Shorter Games: A Perspective

Introduction

Recently, a former Sony executive shared the idea of creating shorter AAA titles instead of spending their resources developing one long one. Game size has been a hotly debated topic in the industry for a while now. So, the question is, would it be more reasonable to produce smaller games? Well, as both a gamer and a developer, I can see advantages from all sides of the spectrum.

Developer’s Perspective

As a developer, the idea of keeping up with longer titles that contain around 40 hours of content sounds unfeasible in today’s market. I tend to follow the MosCoW mentality when developing software as it shows the level of importance for certain features. A lot of developers tend to lose the scope of their projects or just misunderstand how overly ambitious they are being.

Sadly, we have a lot of ideas in the development industry that ends up on the cutting room floor due to their time and budget constraints. The best example I can think of is Demon Soul’s 6th Archstone, which had an entire in-game area removed due to budget limitations.

There are many stages when it comes to developing a game, much more so than a regular piece of software. Outside of design, coding, and testing, which I imagine most are probably familiar with, there are extra features concerning animations, sound, and music effects that do take their time. Testing can be one of the most monotonous tasks of the bunch and can require attention during multiple stages of development. Sometimes, development and testing are not even finished when the game has reached retailers. Instead, developers resort to maintenance patches or downloadable content.

As I have mentioned before, all these stages can take a long time to complete. Some companies could end up getting carried away with their features and mechanics, leading towards feature creep. This practice, along with horrible time management and scheduling, leads several well-known triple-A studios such as Irrational Games with Bioshock Inifinite, and most recently, CDprojectRed with Cyberpunk 2077 having to extend their deadlines numerous times to make ends meet.

Other companies try to resort to cheaper time management practices and, in some cases, crunch time to make up for their work. Naughty Dog, for example, had their developers work 12 hours a day and on weekends while developing the Last of Us Part 2 so they could meet deadlines.

Concerning testing, no piece of software is perfect, and most developers recognise this fact. Some developers even go as far as saying that if one does not find any bugs in their code, either they are some kind of divine being or they are testing wrong. Now the longer the game is, the more potential bugs it will probably get. Games such as SIE Bend Studio‘s Days Gone, and every Bethesda game, while enjoyable, are absolute messes with glitches.

Graphical improvements also require more hands-on deck. The original Crash Bandicoot games had a team of seven handling everything and created some of the best games to date. Vicarious Visions has a current team size of 218 employees yet took a similar development time to develop the N Sane trilogy. Just imagine something like that for longer titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 to complete.

Gamer Perspective

As an adult gamer, one of the things I look forward to is a good narrative. Yet, several developers ruin the pacing of their own works to expand the playtime by adding open-world features and pointless side quests as fluff. I can compare this notion to recent films based on books such as The Hobbit or the Hunger Games: Mocking Jay that were expanded into multiple parts. By stretching out the literature, the films lose their pacing, and to some extent, their worth. In these cases, I find that creators are not respecting my time, and in my opinion, they should be paying me to look at their work.

For videogames, this artificial extension of time comes in many forms, from the more open-world specific problems such as tower climbing and pointless collectables hunting to the long and dull stretches of empty wilderness. Then there those issues more incorporated into RPGs such as the infamous long level grinds.

Some games also like to incorporate the use of procedurally generated missions and quests, which are not inherently awful on their own. Regardless, the idea of being forced to protect a village or base mid quest gets old very extremely fast. Games such as the rebooted Tomb Raider franchise also includes small yet pointless challenges to extend their run time as well.

Then we have the argument surrounding time and money from the perspective of the gamer. A decent triple-A game can easily be around 10 hours long, enough to satisfy a player for a weekend if they binge through it or a week if they play through it casually. However, for some, time is money, and having a short game like Resident Evil 3 be around €60 is quite a turn-off.

However, it is a lot more digestible to replay a game that is only 10 hours long, compared to those that are 40 hours in length. Some games like to incorporate different mechanics to promote replayability. These include features such as branching pathways, time trails and speed runs, incrementing difficulty levels after completion, even an alternative ending to the game and let us not forget the new game plus. A 6 to 8-hour game like Crash Bandicoot 4 provided me with more entertainment than Assassin’s Creed Black Flag.

Shorter video games can also be cheaper to purchase as well. While some developers are scrambling for excuses to reach their €60+ mark, others are probably making wonders with their smaller products. Outlast was only a third of that price with just a 5-hour run time but it sold 4 million copies and is now considered one of the best horror games ever made. This goes to show that tighter gameplay and good pacing can lead to more copies being sold.

Finally, there is the argument over the frequency of new game releases. Not only could smaller video games take a faster time to develop, but one can potentially push more of them into the pipeline. Resident Evil 2 and 3 are both short games by the triple-A standard. However, Capcom was developing them simultaneously, along with Devil May Cry 5.

Conclusion

While longer video games allow the player to feel like they are venturing on some epic quest and provide a lot more playtime than their counterparts, they don’t necessarily have the same polish that shorter games have. As I have mentioned previously, there are several advantages to having shorter games in this day and age. However, I don’t wish to discredit the efforts of those who have crafted lengthy games.

Over the years, developers have given us some remarkable titles coming in various sizes. Games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim have probably created a whole new community of would-be developers through mods for its world. Most Spider-Man games try to incorporate some kind of open-world version of New York within their games, complete with side quests and tasks, to recreate the experience of daily life as the webhead. As the city and the character go hand in hand, the same goes for Batman and Gotham City. Some gamers prefer the freedom within the large open-world sandboxes, which inspires them to create their own adventures, where they can do what they want. Some can spend their time just exploring the virtual world and taking in the gorgeous graphics while playing around with photo mode.

With the coming of a new console generation, developers will probably be looking towards a new paradigm shift as a means to cover the cost of their unsustainable development. Microsoft’s game pass and Sony’s inflation of prices over their video games have gotten me worried for the future of this industry. However, in the end, that is just my perspective.