3 ms·

I'm not too sure. I see a lot of people these days, and unfortunately even kids, becoming hooked on quick fixes; pay-to-win games, AAA games with 10-hour single

I'm not too sure. I see a lot of people these days, and unfortunately even kids, becoming hooked on quick fixes; pay-to-win games, AAA games with 10-hour single-player campaigns, and pretty much all mobile games. I gave a copy of Pokemon Black to a friend's kids (same age as when my brother and I, and all of our friends, were obsessed with them), and they couldn't get more than 15 minutes in without getting bored. Obviously that's a very small sample group, but it seems like a lot of the big companies are moving over to mini-game filled nonsense rather than requiring anybody to utilise their brain or imagination for more than five minutes. I hope you're right though; I really miss the days where I'd buy a complete game on release, rather than only getting half the experience.

hayksaakian 13y ago
I think he means it will go the way of Facebook games.
robryan 13y ago
What is wrong with 10 hour single player AAA games? These generally offer the most refined interactive story type experiences. I much prefer one of these to most movies.
- yareally 13y ago
  Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range. That might not seem so troublesome on the surface, but there's generally little motivation to replay such games most of the time. Also, the knowledge that there have been many games with much more single player time as well as re-playability for a comparable or lesser price now or in the past. The more those 10 hour games become popular, the more it's considered acceptable and even normal for games in general. The problem compounds when a new generation plays such games and never realizes how games were in the past. I've already noticed it with PC gamers and that many use controllers now even for typically keyboard/mouse games like FPSs. Companies end up failing to user test for keyboard/mouse players and things like custom key bindings or keyboard/mouse UX get ignored. Probably the worst example I've seen recently was Sleeping Dogs on PC. No custom key bindings (except for keys you didn't care about changing). Things like exiting a vehicle were set to the right mouse button without a way to change. I ended up accidentally pressing it at least 40-50 times throughout the game and had to repeat at least a few missions. Typically, these type of games are bought for the multiplayer aspect (which is why I assume the single player game is so short and limited). I'm not much for multiplayer gaming unless it's with friends and not random people. Co-op gaming can be especially fun if done right (Saints Row 3, Terraria, Borderlands, etc). In the end though, it's all about preferences. You might like such games yourself (and many others), but not everyone does. I think such games fill a niche for those that like them, but I loathe seeing them become the majority of PC/Console games as they're not the type of game that usually interests me.
  - incision 13y ago
    >"Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range." As an adult, paying $6-8 per hour for "AAA" interactive entertainment isn't terribly expensive, it's quite cheap even.
  - Semaphor 13y ago
    > Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range. You pay for the graphics and the voice acting. If you can handle having more limited graphics and simpler/no voice acting, you will get games that are better in other aspects (balance, story, development, replayability) for way less.
    - yareally 13y ago
      True and I agree, but those games aren't considered AAA (since the definition of AAA is based on money spent as the sole criteria). Plenty of games have been AAA, of above average quality, and longer than 10 hours in the past 4-5 years (though I don't rush through games and like to enjoy the little details). When they are, I gladly pay for them[1] (probably more than I will ever be able to play lol). As I get older, I find time is harder to come by so I maybe I'm just more picky about what games I'll buy and then invest time in than I was when I was a kid. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Borderlands 1 and 2 Saints Row 3 Far Cry 2 and 3 Bioshock 1 XCOM: Enemy Unknown Rage Fallout 3 Fallout New Vegas Tomb Raider Crysis 1 and 3 Sleeping Dogs (despite the keyboard issues) Portal 1 and 2 Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Dishonored Mirror's Edge Metro 2033 Hitman: Absolution Mass Effect Series Fable 3 [1] http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198025283419/games/ http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198025283419/games/
      - Semaphor 13y ago
        We have to agree to disagree here, I have a different view on many of those games ;)
- BillyMaize 13y ago
  While there are some $60 titles that are so good you can justify paying that much for a mere 10 hours of play, most are not worth nearly that much due to lack of replayability. If everyone keeps buying lousy games for full price the companies will keep producing lousy games because they don't need to be creative. I think many gamers have realized this and that is why indie games have been cropping up everywhere lately. I paid $10 for minecraft and have gotten hundreds of hours out of it so the cost is small per hour.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  It seems like a sign of shallow gameplay/mechanics. Supreme Commander, Master of Orion 2, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age (kinda), Mass Effect... Homeworld 2. You could spend - I'd guess at least a hundred hours or so - playing each of those games to see all their content and play around with all the options they offered you. Story seems to have become a sort of distraction from the things that make a good game. So the story can be told in ten hours - what about the fun potential of the rest of the game? How many times am I going to play the thing? How much enjoyment can I extract? Even RPGs, where a good story is important, most of the time is spent on quests and character interactions and on playing around with equipment and stats and so on. If you're just speedrunning an RPG's story, it doesn't generally take long. It's the game around it that takes the time. At the end of the day, I'm not that interested in being passively entertained with the story. Maybe if the stories were better it would make sense as a form of passive entertainment. But games are like movies these days, and movies these days tend to have stories that aren't worth watching. If I wanted a good story, I'd go read a book or fish out some DVDs or something. I largely buy games for the stuff that goes on around the story, the game part of the thing. Heck, at £3 an hour I could go and sit in a cinema for 10 hours at a comparable cost. £30 is like - I could buy 6+ hours martial arts practice, or go and do some archery, or go canoeing, or buy the materials to make myself a new desk, or.... £30 is not an insignificant amount of resources. It's not clear to me that the pay-off even makes sense anymore - though it did for things that you could play with for longer. 10 hours strikes me as ... there's probably not a lot there to play with. How many toys of any complexity are your bored of a mere 10 hours later? It may be a very polished experience but, how inventive can you be? ... I like finding tricky combinations of things and actually playing with stuff.
fhd2 13y ago
I'm also not quite as optimistic as the parent. However, I do wonder if legislators will step in at some point. Both the gambling and weapon industries, to which this has been compared below, are being regulated. Well, in Europe at least. Just anecdotal evidence, but there seem to be very few weapon owners or people with gambling problems here in Germany. Edit: Just noticed this comment below, it's already being regulated in Germany: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088903
- Kiro 13y ago
  Having worked at a gambling company I can assure you gambling problems are probably as common in Germany as in any other country (FWIW about one third of our support staff was german). Regulations can't really prevent you from playing online, no matter how innovative the restrictions are.
koralatov 13y ago
I really miss the days where I'd buy a complete game on release, rather than only getting half the experience. Having just played through Mass Effect 2 and 3, I couldn't agree more with you. The singleplayer `DLCs' felt like bits of the game they'd deliberately chopped out so they could sell them to me later. Nothing in those add-ons was essential, but it all felt like stuff that would have been included in the game proper ten years ago.
- BillyMaize 13y ago
  This. Honestly, how can they act like we should pay for the DLC when it was ready for ME3 on day one! I am totally against DLC and have only ever bought DLC for Skyrim because it added enough gameplay to be worth the cost.
  - dspillett 13y ago
    I cancelled my pre-order for Bioshock Infinite because Steam offered what I saw at the time as "day 1 DLC", and paid half price for the game a couple of months later. You want to sell me half a game? Fair enough, but I'll wait until I can pay half the price. Of course it turns out that on this occasion I picked the wrong target as they are doing the DLC thing right (they started work on it after the main game was complete rather than it being cut out of the main game and sitting on the disk from day one ready to be activated by a DLC code) but that wasn't made obvious in the sales blurb I saw at the time. But my principal still stands: if the DLC is genuinely an extra or an extension then I don't mind, but when it seems to be a core part of the content removed to get a few extra $ I'l adjust what I'm willing to pay for the main game accordingly.
incision 13y ago
I agree with your overall point, but I nothing wrong with "AAA games with 10-hour single-player campaigns". There was a time when I wanted tens if not hundreds of hours of play time out of every game. These days, 8-10 hours is just about perfect for me - something I could play through over the course of a month or two and complete with some sense of finality.
Semaphor 13y ago
Good thing Civilization still has a huge fan base. 370h for V on steam and counting for me.

hayksaakian 13y ago

I think he means it will go the way of Facebook games.

robryan 13y ago

What is wrong with 10 hour single player AAA games? These generally offer the most refined interactive story type experiences. I much prefer one of these to most movies.

yareally 13y ago
Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range. That might not seem so troublesome on the surface, but there's generally little motivation to replay such games most of the time. Also, the knowledge that there have been many games with much more single player time as well as re-playability for a comparable or lesser price now or in the past. The more those 10 hour games become popular, the more it's considered acceptable and even normal for games in general. The problem compounds when a new generation plays such games and never realizes how games were in the past. I've already noticed it with PC gamers and that many use controllers now even for typically keyboard/mouse games like FPSs. Companies end up failing to user test for keyboard/mouse players and things like custom key bindings or keyboard/mouse UX get ignored. Probably the worst example I've seen recently was Sleeping Dogs on PC. No custom key bindings (except for keys you didn't care about changing). Things like exiting a vehicle were set to the right mouse button without a way to change. I ended up accidentally pressing it at least 40-50 times throughout the game and had to repeat at least a few missions. Typically, these type of games are bought for the multiplayer aspect (which is why I assume the single player game is so short and limited). I'm not much for multiplayer gaming unless it's with friends and not random people. Co-op gaming can be especially fun if done right (Saints Row 3, Terraria, Borderlands, etc). In the end though, it's all about preferences. You might like such games yourself (and many others), but not everyone does. I think such games fill a niche for those that like them, but I loathe seeing them become the majority of PC/Console games as they're not the type of game that usually interests me.
- incision 13y ago
  >"Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range." As an adult, paying $6-8 per hour for "AAA" interactive entertainment isn't terribly expensive, it's quite cheap even.
- Semaphor 13y ago
  > Mostly the price of the typical 10 hour single player AAA game tends to be $60 + additional DLCs or special preorder things making up go up to the $80+ range. You pay for the graphics and the voice acting. If you can handle having more limited graphics and simpler/no voice acting, you will get games that are better in other aspects (balance, story, development, replayability) for way less.
  - yareally 13y ago
    True and I agree, but those games aren't considered AAA (since the definition of AAA is based on money spent as the sole criteria). Plenty of games have been AAA, of above average quality, and longer than 10 hours in the past 4-5 years (though I don't rush through games and like to enjoy the little details). When they are, I gladly pay for them[1] (probably more than I will ever be able to play lol). As I get older, I find time is harder to come by so I maybe I'm just more picky about what games I'll buy and then invest time in than I was when I was a kid. Deus Ex: Human Revolution Borderlands 1 and 2 Saints Row 3 Far Cry 2 and 3 Bioshock 1 XCOM: Enemy Unknown Rage Fallout 3 Fallout New Vegas Tomb Raider Crysis 1 and 3 Sleeping Dogs (despite the keyboard issues) Portal 1 and 2 Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Dishonored Mirror's Edge Metro 2033 Hitman: Absolution Mass Effect Series Fable 3 [1] http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198025283419/games/ http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198025283419/games/
    - Semaphor 13y ago
      We have to agree to disagree here, I have a different view on many of those games ;)
BillyMaize 13y ago
While there are some $60 titles that are so good you can justify paying that much for a mere 10 hours of play, most are not worth nearly that much due to lack of replayability. If everyone keeps buying lousy games for full price the companies will keep producing lousy games because they don't need to be creative. I think many gamers have realized this and that is why indie games have been cropping up everywhere lately. I paid $10 for minecraft and have gotten hundreds of hours out of it so the cost is small per hour.
6d0debc071 13y ago
It seems like a sign of shallow gameplay/mechanics. Supreme Commander, Master of Orion 2, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age (kinda), Mass Effect... Homeworld 2. You could spend - I'd guess at least a hundred hours or so - playing each of those games to see all their content and play around with all the options they offered you. Story seems to have become a sort of distraction from the things that make a good game. So the story can be told in ten hours - what about the fun potential of the rest of the game? How many times am I going to play the thing? How much enjoyment can I extract? Even RPGs, where a good story is important, most of the time is spent on quests and character interactions and on playing around with equipment and stats and so on. If you're just speedrunning an RPG's story, it doesn't generally take long. It's the game around it that takes the time. At the end of the day, I'm not that interested in being passively entertained with the story. Maybe if the stories were better it would make sense as a form of passive entertainment. But games are like movies these days, and movies these days tend to have stories that aren't worth watching. If I wanted a good story, I'd go read a book or fish out some DVDs or something. I largely buy games for the stuff that goes on around the story, the game part of the thing. Heck, at £3 an hour I could go and sit in a cinema for 10 hours at a comparable cost. £30 is like - I could buy 6+ hours martial arts practice, or go and do some archery, or go canoeing, or buy the materials to make myself a new desk, or.... £30 is not an insignificant amount of resources. It's not clear to me that the pay-off even makes sense anymore - though it did for things that you could play with for longer. 10 hours strikes me as ... there's probably not a lot there to play with. How many toys of any complexity are your bored of a mere 10 hours later? It may be a very polished experience but, how inventive can you be? ... I like finding tricky combinations of things and actually playing with stuff.

fhd2 13y ago

I'm also not quite as optimistic as the parent. However, I do wonder if legislators will step in at some point. Both the gambling and weapon industries, to which this has been compared below, are being regulated. Well, in Europe at least. Just anecdotal evidence, but there seem to be very few weapon owners or people with gambling problems here in Germany. Edit: Just noticed this comment below, it's already being regulated in Germany: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6088903

Kiro 13y ago
Having worked at a gambling company I can assure you gambling problems are probably as common in Germany as in any other country (FWIW about one third of our support staff was german). Regulations can't really prevent you from playing online, no matter how innovative the restrictions are.

koralatov 13y ago

I really miss the days where I'd buy a complete game on release, rather than only getting half the experience. Having just played through Mass Effect 2 and 3, I couldn't agree more with you. The singleplayer `DLCs' felt like bits of the game they'd deliberately chopped out so they could sell them to me later. Nothing in those add-ons was essential, but it all felt like stuff that would have been included in the game proper ten years ago.

BillyMaize 13y ago
This. Honestly, how can they act like we should pay for the DLC when it was ready for ME3 on day one! I am totally against DLC and have only ever bought DLC for Skyrim because it added enough gameplay to be worth the cost.
- dspillett 13y ago
  I cancelled my pre-order for Bioshock Infinite because Steam offered what I saw at the time as "day 1 DLC", and paid half price for the game a couple of months later. You want to sell me half a game? Fair enough, but I'll wait until I can pay half the price. Of course it turns out that on this occasion I picked the wrong target as they are doing the DLC thing right (they started work on it after the main game was complete rather than it being cut out of the main game and sitting on the disk from day one ready to be activated by a DLC code) but that wasn't made obvious in the sales blurb I saw at the time. But my principal still stands: if the DLC is genuinely an extra or an extension then I don't mind, but when it seems to be a core part of the content removed to get a few extra $ I'l adjust what I'm willing to pay for the main game accordingly.

incision 13y ago

I agree with your overall point, but I nothing wrong with "AAA games with 10-hour single-player campaigns". There was a time when I wanted tens if not hundreds of hours of play time out of every game. These days, 8-10 hours is just about perfect for me - something I could play through over the course of a month or two and complete with some sense of finality.

Semaphor 13y ago

Good thing Civilization still has a huge fan base. 370h for V on steam and counting for me.