Not necessary (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Thursday, May 25, 2017, 15:14 (2528 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Game length should simply occur naturally. If you are playing the game and you get bored or things get repetitive - if the game runs out of ideas, it should be shorter. Make your game the length it needs to be to maximize fun per second. Most games these days are far too long.

A lot of that stems from people directly equating length with value. Yeah, it's stupid, but it's a huge thing.

When Titanfall 2 came out, this one dumb reviewer complained that the campaign was only five hours long. He loved it (and the pacing), but he said that he wanted it to be at least ten hours long, (and I quote) "but not with filler, but more great moments". That was actually one of his biggest knocks against the game as a whole, and it was asinine, but game length is important to people.

Would the Left Behind DLC for The Last of us been better if they doubled the length of the mall fights?

Speed, Cruel and I were talking about this some nights ago, since Horizon Zero Dawn is a 40 hour game, as opposed to something like The Witcher 3, which is closer to a 200 hour game. While The Witcher is a fantastic game, you are required to run many filler quests in order to continue the story, and it's easy to just forget about the main quests and slowly lose interest. HZD has a very tightly-paced story, and only three "main" storylines that you must do (and I'm not even sure if two of them are mandatory, but I was to compelled to complete them before doing the main one) in order to complete the story. If you look at the Trophies, 29.1% of people who started the game have already beaten it (by contrast, while 30% of players completed the Witcher 3's main story, this includes those who played on the story-only difficulty. If you look at the "Blood and Bones" difficulty and above, it drops to 5.6%) Over a fourth of all players have hunted down all of the pieces of the optional Shield Weaver outfit (that's a pretty crazy percentage). And nearly one in every ten people who started the game has gotten the Platinum Trophy for it.

Guerilla's focus on making the experience as long as it needed to be to tell a great story, while not forcing players to run fetch quest after fetch quest is one of the reasons that I love the game (though there are totally optional fetch quests that you can do, but none that the story requires).