Yakoob on 31/5/2016 at 16:32

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I guess there aren't really (m)any short-short RPGs, but I like the ones without needless tons of grinding as filler. jRPGs are of course routinely guilty of it, but some of my favorites (like some of the Final Fantasies or Chrono Trigger) actually balance it pretty well, imho.




You know, I've recently started trying completely different approaches in RPGs than my usual standard (so being a thief or a ranger in lieu of a mage) and it's actually been very refreshing and fun, so I definitely recommend trying something new when the genre starts to feel stale!

I'm thinking of trying a "real evil" play once as well, as I tend to be somewhere in the neutral-to-good spectrum (granted its because rewards usually tend to be better in older RPGs this way, so it's still kinda selfishness driven).

Pyrian on 31/5/2016 at 23:01

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Well, there's rogue-lites. Glade Raid, if you will. If you're going to go through the effort of having RPG systems but a short story, re-playability seems mandatory to me.

Jason Moyer on 1/6/2016 at 03:18

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I find the length of a game is pretty much irrelevant. What matters to me is whether it's constantly engaging. I just finished a full Pillars Of Eternity run and thought it was fantastic; in fact, I found that it managed to take the strengths of each IE game (the exploration of BG1, the stakes of BG2, the philosophical depth of PST, the combat of the IWDs), combine and improve them, and add modern UI conveniences while giving me something interesting to do from the introductory narrative until the end-game slides. And it managed to hold my attention for 70+ hours in one playthrough, which is a rarity. Watching the ending slides I was struck with a sense of "holy fuck I forgot how much fun shit this game let me do for the past month".

A modern Bethesda game can be 150 hours long and I'll play it in 8-10 hour chunks because there's constantly something new to see or do over the next hill. Portal was 2 hours long and it was perfect. Mirror's Edge is 4 (not counting the fantastic replayability + time trials) and it was phenomenal from start to finish. I have 800+ hours in Assetto Corsa and I still want to fire it up everytime I get home from work. The ideal length of a game varies greatly for me.

The games I don't like are the ones where people say "stick with it for 10 hours and it will grab you". The ones with enormously padded content that is literally less interesting to me than filling up spreadsheets full of automotive engineering data or baseball stats. The obvious example of the latter is the current Ubisoftification of everything where something that should have been 4-5 hours long (tops) is fleshed out with repetitive busywork in what seems like a cynical attempt at pleasing the "omg 5 hours doesn't justify my $60" crowd. And it's disgusting that game length is a pro or con in almost every damn Steam review. "I can't recommend paying $15 for this game when it's 2 hours long" on a Gone Home review, despite it being a rare game with the ability to resonate emotionally with people.

The "game feels too damn long based on the amount of content" thing doesn't just apply to massive, icon-hunting games either. There are 5-10 hour games that would have been better if they had been cut to half the size. Madness Returns is a great example of that; it's about the length of a normal singleplayer story-oriented game, and it still feels like they were trying to pad things constantly to hit some arbitrary play length. If the game had been half the length, it would have been a fantastic, memorable experience. As it was, I spent most of the game wishing I could just get to the next good part.