Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Leave Those Long Lasting Games in the Past.

Here's a comment I left on an article on EA Games Europe senior VP Patrick Söderlund's response to EA's last year-end's underperformed quarterly result. This article, where he talks about his positive view of the result, wasn't what triggered my comment. It was another comment that basically blamed EA's new IPs' having short playtime for the disappointing result.

I am with a lot of people who backs Dead Space, and that length of a game does not define its quality.

While we would love never-ending stream of content with great gameplay to occupy our time, the audience of today's games is growing up. More and more are getting jobs and starting families. And thus, shorter games that packs tight and deep content are thriving over ridiculously (in my opinion) long games of the past.

For instance, I used to love playing RPG games like FF series that took above 40~50 hours to finish. But now, with a job, I just don't have time for games like that. It's taking me months to finish Lost Odyssey right now. And do I think that drawn-out-to-death playtime necessary? Absolutely not. They could've cut so many parts and end up with much much tighter and cohesive story, and ultimately, overall fun.

I think Dead Space got it right. It's pace, playtime, everything was right on the target, and I hope more games like that comes out.

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