Comments on Hit Self-Destruct: Dernier

The bit where he's trapped under the blue fairy.. ...

2009-03-28T02:11:00.000+13:00

The bit where he's trapped under the blue fairy.. Right?

Michael: I agree, uncomfortable game lengths owe a...

2008-07-07T22:18:00.000+12:00

Michael: I agree, uncomfortable game lengths owe a lot to reviewers trying to hold games to an objective metric. I'd be more irritated about it but I do feel that games are trending the other way. Budgets might be going crazy but the games are getting shorter. Portal's obviously a great example but even games like Call of Duty 4 aren't that long.

Neither was Half-Life 2 Episode Two, and that held up critically against games of more standard lengths. The Half-Life 2 episodes are definitely examples of fantastic pacing, even if the narrative isn't "signposted" like Portal. They're just really good at telling a story. I guess it does help that both the episodes are basically "point A to point B" and the player knows the game won't end until point B.

qrter: yeah I sympathise about Mass Effect. Even though Mass Effect chooses cool scenery for the ending, it still climaxes like every Bioware RPG: with the longest dungeon crawl of your life.

This isn't strictly related but it reminds me of
a post I wrote a long time ago about another gameplay lesson -- about how the last act should be about letting the player "slam-dunk" (as Steve put it in the comments) the endgame instead of dragging it out and letting the tension evaporate. I'm sure that's a theme I'll return to eventually.

Terrific essay, Duncan. Unlike every other media, ...

2008-07-07T15:14:00.000+12:00

Terrific essay, Duncan. Unlike every other media, video games are evaluated by reviewers and players alike for their length, as if this were a metric of quality. I distinctly recall each of the Half-Life 2 episode expansions being met with this as a factor equal to design or gameplay, and plenty of reviewers rated them down for not being long enough.

I guess I understand the value question for some consumers. How many hours should $60 give me? Twice as long as a $30 game? This line of reasoning quickly goes haywire. I think the games press and many gamers tend to obsess over game length as if it were a measure of a game's true worth.

FWIW, I agree with qrter's thoughts on Half-Life 2 and its clever way of communicating the story's progress to the player. Isn't it funny how often we point to this 4-year-old game?

"expectations frame experience"I think that's a ve...

2008-07-07T09:05:00.000+12:00

"expectations frame experience"

I think that's a very good point. Quite an elegant answer to this problem does come from literature - the use of chapters. Eventhough we maybe don't know how many chapters there are in Half-Life 2 (although they could be seen in the menu, greyed out or something like it) it does give a real sense of a story arc unfolding, a sense of when it's all coming to an end.

Too many times a game will either seem endless or suddenly plop out a big fat ending.

I finished Mass Effect just yesterday. At some point (near the end, it quickly became clear) I got an achievement called Completionist, which told me I had finished most of the game.

It made my heart sink. Not because I knew I was nearing the end of the game, but because I was nearing the end of a (Bioware) RPG, which generally means all the roleplaying goes out of the window. What at first was a large, expansive, sprawling epic suddenly gets funneled into this one-way vortex that's all about combatcombatCOMBAT. There goes the rich experience I was enjoying.

*sigh*