Before the weekend, we published a new piece of information about id Software's Rage, which said that the combination between a first-person shooter, a racing game and a role-playing game, would take around 15 hours to complete.
As you can imagine, the feelings are mixed and have once again contributed to the ongoing debate about the length of games these days, especially with recent titles like Homefront, Crysis 2 or Dragon Age 2, who have all seen their fair share of verdicts given over their length.
In my view, the length is just a product of the game's story and in how much time it can be told without outstaying its welcome.
Homefront is a prime example, with its
4-hour-long single-player campaign drawing in a lot of heated arguments.
In the views of many, no matter how interesting the multiplayer mode was, the short single-player campaign didn't warrant paying $60 on it.
Others, myself included, admitted that the story was short and could have been expanded, but it didn't became boring or outstayed its welcome, a commendable thing considering other titles don't know when to stop adding twists or secondary plots.
Crysis 2, on the other hand, had a surprisingly
long story that was quite the opposite of Homefront, largely because it threw at the player a lot of one-dimensional characters that always barked orders at him.
If it wasn't for the excellent gameplay and impressive graphics, then I would've certainly given up on the 10-to 12-hour campaign of Crysis 2 just to get rid of its annoying characters and plot twists.
By far the game that saw the most arguments in the last few months is Dragon Age 2, the sequel to Dragon Age: Origins.
Considering Origins had a massive 60- to 70-hour campaign, while Dragon Age 2 reached the 35-hour mark, plenty of gamers claimed that BioWare, the developer of the two titles, had betrayed their trust.
As I said in one of our
Dragon Age 2 diaries, the stories of the two games shouldn't be compared, as Dragon Age 2 is a much more streamlined game that knows not to waste the time of players, while Origins had quite a lot of aggravating mechanics that took way too much to complete.
In the end, a game's length shouldn't be important these days, as we should definitely favor the quality of the story over the time it takes to complete it.
Games should be experienced and enjoyed, not raced through in order to just add another notch to your completed count.
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