Sometimes Being Short Is A Game's Selling Point

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, a game which takes up a third of the original 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 (runtime: around 50 hours), will 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:take up to 100 hours to complete. Some of you probably read that sentence with excitement - and maybe already knew that - while others among you will have groaned and rolled your eyes. I think I'm between camps on this one, and see the merit in what this remake trilogy project is trying to do. But just once, I'd love for a developer to say "yeah, this game's really small, you'll have a great time and finish it over a weekend".

This is a complex issue that numbers alone cannot speak to. My game of the year in 2023 was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3, which took me over 100 hours and I still don't think I saw even half of what it had to offer. This year, the early front runner is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, which I'm about two thirds of the way through at 40 hours. And back in 2020, it was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Remake. That took just sh﷽y of 50 (so half of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth), but it helped me appreciate the value in retelling this iconic story in a fresh way.

Video game remakes tend to be shot for shot deals. They might switch up some poorly aged dialogue, add some modern controls, and give the graphics a polish, but what they are aiming for is a perfect recreation. This is what X game would look like if it launched today. Final Fantasy 7 Remake, even though it's made by the same studio and even some of the same developers as the original, feels more like a movie remake.

It wants to recreate the spirit of the journey, not the actual events. It's The Departed to Infernal Affairs, His Girl Friday to The Front Page, A Star is Born to... well, they were both called A Star is Born. This is not 'how do we do the original Final Fantasy 7 so modern audiences can tolerate it', which is the perspective most games are made from. This is 'what can we say that the original Final Fantasy 7 did not'. The developers have spoken about incorporating Western influences, of imbuing the game with a sense of freedom and exploration, and of ruminating on the power of memory through reinterpreting their own masterwork as older craftsmen.

Note: Maybe in that sense, it's more like All That Jazz to Cabaret.

But let's put Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth aside. I know I brought it up, but just go with me here. It's not about whether that specific game is too long. The point is that the industry as a whole is making its games longer and longer, costing themselves so much money that we see repeated layoffs, seemingly because it thinks this is what players want. Or, because 'what players want' is a low priority these days, because it offers solid player retention metrics and "biggest game yet!" feel♐s like a solid sales pitch.

But most people would take shorter games that had good-but-not-cutting-edge visuals that meant the series could reliably offer a new entry every couple of years. Final Fantasy is a bad example here, with 7 in 2020 and 2024 with 16 in 2023 and 14 running through that time, but gaming these days is a far cry from the age of annual instalments, and the results don't always justify these massively bloated budgets.

More of this, please

10 Best Games You Can Finish In On♚e Sitting

Take a detour from your normal lineup for an afternoon with these games that are easy to finiᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚsh in a day.

Posts 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: 🉐

It's a little different for critics who have several games to get through to keep up with the industry goings on, as opposed to players who will buy a select handful and want their money's worth, but 30 enjoyable hours has to count for more than 100 empty ones. I trust Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth to fill its runtime, and I'm sure parts are only there if you really want to max out the clock. But I don't trust other games nearly as much, and yet so many of them ask me too.

Again, there's a flipside. I think 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Suicide Squad feels short and rushed with its ten hour runtime, but of course the problem there is it's not ten hours long at all. It's infinity hours long with a ten hour story - you're supposed to play and play and play and play forever, and this aim (which it will fail at for almost everyone) condenses the story into too small a package that leaves the narrative disjointed and the characters shallow. A 30 hour version of this story without the live-service elements would have been cheaper to make, would have taken less time, and would have been far better received.

It feels like, especially with Xbox poised to make a move, there is a change coming to these unsustainable development cycles. These changes could mean lower budgets, shorter development times, and a move away from endless player retention and back to player enjoyment by which to sell future, similarly sized games. In essence, developers might start saying "yeah, this game's really small, you'll have a great time and finish it over a weekend".