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[Rubix42]

So I've been thinking alot, and I mean A LOT lately about graphics in games these days.  Mostly, my thoughts have ranged to thinking that I feel the gaming community is really pushing developer's to maximize the presentation of the game, which is good.

However, the down side to this seems to be that we have started lacking in content and gameplay quality.  Personally, I feel that even though the graphics on these games is great, we are really lacking in quality gameplay.

Let's look at Oblivion.  This game is obviously huge, gigantic, expansive, etc.  Hundreds of hours exist in it's gameplay.  It looks great as well.  Priced at $60 for a standard version.  Even if you only play it for 60 hours (which is quite a bit) you still pull a good $1 per gaming hour.

Now let's look at some other recent 360 titles.  King Kong, Kameo, and Condemned to name a few.  Now honestly, I must say, I think these games really come through graphically, and I would prefer to look at them compared to Oblivion.  Yet, it is frustrating that I completed Kameo in 2 days, Kong in one and Condemned in 3.  That is less than one week of gaming out of $170 in games!  

Who's with me, who else misses the days when you could buy a game and enjoy it for a good 40 to 60 hours on average?  

Now this discussion is not easy to make in regards to MP online games.  Obviously COD2, Quake, PDZ, etc have online play that extend the life of the game, but all 3 were really lacking in the SP aspect.

Anyone else wish developer's would spend more time developing games that take more than one weekend to complete?

[incognegro]

I think im a different breed of gamer cause as much as I loved games back in the day, i never played them as much as i play games now. They were all great games but certain things i wanted in games back then are now the norm in games today. Like saving your game, I hated the fact that when im dead i had start over so back then if i saw a game over screen the console was off after that. I lost interest for awhile. Now I play games alot more cause I know when the system is off i can still continue when i find the time. Thats just an example but i see where ur coming from. Some of these games nowadays are really too short (ultimate spiderman comes to mind)

[twistedsymphony]

I'm with incognegro...

thinking about it... the more hours of replay value the game has, the more repetitive the game play:

Condemned is single player only completely driving by a linear story, once the story is over it's over.

GeoWars on the other hand is probably the most repetitive game available for the console, and also offers the most hours of game play per $$ then any other title.

While Oblivion can last 100s of hours it's because of how repetitive it is... you can spend hours and hours and hours just running in circles leveling up and raiding caves for loot.

Playing Condemned for 3 hours I revealed a big chunk of the story, I was anxious to see what happened next and I felt like I accomplished a lot. Playing Oblivion for 3 hours, I spent 2:45 minutes of that sneaking around a cave to look for that last piece of armor and then running back to my house the long way so I could reveal more location markers and constantly cast 1 point Fire Damage on self to build my destruction magic before I try that next mission in the Mages guild... heck I've gone through 8 hour gaming sessions with Oblivion where I didn't even complete a single quest! Oblivion does have much more story then the average game but if you take out all the random running around and busywork it probably only offers a few days of gameplay actual STORY development about the same as Condemned.

Heck even COD2 and GRAW are really short in the single player but they make up for it in multi... again REPETITIVE.

I think the reason I like the 360 so much is because of the Achievements. Achievements give games like Kameo and Condemned 4x as much replay value encouraging you to go back through and play again to explore other areas and try different things. Of course then you have King Kong where they didn't even bother to leverage achievements for replay value.

I like a mix, it's nice to have games like Kameo and Condemned with a quickly developing storyline. Sometimes it's nice to just devote a weekend to a game and just play it straight through. I do that with some of my favorite DC games quite often. Other times it's nice to have a game like Oblivion that takes up a whole lot of your time.

I don't know... if you're disappointed with the replay value of your games, either
A. learn to love playing them OVER and OVER and OVER again or
B. RENT

Classic games were no longer, you just learned to love the repetition.

[Rubix42]

Maybe I should clarify what I am trying to say a bit more.  My point is not that games are or are not repetetive.

What I'm trying to say is I feel that by gamers making the choice to purchase games that have short stories, we are telling the developers that we think it is ok to only give us 16-20 hours of story for a game.  I am well aware that games of old were short, but now that we can save our game, I think we need to compensate by having games with longer more complicated stories.

I used Oblivion because even though it is repetitive, the game has many different things to do.  100's of quests, etc.  Yes, many are the same type, collect item "A" and bring it to location "X" etc, but each one is different, and it is a large gaming world with many different experiences to be had.  Of course the main quest is only 16-20 hours, yet each guild quest is 16-20 hours as well, making a good 5 stories (intentioinally did not bring the Arena into this) to enjoy.  Some companies would create a game called "Thief" that is about as long as the Thieve's guild questline and call it a day and charge you $60 for it.

I just wish that even though the next gen graphics are so much better, that we would have next gen stories that were that much better as well.  Give character's more dimension, add length to the story, etc.  And that sacrificing some graphical budget to give us more to experience in game would be a good thing.

[Foe-hammer]

Hmmm...most old school NES, SNES, and Genesis games were very short in length (ranging from 5-10hrs), excluding rpgs, but packing with substance.  I myself would rather have an amazing short game then some drawnout, bloated long game, in where i'm just wishing it would end.

[rzanwu36]

i think "graphics ^ = fun factor ^"