[QUOTE="LeifLongbottom"]
[QUOTE="ianuilliam"]People complained about Heavenly Sword being too short... only 6-10 hours, with no multiplayer. Yet last gen, how long was God of War? 5-8 hours? People that think games this gen are shorter are comparing different types of games. If you compare an RPG from previous gens to an action game this gen, yeah, its shorter. But action games have always been from a few to a dozen or so hours. Contra 3 on the SNES was at MOST a few hours, but it can be beaten as quick as 16 minutes. And since you mentioned Fallout, how long was fallout 1? Not as long as Fallout 3. You could beat it in 10 minutes or so, but even not doing that, it didn't take that long to play through.
Sure, some games are buggy. Large open-world games like Oblivion or New Vegas are always going to have their fair share of glitches. Morrowind was full of em. The more complex games get, the more likely they are to have bugs that make it through to the final game, but other than a very few rare occasions, I haven't run into anything game breaking. Certainly not any more than previous gens.
No, what I've seen this gen is a lot of great games, with incredible levels of production value, and despite costing the devs more than ever before to make, costing less considering inflation than in any past gens.
ianuilliam
But I wasn't comparing action games to rpgs, in fact I was making the comparison within the same franchise: the fact that gta3 was longer (and had better gameplay options) than gta4... unless maybe you paid $100 overall for the game and the dlc. But even then, if you're doing the speed playthrough and not messing around with the tedious dates, you'll definitely be playing gta3 longer.
I played Heavenly Sword and (while I didn't clock it with a stopwatch) it felt considerably shorter than any of the god of war games and it felt more repetitive too: doing the same things to kill the same guys. Not that the GoW games are a wellspring of diverse gameplay but you had more than a dozen enemies.
And yes, I expect any large open world game to be buggy but Fallout New Vegas is just plain broken. Not only that but it seems that most games I get at launch need to be patched which usually isn't a big deal for me or anyone that has their console hooked up to the internet. It's just that it seems that since they've gotten the ability to patch games after launch, publishers are taking undue advantage of that and launching games that should really have more work done on them. Sure we had buggy games in the past but nowhere near this many and nowhere nearly as bad. It can be frustrating when you buy a game for $60 and it ends up being a complete mess for the next 6 months.
I didn't play GTA3 (or Vice City or SA) for more than a few minutes. I did make it through GTA4 (the main game, not the expansions) and managed to get all the single player trophies except hunting down all the pigeons (and therefore also the 100% completion) and beating the main story in under 30 hours. 30 hours is a pretty long game, for a non-rpg. Was there more to do in previous GTAs? Maybe. But GTA4 is still a pretty big game, with pretty high production costs. GTA3 cost $50 in 2001, GTA4 cost $60 in 2008. According to the BLS, $50 in 2001 = $60.79 in 2008. The game may have been a little shorter, but it certainly didn't cost more, at least to the consumer. It cost the devs and publisher more to make.As for Heavenly Sword vs GoW. I missed GoW on teh PS2, but I did get the collection for PS3. I played GoW exactly twice to get the plat trophy. First playthrough took about 7 hours, second playthrough took 3. The enemies from start to finish are the same. Or rather, you just run into stronger versions of the same enemies. I'm not knocking teh game, I enjoyed it. But when it came out last gen, it was praised as one of the greatest. Heavnly Sword comes out this gen. Just as long, or longer. Just as much or more gameplay variety (the Kai sniping levels with motion controlled aftertouch arrow guiding, for instance, was a great change of pace). Incredible production value. The acting and facial capture was absolutely incredible, and all the visuals were just stunning. And it gets blasted as being a complete rip off because it's only 6-10 hours. Which is what action games have averaged pretty much since the PS1/N64 days. In the NES-SNES eras, they were considerably shorter.
And F:NV aside, as I haven't played that one yet (got plenty of backlog this gen, so I figured I'd wait for a GotY edition--which is a great way to avoid the cost of dlc, btw), it's not that games are more buggy this gen because devs are relying on the ability to apply post-release patches. It's that in previous gens, those bugs and glitches would just stay in the games. Yeah, there are a lot of games that get patched to remove bugs post-release. But that doesn't mean that there are more bugs this gen. It just means that finally this gen, they have a way to do something about it. PC games have been getting patches for years and years, there just was never a way to distribute patches on consoles before, so they just waited for a new version, greatest hits or the like, to fix them.
It shouldn't mean that there are more bugs but there are. And while I have been patching my pc games for years, I have never played a game as broken as Fallout New Vegas. It even surpasses Final Liberation. Play it unpatched and you'll see what it was like to play the game up until maybe a month or two ago when they finally started addressing the bugs instead of the benign exploits.
It seems like you missed a lot of big games from last gen. Before you even start talking about gta, you need to play through San Andreas. In fact, you should play San Andreas just for the experience. Once you're done you will see what I mean: that gta 4 (even with all the dlc) is a dwarf in comparison by every feature except graphics and draw distance.
And do yourself a favor and don't go by the BLS. Their statistics is one of the reasons there's such a big difference between what most people earn and what the top 1% earn: at least, it's what they use to justify their greed. In other words, it's a tool for rich people to misdirect the poor people so they don't set up a guillotine on Wall street.
The fact remains that gamers of this gen are getting less bang for their buck and are being asked for considerably more bucks overall.
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