GAME LENGTH AND MAINTAINING PLAYER INTEREST

I think the most simplistic Tension/Release cycle I know is Kirby's arena modes - you have peaks in the boss fights and valleys in the recovery room. Boss Fights are, well, Boss Fights, with the recovery room being a relaxed environment to consider heal up, look who you're fighting next and maybe grab one of the ability trophies.

author=Sooz
I seriously do not get where y'all are getting the idea that anyone is demanding short games. Like, I explicitly said I'm not doing that. It's just a thing I've seen a LOT: people say a game should be "as long as it needs to be," but then a lot of the time there's complaint about games being "too short." It seems there's an idea that RPGs in particular need to take multiple sessions to complete, or else they're not really long enough. And I find that as arbitrarily limiting as the idea that any game should only be an hour or so long.

If people complains that a game is too short, maybe the game then wasn't as long as it needs to be, it was shorter? Also, it could be so that there's something about how RPGs are designed that makes it hard to make them both short and satisfying. Just because we can't tell (maybe we can, some posters here are trying to do so) why RPGs seemingly needs to be multiple sessions long, it doesn't mean that the idea is arbitrary. It could simple be so that we haven't figured out why this is the case, assuming this is case at all.

It's good to keep an open mind and consider that maybe RPGs don't need to be very long at all. However, it goes both way and one should also consider that maybe they actually do. There are other options as well, maybe RPGs can be made short and satisfying, but only if you abandon a lot of common RPG design paradigms.

author=Sooz
So... would you say you need to... plan the game's length?

Yes, in the way you're thinking, but I never disagreed with that in the first place. I'm saying you don't say, "We need to make a game that's under ten hours" and plan from there. The length should be inherent from the gameplay and narrative.

author=Sooz
I seriously do not get where y'all are getting the idea that anyone is demanding short games. Like, I explicitly said I'm not doing that. It's just a thing I've seen a LOT: people say a game should be "as long as it needs to be," but then a lot of the time there's complaint about games being "too short." It seems there's an idea that RPGs in particular need to take multiple sessions to complete, or else they're not really long enough. And I find that as arbitrarily limiting as the idea that any game should only be an hour or so long.

There are no sides to take here. It is just talking about how we think about game length.

Maybe I worded that too specifically and it felt like it was targeted towards you. How about this: I think that the general idea that shorter games are superior is a fallacy. Instead, I think that games should be condensed so that there is no filler, but, even if that's the case, a game can still be as long as it needs to be.

I think we're actually coming to the same conclusion from two different sides of the debate. I agree with you that RPGs don't need to be above a certain hour mark, either. My own game, The Heart Pumps Clay, is just as long as it needs to be, which is around the hour mark. I excised a lot of RPG standards in order to make it work like that--for example, levels/xp gain have been removed and you're healed after battle so that the emphasis is on a per battle basis instead of long-term resource management. I think if you have lingering gameplay mechanics from larger RPGs and a narrative that isn't fully developed, you might get accused of your game not being long enough with some legitimacy behind it.

At the same time, I think that people play RPGs for a larger narrative because that's what they're used to and what they seek out in RPGs. So, any shorter RPG will end up getting complaints about not being long enough. There's not really merit behind those complaints, so you don't really need to heed them, but I think that's where they're coming from.

I know that there are a lot of people who think you need to keep a game short in order to keep the attention span of people nowadays/not waste their time. That might be who they're thinking of. I know I see enough of that opinion. Although it's kind of insulting.

author=drenrin2120

author=kentona
early failure is totally something that turns me off.

I believe when someone starts up a game, there's an internal clock that starts ticking. If you don't hook them within the first 10 minutes or so of the opening credits/title screen, you're gonna lose them. In an RPG, a gameover within that time frame is a guaranteed way to lose them and never get them back. Because RPGs require the player to invest so much time into their gameplay, a gameover is devastating. They have to backtrack, they lose items/experience/money and most importantly, their own personal time. Gameovers should be reserved for serious mistakes that are clearly the fault of the player. There are lots of other ways players in RPGs suffer from mistakes besides outright death, since every action is cumulative with consequences popping up later down the line. If a player can't even make it 20 minutes into an RPG without dying, I can't help but view that as a serious design flaw.

For my game I've had people die in the first twenty minutes but I've also had people die only a few times late game before beating. I don't think that's a design flaw. Some players don't abide by the "rules" so to speak. Like not using skills orjust white hitting thinking that's okay. I would argue that it is not always a design flaw by the developer but that sometimes the players doesn't try at all.

author=drenrin2120
True but I would argue thats more the exception than the rule. And late game is a different beast.

I guess it helps that my game is shorter, like 2 hours+ tops. So early game is difficult and if anything late game gets easier as you get stronger. I like to think I hook people in the beginning, as long as they try more than white hitting. And you see that a lot, I realize that moat RPGs you can get away with that but for the more "non-traditional" games it helps to delve a little deeper.
More to the point of the OC game length can play a big part as well as how traditional your game is. Adding too much fluff to a story can kill the uniqueness you were aiming for originally, especially in a shorter game or a game with a different combat style or those with no combat at all.

I think, in your case kentona, the DQ games sometimes require that you grind and grind and grind in order to be strong enough to defeat a boss (DQ8 had this issue for me) and that gets tedious because having to grind in order to progress is stupid.

Wait, I'm not saying that natural grinding is an issue - as you go on it's fine to level up over the time it takes to get to the next area/boss/etc, but you shouldn't have to go out of your way to grind more than the journey to the boss would take, or at least, not too much more. If you're one level too low, then fine, a quick level-up should be easy to gain, but if you're 5 levels low and the exp rate is very low then you're more likely to say 'Fuck that' than actually go and grind... unless the battle mechanics are a lot of fun and extremely versatile in nature, so that each battle feels fresh and interesting.

Failing is fine, I think, as long as you feel that you were 'almost-just-a-little-more' there. If you get completely decimated, even though you fought every enemy (or almost) you've come across and got the best armour/weapons at that point, then you are very likely to just stop playing.

Our job as game designers is to allow a challenge, but not so hard a one that the player feels that they need to work in order to get past a required (note that word usage, yo) stopper. Optional bosses are a different beast altogether, but anything that a player is required to do must present enough of a challenge to make it seem worth doing, but still be something that can be done with the tools you give.

If they have to seek much more outside of what they get on their way to the boss, then you have probably designed a shitty boss.

This is off-topic, but why would you ever think it's required that you not make the player work to beat the game? The player should always feel like they had to work for their victories if you want them to feel proud of those victories, if you want them to feel like they actually won the game instead of just completing it.

If I get a few hours into a game and haven't felt like I was in danger of failing, I'll usually quit playing unless there's something other than the gameplay keeping me there. Guaranteed victories are worthless. If I beat a game I want it to feel like that means I'm a pro.

To bring it back on-topic, I guess, I'll keep playing a game as long as it keeps giving me that feeling of satisfaction when I succeed. When the game stops providing real difficulty, and instead just regurgitates the same kinds of challenges I've already beaten but with slightly higher numbers that I have to grind EXP to match, that's when it needs to start reaching its end, because the designer has run out of ideas. If your game can't keep that going for more than a few hours, either it's a really shallow idea or you're a terrible designer!