself. But could the gameplay change enough during a game to feel that the endgame was very different from the beginning and the middle?
John said,

20 to 30 hours is usually tops for me, even on my favorite games. Even with many long games, the main plot can be finished in that time (though there are some games much, much longer). Honestly, most of the side games and missions just don’t do too much for me. The GTA franchise, for example, is my favorite of the modern games, but I don’t need another side racing mission or some silly mission where I have to jump bicycles into the air or collect stuff. If I wanted to play a racing game, I’d buy a racing game. I don’t mind a few of the side missions, but there’s just too many, and they’re no really fun.