Fully agree, another thing about longer games is the replayability issue.
So many of them feel like such a slog the idea of replaying them is really off putting.
That is because...
I think this speaks to how shallow most games actually are. Most of them are built to be interesting for 5 to 10 hours and then the planned obsolescence kicks in.
Short games end before the planned obsolescence period drags on too long.
Long games just keep going.
We should be wanting better gameplay design, more depth, more variety. Instead we talk about when a game should end because we see another interesting 5 - 10 hours game coming next month.
...they are long, but not dense games. Dense games are meaningful experiences the entire way through. Think RE4, Half-Life, Super Mario anything, Halo, etc. These are games that do not have much downtime where you are waiting for something interesting to happen.
The problem really began with dynamically generated content, and I think it hit the zeitgeist with Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. It was an amazing achievement to be able to interact and pick up just about everything, and having such a huge world to explore, and how they did "radiant" AI with unscripted events playing out. Interestingly enough, the most heavily criticized parts of the game were the copy/paste caves and Oblivion gates. But there was enough hand crafted content that those copy/paste parts were able to serve as filler and more so contributed to the scale of the world.
However, every other dev team saw that and tried to do their own version of it to expand the amount of time people spent with the game, whether people really wanted to do so or not. So then you had games that wanted to have Elder Scrolls playtime, without having Elder Scrolls content and the richness of that world to encourage people to keep playing. This is how you get bloated Assassin's Creed and GTA style games that have a handful of different types of missions or collectibles. There is a difference between repeating elements of gameplay throughout the game which can be enjoyable, and "I experienced this already in the previous area" padding to artificially lengthen the game.
Absolutely. And the thing is, bloating isn't hard. It's actually hard to be focused and make a short game still feel like a big adventure. Many masterpieces and classics I still play today can be beat in less than two afternoons, but don't actually feel short. Symphony of the Night, Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Resident Evil 2, Super Castlevania 4, Streets of Rage 2, etc. When it comes to RPGs, I'll never have the time to replay something like Dragon Quest 11 ever again. Thankfully there's Bloodborne and Chrono Trigger at 20 hours which is still an amount of time worth investing into a replay of such good classics. And I'm never gonna touch soulless bloated trash like Assassin's Creed to begin with. Back in the day I would have tried a 7/10 game with a few interesting ideas, but not anymore with 50 hour open worlds.
And the birdbrains whining about the price... nothing drops quicker than videogame prices. So just wait two fucking months if you're that appalled by paying 70 bucks for a non-bloated campaign. I don't even remember what I paid for Resident Evil 2 back in the day and it absolutely doesn't matter when I go back to it once again.
The issue is two-fold. First, you have gamers saying dumb shit like "I don't replay games" and focusing on things like "hours per dollar" to somehow maximize their satisfaction. Forget for a moment that it's difficult to quantify fun and your enjoyment during that time. This discourages any effort by devs to make a game replayable. Second, it's in the interest of publishers to discourage replaying a game you already own unless they can make more money off you. This is why GAAS has been so popular - sell, or give away a copy of the game and have you come back to buy expansions, seasons, battle passes, etc. If you are replaying an old classic without giving them more money, that is time and money not being spent on their newest offering.
This is more due to gaming being viewed as a business first, and art for second. How many of games like this are being created because they have passionate dev teams that want to make a fun game that offers something new or unique? Or does it exist because "we are in the business of making games, and this is a game we are making to profit so we can continue the business of making games"?
Yeah. And also Concord was made with the objective of "how do we make a game that can make the most money", while Astrobot seems like a game that was made with the simple objective of "making the most fun game we can make."
This, and...
I am not even sure it is possible for a company in the US, like EA or Sony, to make a game with a staff of sixty people anymore, due to all the initiatives and policies and laws in place. Like, people have been talking about 150 people who worked at Firewalk, but in reality it was more like 1000+ who actually worked on the game. Like, just to use a simple example everyone has been talking about, if you "need" to hire diversity consultant, they are not free. They are actually really, really, really expensive. So if the managers at the company decide you have to hire them, you're not making a game with sixty people over three years, and they get in and start throwing out work and reworking things.
This is, essentially, managerialism which has hit the game industry like a comet in the past 10 years or so. You end up with huge bureaucracies designed to manage the bureaucracy. It's hard to go back.
...this too. Spot on, the gaming industry has been taken mainstream and was invaded by your typical business grifters who view it as a way to make money. Of course the rise in popularity of gaming has helped increase resources available to make incredible big budget games that would otherwise be impossible. Unfortunately it also turned into another industry that churns out content for the sake of keeping itself going. The bloat is a self-perpetuating cycle - and it's a fool's errand in the realm of software. The more people you throw at a problem doesn't mean it gets easier. Nine women cannot produce a child in one month. The Phoenix Project is a great book that explains the perils of software project management and how sometimes a smaller, simpler team with expertise and focus can outperform the shitshow that is a large team with churn. And that's just on the production side - how can anyone add a personal, artistic touch to games that gives them personality, when there is such an unbelievably large amount of content? We are seeing good examples right now of the industry and its development structure collapsing under their own weight, meanwhile tooling and resources have become so good you see indie dev teams and solo acts putting out games like Stardew Valley, Animal Well, and Hollow Knight and succeeding critically and financially.
