14 DAY TRIAL // When was the last time you sat down in front of a computer to fire up a role playing game or an adventure title, and then spent the next 6 hours staring at the screen as you leveled up, talked your way through dialog scenes and battled monsters? I bet that most of you will not remember the last occasion this happened. The reason is that, while the age of the average gamer has been steadily increasing, the time he has to play has been decreasing.
Game developers are now becoming aware of this fact and are trying to adjust the games they create to make sure that the people who have little time to spend on videogames are able to get a complete experience. Charley Price, the lead designer of the upcoming Rise of the Argonauts, says that "every time someone invests 25 hours of their life into a game and then realizes there's another 75 hours to go, they just can't stomach continuing and they walk away with a sour taste in their mouth - no matter how much fun they had with the game."
Price told Eurogamer that "you've got to be going through and presenting the fun up front; you've got to be going through and presenting what you're game's about and what makes it compelling so that people can really get their hooks in." This is a trend already noticeable in games like Gears of War and Call of Duty 4, which tend to get the player into the action quicker than usual.
There's also a portion of the public that goes vocal and laments the shortening of games, saying that the developers are trying to get more money from gamers by selling them shorter titles for the same price. Then again, there's also the opinion that games are getting shorter because developers are running out of ideas and less game space means that quality can be kept up, where a bigger game would mean an experience which is not that sharp and interesting.
I myself can remember a time when I had whole summers punctuated with empty hours, which I could fill with sessions of Baldur's Gate II and that would only be interrupted by eating three meals a day, 8 hours of sleep and a few hours of talking to my friends about the game.
And I can also remember the fact that I recently considered going through Mass Effect without touching the side quests because of lack of time. Fortunately, I settled on playing little of the game on a daily basis, so that I could take in the whole universe and experience all that it had to offer.
What about you, Softpedia reader? Do you have time to thoroughly enjoy your games or are you starting to feel a need for shorter adventures?