In the past few years I have been sorely disappointed by the amount of content that games are putting out. Having been an avid gamer now for roughly 25 years, I've experienced most of the game world since the inception of MUDs, the first gaming systems, and so on and so forth.
To highlight a few of the games I've played in the last year: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, just to name a few. And while those games have great graphics and awesome cinema sequences, the amount of gameplay is crap. Not a single one of those games gave me more than 20 hours of gameplay. I beat all of them within 2 gaming sessions, three at the most (Mass Effect was 3).
The point is, I got to thinking about the games of yesterday. One in particular that stands out, and is regularly pointed to as the crowning achievement of RPGs, is Baldur's Gate II. The game has roughly 120 hours of MAIN questlines and over 100 hours of additional side quests, bringing your total game time to over 220 hours if you play through the side quests for your party members and class quests.
Games today boast 40 hours of gameplay at most when they market the games. Fallout 3, for example, boasted 40 hours of gameplay. I beat the game in 14 hours. I know a friend who beat it in 9 hours. Now, granted, that's doing mostly only the main questlines, but for the main questlines to be beatable within a single game session? Pathetic!
To top it off, the game studios charge 60-70 bucks a pop for a few hours of entertainment. Back in the day I could spend 50 bucks on a game and know that I was going to get WEEKS of entertainment out of it. Now, I'm lucky if I get two days out of my favorite games.
I re-installed BG2 the other day and I'm already 20 hours into it and nowhere near the 120 hours of main questlines offered. The game is nearly 10 years old but the world graphics are still fairly good (character graphics are, sadly, not), and it just got me thinking about how epic the games of yesterday were compared to the crap that gets farmed out these days. Sure, the modern games LOOK great, and are fairly entertaining, but you don't get anywhere near the bang for your buck that you used to get.
Some games have multiplayer aspects that can make up for the lack of a single player element. Games such as Halo 3, sure. But what about the single player games? The closest thing I've come to old-school was Neverwinter Nights II, which gave me about a week's worth of play, doing 3-4 hours per session.
I'm looking forward to Dragon Age: Origins, but the foremost thought in my mind is the thought: Is the game going to give me more than 2 or 3 days of gameplay? I know it's being developed by Bioware, but it's the post-EA buyout Bioware, the same company who put out Mass Effect, which is one of the games I'm complaining about for its lack of substance.
Don't get me wrong...I loved Mass Effect. It was fun, it was breath-takingly beautiful, and I've played it through 4 times so far, twice on the X-box and twice on the updated PC version. However, the storyline is almost an exact copy of Babylon 5 (ancient race of beings comes back thousands of years later to wipe out everything yet again; a central "space station" where all of the races have their diplomatic meetings; I could go on), and it was too damn short.
I know that things have changed over the years, and I do appreciate the beauty of modern games in high def, but I seriously miss the games that had me spending 2-3 weeks worth of gaming sessions to beat. I haven't been sucked into a game since Baldur's Gate II, or an MMORPG outside of EQ1 and Vanguard, the only two MMORPGs I feel had substance behind them. But that's a topic for another day :)
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When it comes to RPG's, The amount of gameplay is inversely proportional to the quality of its graphics.
Yes, there's exceptions, but the more $ a company puts forward for graphic design and such, the less time I find they spend on building and telling a story.
The last game I played that didn't follow that rule was Morrowind / Oblivion. I don't equate replay value with total gameplay, though - maybe it's just me.
I don't equate replay to total gameplay either, which is why Mass Effect fell way short, because although I could get a slightly different storyline each time I went through with a different crew, there was still only about 20 hours of storyline to be had.
And these days, yes...the amount of gameplay is absolutely related to the quality of its graphics. They'll spend 50 million dollars to make a game, but the VAST majority of that development money goes towards top-of-the-line graphics, physics engines, and new ways to make things better, flashier, more eye-catching.
Not sure if you've played it but Drakensang, which is from a German developer, is one I'm chalking up to incredibly fun and detailed. In fact, it's almost TOO detailed. I've been enjoying the hell out of it, although there are a few things I don't really care for, like clunky movement and spell casters are kind of worthless. Still, it's a great looking game, the storyline is very in-depth, and the game is EXTREMELY detailed. I took a break from it recently simply because it was SO detailed I needed a breather, lol. It can get quite tedious in some areas having to deal with every little rule.
Morrowind and Oblivion were absolutely fabulous. However, even Oblivion itself had a main storyline that could be knocked out in under 10 hours if you only focus on the main storyline. Now, granted, I never played less than 60 hours or so each time through, but that was because I made sure to do the guild quests and such.
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