Almost no one finishes games, but what about episodes?

[Forbin]

I don't know about games getting too long, for me it's more getting too tedious. I don't know if it's a recent development (i.e. artificial lengthening by adding tedious crap) or just me.

But if I look at the time I've spend on New Vegas, it's clearly not games being long.

I found both Fallout 3 and New Vegas to be "artificially" long. There was a lot of good content in New Vegas, I literally just finished it today. I know some people really like the freedom of an open world, but unless you have a team the size of a subscription based MMO, it's extremely challenging to pull it off without throwing a massive amount of filler in the world. IMO it would have been better if some of the good stuff was on the main line instead of stupid fetch and reputation grinding quests.

[syntheticgerbil]

I always cringe a little bit when somebody tells me that they gave up on a game because they were bored or stopped having fun or something. When you're dealing with some games that can be multiple dozens of hours, it seems like a given that at some random point it might start being a bit shit, but there's probably a whole lot of rewarding stuff on the other side of that too.

Though i'm just speaking out of frustration for knowing people who never finish games.

I feel the same way, sometimes a game can surprise you if you hold it out.

In fact I'd venture to say there's almost no game that will not hit some rough, tedious, or repetitive spot. Even then, there's no way it will be the same for everyone.

So the attitude that the game designers need to cater to exactly you or you won't finish the game is pretty nuts. On the game development side there's no way to possible know when your players will get to the breaking point of quitting sometimes, even with a bunch of analytics to back it up. Just like Metacritic statistics, they only go so far.

[a purple future]

I guess you hit the target with the "artificial tedious crap" thing.

Fallout has a world where they put of work and is worth exploring, other games want you to find 200 "generic item #54" just for an achievement or the ever popular "you can't leave this area until you're fight monsters for 20 minutes".

that's why I never finished Infamous. I cannot fathom the appeal of that game, it's the same 5 missions over and over and over, and I'm not trying to sound like a neogaffer or anything. The missions are literally exactly the same. I can only do so many repetitive escort missions or "knock the flashing lights off the side of the building" missions

[Roderick]

So the attitude that the game designers need to cater to exactly you or you won't finish the game is pretty nuts. On the game development side there's no way to possible know when your players will get to the breaking point of quitting sometimes, even with a bunch of analytics to back it up. Just like Metacritic statistics, they only go so far.

This isn't about entitlement at all.

Filler content isn't 'good' gameplay, and I'd be surprised if anyone is waiting for it. People have different breaking points, that much is true, but no designer goes 'we have to put more filler and grinding in our game because that's what games are made of and that's what people want'. No, it's in there out of time constraints and to buff up the length of your game, or it's some experiment to see whether people will continue to play after the main mission is over.

That's what is so brilliant about the current generation of games: it's OK now for a game to be ten great, diverse, non-filler hours. That's accepted by the public. Because of that there's no need for games to hit that 'grindy rough spot' anymore, because length is less of an issue.

[Sno]

I don't think either of us were making an argument in favor of "filler" content. I think you're conflating several separate threads of conversation.

An aversion to grinding through repetitious content is obviously not the only reason a person might stop playing a game.

[Roderick]

You could replace 'filler' for 'rough spots or tedious gameplay'. It does get a little confusing in this thread.

[Sno]

You could replace 'filler' for 'rough spots or tedious gameplay'. It does get a little confusing in this thread.

Well then i think you're just wrong, i don't think there's such a thing as an unassailable ideal of "good gameplay" that can be held to.

Shit is subjective, what works for one person won't work for another, you draw that experience out and the odds increase that you'll find something you don't like. So do you stop when you find something you don't like, write off the rest of the experience, or push through and hope you find something on the other end that you do like?

Personally, i'll generally try to keep going.

[Tanukitsune]

That's what is so brilliant about the current generation of games: it's OK now for a game to be ten great, diverse, non-filler hours. That's accepted by the public. Because of that there's no need for games to hit that 'grindy rough spot' anymore, because length is less of an issue.

Really? I could swear people whine the most about length now, like Angry "FOUR HOURS!?!?!" Joe and everybody who said Portal 2 is too short even though it's longer than the original.

People are complaining ARCADE games are too short, that's how bad things are getting.

Sno, there are things that just can't get better over time. Sure, the story can get better and your character can develop and gain better powers, but if the controls are bad or the pace is terrible it's likely not to improve.

[Sno]

Sno, there are things that just can't get better over time. Sure, the story can get better and your character can develop and gain better powers, but if the controls are bad or the pace is terrible it's likely not to improve.

I don't agree with that assessment at all.

Environment and mission design can vary wildly over the course of a game, encounter design and difficulty balance can vary wildly over the course of a game.

I'm sure everybody has played a game that has had some awful escort mission that clearly isn't playing the way the developers intended for.

Maybe it's not even completely the game's fault, maybe your frustration/boredom as a player stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the game's mechanics and the tools it has presented you with.

[Roderick]

This discussion is awful because there's no proper definition for what we're talking about. What the fuck is filler?

All I wanted to say is that I generally finish every game I play, but I dislike it when games artificially pad their length with, for instance, grinding battles. I don't see it as entitlement to criticize that stuff, because it's a critique. Calling it entitlement pulls the rug from under any critique you could have on anything.

[Sno]

I guess my point is simply that games can and will, at times, suck balls in ways that are completely disjointed from the rest of the experience.

I think people who take their games seriously enough to, for example, post on a vidoegame forum, should know enough about games to accept the occasional design implosion as a given. It will always happen, there will always be that one shitty level.

[Nappi]

I guess my point is simply that games can and will, at times, suck balls in ways that are completely disjointed from the rest of the experience.

I think people who take their games seriously enough to, for example, post on a vidoegame forum, should know enough about games to accept the occasional design implosion as a given. It will always happen, there will always be that one shitty level.

Like I said earlier, most, if not all, of the games I have stopped playing and eventually forced my way through, didn't suffer from "occasional design implosion" or "one shitty level", the developers quite simply ran out of ideas or lost the ball completely. For example, I got completely fed up with killing wave after wave of heavily armored bad guys in Uncharted 2 by the time I reached the monastery and simply quit playing. I resumed playing a couple of months later only to find out that I was expected to do the exact same thing for a couple of hours more in a considerably more dull setting. Not only that but I also had to deal with some stupid

yeti's

, as well.

I'm not at all sure that many people quit playing for the wrong reasons, for instance, one particularly annoying part or mission type. If the mission is not representative of the ones before it, then it probably won't be of the ones after it either. If on the other hand, the mission is similar (in design or mechanics) to the ones before and you still find yourself bored, then what are the chances that the rest of the game will be awesome (especially since most games today seem to have all the interesting stuff in the beginning)? There are exceptions, of course, but it is often very easy to estimate which games still have something to offer to you and which don't.

I don't see any issue in not finishing what I have started. I have no problem in admitting that a video game (or a book for that matter) that I have bought is not what I expected, quit and spend those 10 hours of my life doing something I find more rewarding.

[Tanukitsune]

I don't agree with that assessment at all.

Environment and mission design can vary wildly over the course of a game, encounter design and difficulty balance can vary wildly over the course of a game.

I'm sure everybody has played a game that has had some awful escort mission that clearly isn't playing the way the developers intended for.

Maybe it's not even completely the game's fault, maybe your frustration/boredom as a player stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the game's mechanics and the tools it has presented you with.

Maybe I should said the general pace of a game? Sure an escort mission can and usually kills the pace of the game, but the pace of the game can be bad from the beginning.

Sometimes you can spend hours lost and feeling like you're not making progress, sometimes it's your fault, sometimes it's the game fault, but sometimes... It's just how the game is? You can spend 10 hours in the same area with the same equipment and no story progression and that's exactly how the programmers intended it to be, and that's bad pacing.

This discussion is awful because there's no proper definition for what we're talking about. What the fuck is filler?

Anything added to make the game longer? I'm pretty sure it's the same as with movies?

A movie doesn't need a five minute scene with the main character brushing his teeth, the same way a game doesn't need a QTE mini-game of the main character brushing it's teeth. But they were both added why? Because they thought they needed more content and lenght!

[syntheticgerbil]

Filler content isn't 'good' gameplay, and I'd be surprised if anyone is waiting for it. People have different breaking points, that much is true, but no designer goes 'we have to put more filler and grinding in our game because that's what games are made of and that's what people want'. No, it's in there out of time constraints and to buff up the length of your game, or it's some experiment to see whether people will continue to play after the main mission is over.

I think I was being too vague. I was imagining games that are streamlined and have very little filler but still hit rough or tedious spots.

I don't really mean the addition of needless gameplay, but to go on the supposed 30-50% of those finishing episodic games even when there should be very little filler and some of the comments in the thread about those that quit after a game fails to impress them makes me think it's really more of when most players hit a rough spot in a game, they don't come back. Filler of course makes it worse, but you'd think the designers would make sure it's all parred down in an episodic game.

On the designer side though, games in their nature will have repetition because of function and sometimes I think designers unknowingly tend to create more parts of a game without necessarily introducing anything new. They might not see it because they are no longer on the player side that is looking for something fresh and new but instead trying to explore all avenues of what their game can do, which can fail. On the other hand, I have no doubt there are designers completely hung up on value of full game length and will artificially stretch their game far beyond it's means.

Er... I'm just saying that I think even if there were a game with the most streamlined, nonrepetitive, and smooth gameplay ever, I'm guessing still only 30-50% of players would finish just over personal taste or other matters in life.

[elmuerte]

One's tediousness isn't the other's tediousness.

I spend 36 steam hours in Just Cause. A lot of that time was spend on tedious things, but I had fun doing so. I enjoyed messing around with the game mechanics. I've done similar things in Vice City, San Andreas, Assassin's Creed.

But I didn't enjoy the similar messing around in inFamous because the game mechanics for messing around where not as good.

Of course these are things you can do beside the main game, well most of the part.

Ok, maybe a different example.

Quite a lot of games include an arena section. This is nothing but filler or "padding" to make the game longer. Arena segments are easy to create and can add a lot of time to a game's length. But they suck. Darksiders, R&C Crack in Time, Fable, etc. contain pure arena segments. A lot of other games try to cover them up with some window dressing, but in their core it remains fighting against a few waves of enemies (or up to X minutes) in a closed environment and then do it another few times. It's a very lazy and tedious game mechanic (for me).

[ThunderPeel2001]

I guess my point is simply that games can and will, at times, suck balls in ways that are completely disjointed from the rest of the experience.

I think people who take their games seriously enough to, for example, post on a vidoegame forum, should know enough about games to accept the occasional design implosion as a given. It will always happen, there will always be that one shitty level.

What is this? So nobody here can complain about games? Life is too short to spend on games that aren't good.

[Sno]

What is this? So nobody here can complain about games?

That is very obviously not at all what i am saying.

Life is too short to spend on games that aren't good.

I don't think it's so binary though, that a game is either just good or bad.

Deadly Premonition is a game that by traditional measuring sticks is horrible, but you play through the parts that are bad and you get something that is really interesting as a reward.

But whatever, i've ended up arguing something i don't really buy into. Of course there's a lot of games i haven't finished because they're obviously total shit, or i was, in fact, just bored by.

I return to one of the original comments i made, that i'm speaking from the place of knowing the kind of people who just absolutely never finish games. My friends make me crazy.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I don't think it's so binary though, that a game is either just good or bad.

Deadly Premonition is a game that by traditional measuring sticks is horrible, but you play through the parts that are bad and you get something that is really interesting as a reward.

But whatever, i've ended up arguing something i don't really buy into. Of course there's a lot of games i haven't finished because they're obviously total shit, or i was, in fact, just bored by.

I return to one of the original comments i made, that i'm speaking from the place of knowing the kind of people who just absolutely never finish games. My friends make me crazy.

I think you're arguing with your friends rather than anyone here on the forum.

[miffy495]

A movie doesn't need a five minute scene with the main character brushing his teeth, the same way a game doesn't need a QTE mini-game of the main character brushing it's teeth. But they were both added why? Because they thought they needed more content and lenght!

I'm calling bullshit on that. Especially something that mundane, a director or designer added it on purpose, and in order to establish something (character, mood, whatever). Arena sections, yeah, they're totally just padding out shit. One short one can be forgiveable, but if you have more than one arena section in a game you're deep in lazy design town. If you show me the protagonist brushing his or her teeth for any (more than a brief montage) period of time however, I'm assuming that it means something, and I'm usually right. The movie Pi, for example, when you watch the main character get ready in the same way each morning, it's building you up for the climax of the film. I haven't played Heavy Rain, but as I understand its opening, you're brushing your teeth and shaking orange juice and what have you in order to firmly put you in that world. Quite the contrary of filler, when I heard about that stuff it made me much more interested in the game than I would have been otherwise.

[Ben X]

Anyone here seen the film Gerry?

[ThunderPeel2001]

A movie doesn't need a five minute scene with the main character brushing his teeth, the same way a game doesn't need a QTE mini-game of the main character brushing it's teeth. But they were both added why? Because they thought they needed more content and lenght!

So that's why there's so many five minute tooth-brushing scenes in movies these days. Thanks for the explanation

[Kolzig]

I wonder if asking this on the TTG forum may yield the answers you're looking for.

For me, I often go through this pattern with TTG games:

Episode 1, "Ooh! New TTG game! I wonder what it's like..." (Plays) "Not bad. I wonder what they'll do with Episode 2?"

Episode 2, "A new episode. Cool. I hope this one is really good." (Plays) "Hmm. Well maybe Episode 3 will be great."

Episode 3, "I really should play this."

Episode 4, "I really should play Episode 3."

Episode 5, "I'll wait for my DVD version to arrive and play through them all".

"DVD sits on shelf"

Eventually I'll usually go back and play through them, but I still haven't completed BTTF or S&M 3.

Hahah, I kind of feel the same way. I'm still in S&M 1x04 and I played it to that point years ago when those were released, then I just somehow stopped and now that I started replaying those I stopped at the same point. I really don't know why as according to what I've read here, that's the point when the games actually started being more and more better.

BttF is the only Telltale series that I've finished so far.

I was waiting for the Monkey Islands really lot, but those are still sitting there in the huge backlog even though those might be good games. I guess I'm still scared because of Escape from Monkey Island.

I do buy a lot of games, but usually only from discount bins in Steam/GoG, not so much physical copies anymore, but I do have some of those also gathered from years ago still unplayed.

I have bought in the past full priced games that were really bad, really horrible. Like Rebellion from Lucasarts. I tried playing that but it's just so unplayable that I saved a lot of time and nerves to just quit it and uninstall it. It's basically a pile of shit compiled into a form of a game.

These days I don't buy that much full priced games anymore because those will just end up in my backlog. (Except for many Telltale games which I have bought and not played). Last full priced game I bought was DNF and I'm playing that right now and next will be Rage and I will also play that immediately when it arrives.

My own personal shame is FarCry 2 which I kind of stopped in the middle, partly because I upgraded my PC 1,5 years ago and I stopped the playing FC2 and haven't found time to continue the game and have instead played other games.

I never intentionally quit playing games unless they are completely shit, like Rebellion was. Sometimes some games are really boring and I just can't find strength to completely those and some of the latest Tomb Raider games were like that so I instead lazily just went to Youtube to watch the rest and even after watching Youtube the games were even more boring because the story wasn't that good at all.

Edited August 25, 2011 by Kolzig