When Titanfall 2 came out, this one dumb reviewer complained that the campaign was only five hours long. He loved it (and the pacing), but he said that he wanted it to be at least ten hours long, (and I quote) "but not with filler, but more great moments". That was actually one of his biggest knocks against the game as a whole, and it was asinine, but game length is important to people.

There is such a thing as a game being too short while still being good. This happens when your game is so short, that it doesn't meaningfully explore enough possibilities set up by the rules. There is a critical mass.

If Super Mario Brothers were just world 1-1, then yeah. You could easily say that the game is fun, but too short. This is because there is so much more you can do with these rules; there are so many challenges you can give the player.

A game like PaRappa the Rapper is too short. You have six stages, but the first few are very easy and pretty much the same, and in the last two you begin to get some semblance of diversity and challenge. There is no hard mode either. Rap is very diverse, so it should have been easy to craft each song as a cool new experience exploring a different style. Instead, it is over before you even have to apply yourself.

Contrast this to Gitaroo man, which has ten stages. You wouldn't think 4 more songs would make the difference, but each song is completely different in style, and gives you a unique set of challenges. Plus, it has a master's mode.

PaRappa is to short, and Gitaroo Man just right, even though both are fun. It is certainly possible to like Titanfall 2's campaign yet think it is too short, but I don't really agree with the reviewer there. It too was just right.

When you say a game is too short, you have to prove that it left ideas unexplored, and did not hit its critical mass. What you don't do is throw out bullshit numbers like 10-12 hours and score it by checklist.

Game length should simply occur naturally. If you are playing the game and you get bored or things get repetitive - if the game runs out of ideas, it should be shorter. Make your game the length it needs to be to maximize fun per second. Most games these days are far too long.

A lot of that stems from people directly equating length with value. Yeah, it's stupid, but it's a huge thing.

When Titanfall 2 came out, this one dumb reviewer complained that the campaign was only five hours long. He loved it (and the pacing), but he said that he wanted it to be at least ten hours long, (and I quote) "but not with filler, but more great moments". That was actually one of his biggest knocks against the game as a whole, and it was asinine, but game length is important to people.

Would the Left Behind DLC for The Last of us been better if they doubled the length of the mall fights?

Speed, Cruel and I were talking about this some nights ago, since Horizon Zero Dawn is a 40 hour game, as opposed to something like The Witcher 3, which is closer to a 200 hour game. While The Witcher is a fantastic game, you are required to run many filler quests in order to continue the story, and it's easy to just forget about the main quests and slowly lose interest. HZD has a very tightly-paced story, and only three "main" storylines that you must do (and I'm not even sure if two of them are mandatory, but I was to compelled to complete them before doing the main one) in order to complete the story. If you look at the Trophies, 29.1% of people who started the game have already beaten it (by contrast, while 30% of players completed the Witcher 3's main story, this includes those who played on the story-only difficulty. If you look at the "Blood and Bones" difficulty and above, it drops to 5.6%) Over a fourth of all players have hunted down all of the pieces of the optional Shield Weaver outfit (that's a pretty crazy percentage). And nearly one in every ten people who started the game has gotten the Platinum Trophy for it.

Guerilla's focus on making the experience as long as it needed to be to tell a great story, while not forcing players to run fetch quest after fetch quest is one of the reasons that I love the game (though there are totally optional fetch quests that you can do, but none that the story requires).

Your post reminds me of when we would run multiple nightfalls with a party of two (and a half) fireteams. Those were good times. I wish for more things that are engaging for 6 players that aren't as intense as Vosik or Aksis. Right now VoG or Crota are the only things that meet that (Crota does an excellent job of meeting that actually).

We did that yesterday.

Good thoughts.

One note though about leveling up quickly to do the new raids. We do that in order to savor the content in a way that can't be done later.

Right.

It's just too bad that in a way that design forces you to decide between savoring the spoiler-free raid, and savoring the campaign content at a reasonable pace instead of grinding through it for light levels.

If you were to say "There's around a 1:4 ratio of players who have completed a raid." Then folks will be like "What's the point of investing so many resources into a Raid then?"

Yup!

I'm betting someone somewhere IS saying that. Guided Games is the response to it.

Less than half the people who play your game see the ending. Why are you spending money on the ending? This line of thought is ridiculous.

Just because it is ridiculous doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Also, the line of thinking there has a natural counterpoint in the debate over game length.

After all, a game's length is arbitrary. Even if you've predetermined your game's beginning and ending, you can make that journey take longer, or you can make it shorter. You can design encounters to slow the player, or you can speed things up. You can add side missions or leave them out, you can cut levels you don't like as much, you can add places that require players to grind.

So you've got pressure to make games shorter because the numbers TELL you that people aren't finishing your game.

You also have pressure to make games LONGER because user feedback and the press tell you that hours per dollar is important, and games that deliver more hours, even if all those hours aren't of even quality, are well thought of and sell reasonably well.

The shooter genre absolutely is facing pressure to get shorter-- to focus on gameplay mechanics and forget story, and it's been facing that pressure a long time.

The RPG genre generally falls prey to the other pressure-- bigger areas, more encounters, more quests, campaigns that last hundreds of hours instead of tens. Halo games clock in around 10 hours.

Destiny, being an FPS-RPG hybrid, feels both kinds of pressure. Campaign wise, D1 is way shorter than most self-respecting RPGs and is threadbare compared to any Halo game. But now we're seeing D2 get a Far Cry/Assassins Creed type map with a bunch of "stuff to do".

If you were to say "There's around a 1:4 ratio of players who have completed a raid." Then folks will be like "What's the point of investing so many resources into a Raid then?"

Yup!

I'm betting someone somewhere IS saying that. Guided Games is the response to it.

Less than half the people who play your game see the ending. Why are you spending money on the ending? This line of thought is ridiculous.

Sure sounds like it, but this line of thinking is exactly why Titanfall didn't have a campaign. According to Respawn's co-founder, Vince Zampella:

"We make these single-player missions that take up all the focus of the studio, that take a huge team six months to make, and players run through it in 8 minutes... And how many people finish the single-player game? It's a small percentage.

...Really, you split the team. They're two different games. They're balanced differently, they're scoped differently. But people spend hundreds of hours in the multiplayer experience versus 'as little time as possible rushing to the end' [of the campaign]. So why do all the resources go there? To us it made sense to put it here [in Multiplayer]. Now everybody sees all those resources, and multiplayer is better. For us it made sense."

Now Titanfall sucked enough on its own that it hemorrhaged its playerbase in months, but I doubt investors really blamed this as the fault of a lack of campaign, and it goes to show you that people really do have that kind of mentality. 22% might even seem like a decent number in some people's eyes, but if you add the number of Xbox players to the list, I bet that percentage would drop. Then you have a real problem trying to explain to the suits, investors, and playerbase why you're dedicating so many resources to the rarely-completed "premiere" experience of your game when the easily-made Microtransaction content is raking in the dough (as the emotes shown off so far show, Microtransactions are guaranteed to be back in Destiny 2, sorry Cody).

It's a pretty precarious situation, so ambiguity and carefully-chosen words are important, even if they mislead people with poor reading comprehension (some might say "especially if")..

The other element to all of this is that even if the raid is only experienced by 22% of the player base, it generates HUGE hours of playtime from those players. From an investment point of view, I'm sure that is something Bungie and Activision would take into consideration. I bet I've spent triple the in-game hours playing raids than I have playing story missions, and I'm sure I'm not alone there.

Another reason to make the entire game like that :-)

::sigh::

Except for those of us who like the OTHER parts of Destiny.

Cody - we're not all you. Please don't make us all play like you.

I think a huge reason that the raids were played so much was because, for a long time, they were the entirety of endgame content. They were the only way to reach the level cap, and you could be in a single run for hours and hours on end.

I've never particularly liked Vault of Glass, But according to DestinyTracker, I had 57 completions of the raid, not including DNF games (which is easily dozens, if not a hundred more games), the AoT revamp, or the times I'd run it on Sammy's profile. It's a lot.

And one of the big reasons that I ran so many raids was because of the people. I didn't care so much what the activity was, as long as I was having a good time with friends, and most of the time, they wanted to do endgame content. Three runs a week, this boss or that boss, grabbing this or that checkpoint... Raids aren't necessarily the best experience that I've had in Destiny (Trials might be it), but they were pretty much mandatory for a long while (and still are if you want to play with more than two people without having to jump into PvP). That's why I liked Prison of Elders, Crimson Doubles, Trials, Sparrow Racing, and modern Iron Banner. With so many different options, folks had less incentive to do the raid-of-the-season, and none of those options demand as much of a time sink as raiding. Heck, the House of Wolves event was great, because you could jump into a Vault of Glass with five other friends, then go off and hunt the Wolves down Patrol-style (and you could do some pretty great Public Events to boot).

So yeah. Just because we've spent way more time in Raids, doesn't mean that it's because we want more raids, or because they're the most fun in the game. I want more non-raid content that I can enjoy with more friends.

::sigh::

Except for those of us who like the OTHER parts of Destiny.

Which would also be better! Even a patrol mission would be significantly improved if designed around this principle.

I'm not totally sure about that, myself.

The reason I'm in favour of lack of matchmaking for raids is because it is a demanding & time consuming activity. Patrols/story missions/regular strikes are not. They are shorter, more relaxed experiences, and I think standard matchmaking suits them just fine.

::sigh::

Except for those of us who like the OTHER parts of Destiny.

Which would also be better! Even a patrol mission would be significantly improved if designed around this principle.

We found that still, some jerks would join, act like a newbie and get off on crushing their opponents...

As a response we would host "2v2 Newbies Only", booting anyone who joined that didn't have a solid record, filtering effectively only for the jerks, and then we'd disappoint them.

PS This was exclusively on Killing Fields and were minimum hour long matches unless they realized we weren't pushovers and just quit immediately.

The other element to all of this is that even if the raid is only experienced by 22% of the player base, it generates HUGE hours of playtime from those players. From an investment point of view, I'm sure that is something Bungie and Activision would take into consideration. I bet I've spent triple the in-game hours playing raids than I have playing story missions, and I'm sure I'm not alone there.

Another reason to make the entire game like that :-)

::sigh::

Except for those of us who like the OTHER parts of Destiny.

Cody - we're not all you. Please don't make us all play like you.

The other element to all of this is that even if the raid is only experienced by 22% of the player base, it generates HUGE hours of playtime from those players. From an investment point of view, I'm sure that is something Bungie and Activision would take into consideration. I bet I've spent triple the in-game hours playing raids than I have playing story missions, and I'm sure I'm not alone there.

Another reason to make the entire game like that :-)

...As long as there aren't too many clans that are full of jerks.

I kind of want to make a clan with the description "a clan full of jerks" just to see who wants to be sherpa'd by them. Then again, I'm not sure I actually want to meet those people.

Sure. But if they didn't even hit the level cap, are they really relevant to the discussion?

Maybe not.

If 50% of the player base at the level cap did the raid, and 22% of the entire player base completed a raid, that means that about half the players who played Destiny didn't reach the level cap.

I reached the level cap on the final story mission, without doing anything unusual. If we use that as a benchmark, that means about half the people who played Destiny didn't even finish the story missions. I was going to say that this was a huge deal, but that seems roughly in line with other games.

Looking at it from that perspective, it kind of seems like 22% is a lot actually. A raid is the hardest activity in the game (ostensibly). Most people are clearly casual players. So a 22% completion for the raid actually seems pretty high when you look at it broadly. According to my trophy data, 5.8% of the people completed Uncharted 4 on Hard mode (not the hardest mode). 41.8% beat the game at all.

I actually don't see a problem with Bungie's numbers. In fact, they look pretty good to me.

Exactly.

That's why I was more than a bit surprised at the reveal of Guided Games and the focus on getting more people to do the raid.

That's also why I wondered whether it was publisher pressure to spend less time developing raids. If story level 20 doesn't take more time and effort to make than story level 5 or story level 10, the only thing you need to tune is how many of them you make, knowing that not everybody will finish the game.

It's a different kettle of fish when you're spending more time tuning a set of encounters that are more complicated than any story mission, to make content that only 50% of eligible players, 22% of players overall, will ever see. That same effort put into making more patrol destinations or more story missions would get more exposure and perhaps reflect better on the game as a whole.

So Guided Games is a way of saying that Bungie will get the raid completion percentage up so they can continue to justify spending extra effort on those encounters. IMHO.

The other element to all of this is that even if the raid is only experienced by 22% of the player base, it generates HUGE hours of playtime from those players. From an investment point of view, I'm sure that is something Bungie and Activision would take into consideration. I bet I've spent triple the in-game hours playing raids than I have playing story missions, and I'm sure I'm not alone there.

If you were to say "There's around a 1:4 ratio of players who have completed a raid." Then folks will be like "What's the point of investing so many resources into a Raid then?"

Yup!

I'm betting someone somewhere IS saying that. Guided Games is the response to it.

Less than half the people who play your game see the ending. Why are you spending money on the ending? This line of thought is ridiculous.

One note though about leveling up quickly to do the new raids. We do that in order to savor the content in a way that can't be done later.

Playing with people you know gives you the best D&D experience.

While I agree with your overall point, I'd like to counter this particular argument. I, for one, have never played a D&D game in real life. However, I actually GOT TO KNOW Beorn, Raga and Chewie through playing an online post-by-post D&D clone. I'd say it improved my relationship with the three of them (and our GM, who I hadn't even heard of before said game) much, much faster and better than even the forum here.

My point is, what if you could get the Raid to that to you? Instead of seeking people you already mesh with, what if the Raid meshed you with people you barely know?* In fact, I can also confirm the Vault of Glass and King's Fall have both gotten me closer to other DBOers than the forum as well.

*I concede "barely know" is still more potentially fruitful than "complete strangers", but not enough to invalidate the point.

This is a good point, and also one of the benefits of the types of engaging and challenging design a mandatory co-op experience creates. By the very nature of what is asked of you, you're going to get to know the people you play with no matter how you do it.