Perfect length for a story-driven RPG?

[aries202]

To me, a main quest for an rpg game would be around the 15-20 hour mark, then maybe 30-45 hours for sidequests and all other content available in the game. A game's perfect length would then be around 45-65 hours, probably around 55-60 hours would be best, I would find.

Here's a thought:

A good (or perfect) game should be long enough to cover all the bases and short enough to still keep you interested in playing. (paraprase over this quote: http://quotations.clubandhra.com/a-good ... nox-quote/ )

Many modern games are way too short, and many older games are way too long, I find.

 

[Marquess Cornwallis]

I don't think there's any limit to how long a story-driven game can be before the audience starts losing interest. There are simply too many things that can (and very often do) go wrong and ruin the effort.

As many posters mentioned before me, story and other elements of the game need to be balanced. Too much filler combat not only takes away all fun out of combat itself, it also makes you feel the portion of the narrative it leads up to wasn't really worth the effort. Dragon Age and Bloodlines are good examples.

Even if the gameplay is good, it cannot fully substitute meaningful story progression in a story-focused game. Thief Gold was in many respects an improvement over The Dark Project, but I found it less coherent and a bit dragged out. This was precisely because the extra missions felt squeezed in, adding a lot of gameplay without moving the story forward.

The story should not be extended in artificial manner. Chasing after a MacGuffin only to repeatedly find out it was stolen by yet another party (so that you have to go and retrieve it once again from a different location) is a typical example. It makes the story longer, but adds no substance.

There shouldn't be any obligatory parts that are largely or completely unrelated to the main plot. Someone in the Witcher thread mentioned how the developers realized there was little in the first chapter that was directly related to the main story. Incidentally, this was the major reason why the first chapter felt to me as if it consisted mostly of pointless running around.

The story needs to build and relieve suspension in a way that doesn't place the climax somewhere it doesn't belong (i.e. with unnecessary further plot complications after it). Unlike the OP, I thought Torment was great until Ravel's Maze. Everything that came after it felt less fleshed out and rushed (Curst) and simply couldn't compare to that climactic point in the story. It was like a really drawn out epilogue.

The plot shouldn't include deus ex machina moments or introduce important elements without any foreshadowing.
Take Fallout 2 and the Enclave. They start to play a role only very late into the game, and instead of being gradually tied in with your search for the G.E.C.K., they make the previous portion of the plot practically irrelevant. At that point, instead of wanting to finish the game, I stopped playing for about a week, just because it felt so forced.

Those are just the things I could think of off the top of my head and all supposing the story is at least decent and reasonably well-written to begin with. (There's only so much you can do with Fallout 3-grade quality material.)

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Enclave was heavily foreshadowed in Fo2. It was mentioned by Metzger, it was shown in New Reno, one could speak with an Enclave guy in Gecko, etc.

 

[Marquess Cornwallis]

Enclave was heavily foreshadowed in Fo2. It was mentioned by Metzger, it was shown in New Reno, one could speak with an Enclave guy in Gecko, etc.

I agree that in this case there was some foreshadowing, but was it enough for the Enclave to work as the game's ultimate nemesis? It wasn't for me. For the vast majority of the game they were barely a presence, then they suddenly replaced rather than built upon the G.E.C.K. situation.

 

[Droog White Smile]

Yeah, the Enclave in FO2 kinda like popped out of nowhere.

They were handled much better in FO3 with the Enclave radio and the eyebots everywhere.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

Less stuff you have to do, and more stuff you can do.

This!!!

 

[DriacKin]

Less stuff you have to do, and more stuff you can do.

This!!!

This is ok for sandboxy or open-ended RPGs like Fallout, Morrowind, Arcanum, etc...
But, it doesn't really work quite as well when the developer is trying to create a more story-driven experience like Torment, Bloodlines, Mask of the Betrayer, etc...

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

Less stuff you have to do, and more stuff you can do.

This!!!

This is ok for sandboxy or open-ended RPGs like Fallout, Morrowind, Arcanum, etc...
But, it doesn't really work quite as well when the developer is trying to create a more story-driven experience like Torment, Bloodlines, Mask of the Betrayer, etc...

One thing that you can always make optional is combat. There is no story that would require the player to take part in combat or crawl through badly designed dungeons of hack & slash. Mind you, there are stories that require the player CHARACTER to do so, but that's different. (I want a feature that lets you "auto dungeon-crawl" the MAIN-QUEST dungeons and wilderness areas, meaning that when the PC absolutely has to clean a dungeon of monsters, the game would offer the player the possibility to skip doing it manually. A certain amount of exp and loot would be automatically added to the PC's previous exp and loot, etc.)

I'd also say that Morrowind seems about as linear story-wise as MotB. Of course, they are a bit different in other ways.

In MotB, you don't have to find the mask pieces to complete the game in three slightly different ways (finding the pieces brings you the fourth ending). There is at least one major main-quest area you can skip. Skipping it means that you don't have any chance of finding one of the mask pieces. Perhaps another area can be skipped if you don't skip the one I skipped, and perhaps there are more things that can be skipped without fore-knowledge of any kind. It's not exactly just one story, since it has four different endings, some of which you rule out by treating your NPC's in a certain way, having certain NPC's, and having certain kinds of discussions with them. So it's relatively interactive in terms of any possible "story" the writers or designers may have wanted to tell. (Edit: I don't actually remember how you get those different endings. Lulz.)

Although you can reportedly trick-beat Morrowind in a couple of minutes, the main-quest path that I'm playing (I think there may be two) is linear, long, and so with lots of have-to's. The other path, if it's indeed another path, is probably similar in those terms. The only "can" in that game, apart from choosing whether to follow the first path, or the second, or both, seems to be the exploration of scattered dungeons and joining guilds and performing "duties" to advance in rank, and some non-guild side-quests. But none of that stuff is very interesting, because it doesn't affect the main-quest or anything else in a significant way, and no matter how much you do it, there's still a gigantic "have-to" left, in the form of a long, linear main-quest.

So I'm not asking for a bigger MMORPG. I'm mainly interested in freedom in the context of main-quest, which is usually the only "have-to" in these kind of games. Something that could be completed in two hours but in 10 almost completely different ways without fore-knowledge would be fun. Some of the ways could be much longer than two hours.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

Oh yeah, one of the things you could skip in MotB was finding NPCs to help you against the spirit bear in the beginning. It's one of the parts I skipped. I just ran straight out of the main-gate and single-handedly beat Okku and his minions. (Pretty basic stuff that you don't HAVE to gather NPCs to join your party. But it's that kind of things I want to see more.)