Brem_X_Jones on 29/11/2003 at 11:35
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Originally posted by screwed Who said anything about action games?
I did to make the question make sense. Clearly there's been expansive repetition based games that lasted considerably longer that 25 hours.
(Then again, even KOTOR only came in around 30 hours for most people. As did, sliding back slightly further in time, Planescape. But anyway...)
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Morrowind, Mafia, NOLF, I could probably think of more after awhile.
NOLF 2, presumably, if we're talking the last two years, and I swear that wasn't over 25 hours for me. Mafia was relatively big for most action games, though I'd be surprised if it was significantly over 20 hours on normal difficulty. Morrorwind is big, but it's not hard making a game like Morrowind take a long time to complete, in the same way it's not hard to make an RTS take longer to completely.
But yes - most games are shorter now, for a variety of reasons mapped out in this thread*. 15 hours for DX, assuming replayability is high, isn't that bad, I think.
KG
*I'm surprised people haven't done the maths on the polygon counts in games. If a game level has a thousand more polygons to place in architecture, it's clearly going to take much more time than a Quake 1 level to put together.
Liliel on 29/11/2003 at 12:08
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Originally posted by Uncia Only if you play it the same way, which is exactly what DEIW is designed against. Also, SS2 was damn short, but I'd really like to see someone finish it in 4 hours on their second run. Especially on Impossible. But, we'll see...
Hmm... I finished SS2 the first time with about 26 hours... after 7 times through, I beat it in under 8 hours...
well I was exaggerating a bit, but then the reviewer himself said it quite clearly, the first time it took him 46 hours to beat Deus Ex with thorough exploration, but now it's 15 hours with the same kind of thorough exploration... so unless he missed a LOT on his "thorough exploration" this time, and if we scale the time proportionally, it's not that unlikely that after a couple of playthroughs you can beat the game in 4-5 hours, right? :p
Freddo on 29/11/2003 at 12:32
46 hours is a bit extreme, don't you think? On my first run I it took me 24 hours and I went pretty much everywhere, reading almost everything. And it took this guy almost twice the amount of time. He can't have been very good back then. Obviously his "gaming skills" have improved since then.
I have no worries about the gamelenght. Sure it will be shorter, but I already knew that. It was a long time ago IS said that DX:IW would be as long as 75% or so of the original game. And that by not doing any side-quests. And that's fine to me.
JonahFalcon on 29/11/2003 at 19:22
Some points- the game IS different based on a male and female character (heck, in the demo, you get a discount from Sid if you're female, and there are other reactions to being a woman.)
That, plus the alternate endings, make it a very replayable game.
heywood on 30/11/2003 at 20:20
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Originally posted by Freddo 46 hours is a bit extreme, don't you think? On my first run I it took me 24 hours and I went pretty much everywhere, reading almost everything. And it took this guy almost twice the amount of time. He can't have been very good back then. Obviously his "gaming skills" have improved since then.
I don't think it has much to do with skills, given that most people spend only a small part of the total DX playing time in combat.
I personally spent over 40 hours on my first play as well and I can't understand why anybody would want to run through the game faster than that the first time. I made sure I visited every area, completed every optional side mission, read every book, talked to every person, and investigated each of the possible approaches to a task before making up my mind which path to take. Just exhausting all of the available dialog from NPCs takes a lot of time. In games like Quake, Unreal, and Half-Life, you're just running around clearing levels and you're not in danger of missing anything. But in Deus Ex, if you hurry through the game you could end up missing something or compromising the depth of the story by ignoring optional content. There's no extra credit for finishing in less time. So why rush?
dtc on 30/11/2003 at 21:19
Well said heywood. The whole essence of DeusEx was not about rushing the game, but savouring all the elements and sideshoots that made the game so enjoyable - including some of the more cryptic quotes from people like G.K. Chesterton i.e. 'The Man who was Thursday', etc. I've played every sort of conceivable game through Spectrum, Atari and PC and I'm not ashamed to say that my first try on DeusEx was over 40 hours - and very enjoyable it was too. Most of the recent games I've played have usually been a quarter of this length and sadly not even worth a replay - p**s poor value for money IMHO.
screwed on 30/11/2003 at 23:11
I agree. Wat's the point of running through a game you've paid a lot of money for? If you want to run through a game, buy Serious Sam. :D
Retischal on 1/12/2003 at 01:28
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Originally posted by heywood In games like Quake, Unreal, and Half-Life, you're just running around clearing levels and you're not in danger of missing anything. ?
I'd agree with this statement -to an extent- but I'd still say that by running through Half-Life (forget Quake, yawn) as fast as possible you'd be miss out on a lot of the fun things in the game. First up you might miss hard to reach areas, secondly you'd miss out on the multiple ways you can get past many areas. Furthermore, by running through them really quickly I think that it may spoil the atmosphere.
Point taken however that DX is much longer than Half-Life etc, due to branching conversations, multiple results to situations / several ways to do them.
Burdcheese on 1/12/2003 at 16:30
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Originally posted by heywood In games like Quake, Unreal, and Half-Life, you're just running around clearing levels and you're not in danger of missing anything.
Unreal was a long game and had a surprising amount of depth to it...
Fin on 1/12/2003 at 18:10
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OK, am I the only one here who actually takes his time with single-player games? I can take longer than this on a good Thief FM level.
I take my time too.
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I think on the first time you kinda breeze through without paying too much attention to details. Later on you've more time for that and then there often are nice surprises in it.
I do the opposite, take my time on the first go. If I re-play I'm doing a different style or trying somehting else out and I tend to gloss over stuff and run through it...
