Are video games getting to big?

[Gwen]

Is anyone else getting tired of how big some games are getting? I was playing New Vegas the other day, and after playing for like an hour I still did not feel like i accomplished anything. Now dont get me wrong, New Vegas is an awesome game… but there is just TOO much stuff. I found the strategy guide online for it, and I felt like i needed a masters degree just to read the stupid thing. All the formula's for all the different weapons and character builds... it was insane. it started with GTA3... I still havent beat that game. Im near the end, but after a while you lose interest in running all over the place trying to complete quests. Its cool that they have these wide open worlds, but when i have to go trek through the freaking wasteland for an hour with nothing around to find some stupid thing that is too much.

Maybe im just a casual gamer now because i dont have time to devote to games.... but I like games that give you some feeling of progress after investing time into them.

Ok ive rambled on long enought and im losing my train of thought
/rant

[gamesucker]

I'd suggest flash games.

[Gwen]

bleh…. I like real games. I guess it comes down to im a FPS gal at heart. I love bioshock, and battlefield games. I played all the way through SC3, RTS is awesome... I do like RPG, but i dont think ive ever actually completed one.

I have dead rising, and that is fun for quick gratification... Fallout, oblivion, and all those other games would be just as good if you didnt have to have spend 20hrs just to progress the story 5 mins.

[Helladen]

@uılɐpuǝʍƃ:

> Is anyone else getting tired of how big some games are getting? I was playing New Vegas the other day, and after playing for like an hour I still did not feel like I accomplished anything. Now dont get me wrong, New Vegas is an awesome game… but there is just TOO much stuff. I found the strategy guide online for it, and I felt like I needed a masters degree just to read the stupid thing. All the formula's for all the different weapons and character builds... it was insane. it started with GTA3... I still havent beat that game. Im near the end, but after a while you lose interest in running all over the place trying to complete quests. Its cool that they have these wide open worlds, but when I have to go trek through the freaking wasteland for an hour with nothing around to find some stupid thing that is too much.
>
> Maybe im just a casual gamer now because I dont have time to devote to games.... but I like games that give you some feeling of progress after investing time into them.
>
> Ok ive rambled on long enought and im losing my train of thought
> /rant

Some people like those types of games, buy a game that is short and sweet like Fable.

[gamesucker]

@uılɐpuǝʍƃ:

> bleh…. I like real games.

I hope you didn't mean that literally.

I personally like long games, as I can always go back to it and there will be new stuff awaiting me.

[Gwen]

of course i didnt mean that literally.

really tho…. how often do you stay with a long game. Unless you dont have any real life commitments by the time you get around to finishing a really long game some other game will come by and and take you away from the one you were currently playing. Or if you do decide to go back to it after playing something else you'll forget where you were in the story or what you were doign.

[gamesucker]

@uılɐpuǝʍƃ:

> of course I didnt mean that literally.
>
> really tho…. how often do you stay with a long game. Unless you dont have any real life commitments by the time you get around to finishing a really long game some other game will come by and and take you away from the one you were currently playing. Or if you do decide to go back to it after playing something else you'll forget where you were in the story or what you were doign.

I usually stick to one game at a time.
Right now that happens to be Minecraft.
Before that it was Haven and Hearth.
Before that it was Little Big planet.
Before that it was Kryce-Online.
That's not to say I didn't play other games in-between those, but those were just the games I played the most.

[Kite]

Long games are fine to me.
Mainly because I beat them in a super short time :P

Like I beat a 90+ hour game in 19hours 100% complete.

All though even if I don't beat them in a short time, I still love to play them.
I stick to 1 game at a time before I move on to a new one.

Btw, GTA3 is epic, beat it 4 times.

@Batman:Flash games lol, never recommend crappy flash games to a gamer xD

[Gwen]

I dont know… maybe its just due to the fact i dont have time to invest in long games anymore.

It just really got to me when i was walking for like 20 mins clear across the wasteland in fallout with nothing happening that drove me nuts.

[gamesucker]

@Alphonse:

> @Batman:Flash games lol, never recommend crappy flash games to a gamer xD


[Jeff]

I love long games.  Recently i got hooked on oblivion, have been playing as much as i can for the past 3 weeks(which still isn't that much time to play it)  I think that long games are fantastic for people like me who don't care how old the game is and don't want to spend 50 bucks on a game that their only going to play for a couple weeks.  I think i've clocked over 300 hours of oblivion in my life, as i do play throughs with different characters.

[IceCream Tuesday]

Games these days are Wins and loses, Games like Vegas are UBER long.. yet there are very good games (fable) which is short as dick

[kender the great]

Eh I feel like games now are the same with a different label slapped on them. I've never sat down and beat any of the GTA's or any of the Fallouts. Games with complete worlds and give you the opportunity to run from the start to the other side kill me. It's ridiculous. I enjoy games with stories, but also have its limitations. Games are slowly becoming less and less appealing to myself. The last game I beat was Super Meat Boy. A challenge, but nothing major and intense.

[Dark Crusade]

@uılɐpuǝʍƃ:

> Maybe im just a casual gamer now because I dont have time to devote to games…. but I like games that give you some feeling of progress after investing time into them.

I found this out about myself a few weeks ago. Ironically I played New Vegas for 2 or so hours, and just lost all interest and didn't enjoy it as well. The few games I enjoy nowadays is most games from Bioware (Neverwinter nights series, Dragon Age series, Mass Effect series), Nintendo (zelda, mario and donkey kong series), and I enjoy a casual game such as Minecraft or Mount and Blade here and there.

[Robin]

Sandbox games are fashionable now-a-days. Everyone seems to think they need to make their game a big open world.

I grabbed a copy of the new Burnout. They made it a bloody sandbox and absolutely killed it. When it comes down to it, sandbox games just require you to run around to your next quest/mission/story and artificially pad out the gameplay time. It's annoying and doesn't work, but it seems to keep all the idiots interested, and idiots have more money to waste than clever people.

As for New Vegas, I put about 5 hours into it then got bored. Once again, Obsidian take a good franchise and kills it (seriously, all their projects are just bad sequels. inb4 they made fallout.) Then again, Bethesda are just as much to blame for continuing to use that God-awful engine. The exact same bugs and annoyances that occurred when I was playing Oblivion 5 years ago are still in that bloody thing.

[saadhamza]

I personnaly love sand-box games, that live up to standerd.I did like the new burnout, mostly because it was a really fast paced game. I didn't really care that it was open world. It was fun just driving around for the fuck of it, and doing awesome flips. One of my all time favorite games is San Andreas. I did not like GTA IV as much, for one reason: Limitations. In SA, there were so many fucking cheats that it was hard to get bored. Flying planes, using tanks, and immortality just never got old to me. The problem was that, in GTA IV, there were not as many cheat codes, and the like. I've never played them for the story. Just to sit down, and maybe burn an hour lighting policemen on fire.

I kinda like Oblivion. I started it, but i havent had the time to play much further then the tutorial. It was a cool system, though.

[Robin]

@Zonova:

> I **personnaly** love sand-box games, that live up to **standerd**.

@Robin:

> but it seems to keep all the idiots interested

[saadhamza]

I knew you were going to say that.

[Thorn]

Oblivion had a glitchy engine, I readily admit. I also agree that they did a very poor job in FIXING the engine when making Fallout 3.
I still loved them both though.
I simply learned to save a ton, and I didn't even find it that bad. I played Morrowind for three years all in all, between the core expansions and the enormous modding community. In my books, time well spent. Balmora will always feel a little bit like home to me, and I could still find my way to Bal Isra without a map.

I find some sandbox games more aggravating than others, for example I've pretty well gone off Minecraft because there aren't even any narratives within it for me to explore. A good sandbox game though is a novel waiting to be written.
I love the freedom to take a detailed world and explore it in the way I want to. Fallout, the Elder Scrolls, even more linear ones like Mass Effect and Assassins Creed, I love them all.

I do however understand that they aren't for everyone, these games often require quite an investment of time.
Just keep in mind that there are those of us out there that aren't stupid, but still like this kind of game.

[Murdoc]

@uılɐpuǝʍƃ:

> bleh…. I like real games. I guess it comes down to im a FPS gal at heart. I love bioshock, and battlefield games. I played all the way through SC3, RTS is awesome... I do like RPG, but I dont think ive ever actually completed one.
>
> I have dead rising, and that is fun for quick gratification... Fallout, oblivion, and all those other games would be just as good if you didnt have to have spend 20hrs just to progress the story 5 mins.

I love first person shooters. I wasn't aware many people on here even played them, until recently. Have you ever played Day of Defeat, the half-life mod? That was a personal favorite of mine for quite awhile. But all this talk of FPS games is making me wanna get back into it again. :)

[Robin]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all sand-box games are bad. I spent most of my teenage years on Morrowind and Oblivion. I finished Fallout 3 and was looking forward to Fallout: New Vegas. I still think Spiderman 2 was an amazing game as well.

It's just there are far too many developers who think that creating their game as a sandbox means they don't need to actually think about pacing the game, and for some games it simply doesn't work at all.

The main problem with the Burnout sand-box game is that there are only 8 goals within the entire map. Every single race on the map ends at one of these 8 places. This means that no matter which race you choose, you're just going along the same damn roads all the time. It's boring.

[Anna Comnena]

@Katsumi:

> I love first person shooters. I wasn't aware many people on here even played them, until recently. Have you ever played Day of Defeat, the half-life mod? That was a personal favorite of mine for quite awhile. But all this talk of FPS games is making me wanna get back into it again. :)

Day of Defeat was good until it went retail, then it pretty much became Counter-Strike: 1943

Natural Selection was probably the most interesting Half-Life FPS throughout it's whole development. I heard there was a Source engine version but I haven't tried it since I don't like Steam.

About the topic, I don't think games are really getting any longer, but as Robin pointed out everything is going sandbox style, and depending on the game how nicely filled the sandbox is really matters. A lot of the extra stuff are timesinks though, plain and simple. The easiest thing is to just do the mission arcs themselves and not really play with the sandbox itself, and the games can go at a decent pace. Of course that's if you can't devote the time to explore the extras that populate the world.

You could try smaller games, like Red Dead Redemption, or Fable 2, or Assassin's Creed 2 and Brotherhood are fun. I like the Assassin's Creed games (atleast the newer ones), it's basically Renaissance Parkour, really fun for casual gameplay but it has enough in it for a long time spent (I mean casual gameplay as you can't devote more than 2 hours a day most of the week to a game).

[gamesucker]

@Anna:

> I like the Assassin's Creed games (atleast the newer ones), it's basically Renaissance Parkour, really fun for casual gameplay but it has enough in it for a long time spent (I mean casual gameplay as you can't devote more than 2 hours a day most of the week to a game).

I'd just like to say that I once spent an entire day playing number two non-stop. The game's awesome.

[Robin]

There's a good example of how a sand-box game can be very good. When it comes down to it, having a fun, cool way of travelling around is a must.

[Drummerpete]

@Robin:

> There's a good example of how a sand-box game can be very good. When it comes down to it, having a fun, cool way of travelling around is a must.

That's why I loved prototype, the jumping, flying… really fun.

Oh, and being able to absorb people was pretty cool.