Has any body else noticed that games these days, especialy rpgs, are getting easier to beat. Now maybe its because I’m too good, butI finish most rpgs in a week. The reason why I’m saying this is I just rented Media Vision new Wild ARMS game and the total end time for me was under 30 hours. 30 HOURS. That is insane. Now I know that little kids play games too, but why must we older gamers sufer because little Timmy needs to play rpgs too.
Ibelieve that every rpg needs to be at least 50 hours long normal play. This is just my comment. Another thing is that when FF1 first came out, I mean the NES one, it took the combined talents of my dad, my sister, and myself to just make it to the earth shirne in one week. The newly released one however I almost had the game beat come 1 week.
So please someone tell me why games are getting easier.
::dekar!::
I disagree. This is all about 1 thing: perception.
FF1 is extremely easy to beat nowadays and it can be one fairly quickly. I used to finish SoM in 1 weekend on the SNES. FF4 and 6 aren’t any longer than other avg RPGs.
Different kinds of RPGs are made of different lengths. You want long? Play XG, DQ8 or DQ7. You want really short? Play Vandal Hearts. I’ve finished Suikoden 1 in about 20 hours with 108 stars too. It varies on the game, player and extras. A lot of games nowadays are long because of content unrelated to the game itself (sidequests, bonus dungeons etc).
See, there’s a difference between a game being long because you’re a kid and you can’t finish it and getting help from your father who is more then likely inept at all things video game and a game being designed to be long.
Most RPGs have a main game of anywhere from 12-24 hours long, excluding side quests. And basing your opinion off of Wild Arms 4 makes me think your opinion is more then just a little bit uneducated. As the Wild Arms series has never been known for proper length as they’re either too short or dragged out. That and the series is mediocre as a general whole.
Having also recently finished WA4 I was thankful that it was shorter then other games as neither the gameplay or storyline was good enough to warrant playing it any longer then I did. So, basically if you cleave straight through an RPG then yeah, it’ll be short. But if you explore and attempt to find all the hidden items and side quests then it’ll get up there in hours.
Play XG. Tell me if you think its easy. Having played XG the number of times I did and knowing what I know about RPGs and being a strategic person, I know how to exploit XG. However, most people get nailed by it at a few times in the game. Let me know what you think after finishing it. It would be inaccurate for me to say a game is “easy” only because I know how to exploit it. Some games ARE easy, others aren’t easy, others impossible unless you do certain exploits. Like with XSII.
30 hours is a perfectly reasonable length for an RPG. When it went over that in oldschool games, it was very rarely for anything else than forced leveling and gear grinding, which I do NOT appreciate. There are still plenty of long good games like the ones Sin mentioned.
EDIT: I have gone trough Xenogears five times and I always get nailed by Opiomorph at the very least once per playthrough >:/
I have played XG, I borrowed it from a friend, it was on of the hardest games I ever played. She even gave me the strategy guide and it was harder thanks to that.
Still as I’ve said before game companies are toning down games so little Timmy can beat them to. The least these companies could do is add a hard mode or something like Konami and all the Castlevainas they’ve made recently.
No games have not become easier. You just don’t find games that are like Castlevania 1 on the NES that are stupidly difficult, impossible and discouraging to play.
RPGs aren’t hard by definition. In almost all cases you can brute force your way through challenges by leveling, crazy ability combos and what not, and most challenges are just artificially difficult, longass fights where random boss X just has crazy high stats and hp.
And games aren’t really made shorter with young gamers in mind, they get made shorter because only a very small amount of people actually FINISH these longass games, and because as the core audience grows up and gets jobs, families and whatnot, 60 hour commitments aren’t really what they look for. And since the biggest slice of the market currently consists of 19-25 year old males, you can bet that games will get marketed towards that audience more.
Personally, I’d rather have an awesome 15 hour game than a meh 60 hour one.
Frankly I prefer easier/shorter games, I can get more out of them that way. Okay, for an RPG I like to have a good amount of depth in it but 30 hours is a good medium. Virtually every RPG I’ve finished I’ve done in the 30-40 hour mark. I never go over unless deliberately levelling up, which does of course get boring very quickly.
Seriously though, if you have a problem with the games, go play different games or start making your own or something. I don’t see anything wrong with any of the new RPGs
Some people prefer shorter games; I tend not to play RPGs that go longer than 30-35 hours anymore (unless I’ve just been WOWed the whole time, which hasn’t happened in years), cos I think I have better things to do with my time. I personally think that 20-30 hours is enough time to deliver a good, well-written story without having it lull too much. Games that go over that long are usually difficult for me to even REMEMBER all the details, which is ridiculous. The longer you make a game, the better you have to do in your writing, and very FEW RPGs have ever done it (btw, I don’t think Xenogears is one of them).
Longer does NOT mean diffucult. If you want, I can give you a HUGE list of long, easy games, cos there are way more of those. Shorter games are usually more difficult.
Also keep in mind that the audience for video games is getting older. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a job that keeps me occupied for roughly 60 hours a week, I’m about to go back to school, and I try to keep in touch with my friends. Between all of that, finding time to play games is pretty rough. Thus, 2 hours here, 5 hours there… that’s no way to get through an 80 hour giant. So most of the games I’ve been playing lately are either handheld games, or they’re pretty short. The few long games I’ve played lately have had to be relegated to my days off.
So, I think that may be part of it. Also, as others have mentioned, years of playing games have made us a little better at them than we were. When I first played DQ1, it took me weeks to find everything and beat the Dragonlord. Now, I can do it in one sitting. And, now that we have the basic strategies and techniques of those games mastered, modern games seem a little bit easier.
Castlevania is NOT stupidly difficult. It’s not even the most difficult Castlevania game on the NES (I’ll go to my grave saying Castlevania III is harder… largely because in the first Castlevania, you could continue right outside of Dracula’s room, and in Castlevania III, you had to continue at the beginning of the level… And Castlevania II is damn near impossible without a walkthrough). You want stupidly difficult, try Battletoads…
Anyway, NES games (and SNES games to a slightly lesser extent) tended to be harder since many of them were fairly short, and didn’t have saves or passwords, so to extend the game’s length, they made them difficult so you couldn’t blaze through them an hour after you bought them. But after the 16 bit generation, almost all games allowed you to save your progress, which made them easier (and they tended to be a bit longer as well). Of course, this goes mostly for action games, not RPGs. But even with RPGs, things like the first Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy… those games really were very short. The requirement to level up to stand a chance is what gave them any respectable length. Did this mean they were harder? Not really, it just meant that you’d have to spend some time power-leveling.
But everybody else said pretty much anything I could say on this topic, so I’ll just leave here saying that I can blaze through Chrono Trigger, with all side-quests, in under 10 hours, and that game’s what, 11 years old? Games aren’t getting shorter or easier. Some just happen to be shorter than others, just like it’s always been. And as you get older, you do learn to appreciate being able to play through an RPG without having to spend 100 hours of your life doing so.
I was thinking the same thing about DW1, how I could never ever beat it back when I was younger, and now it’s like an afternoon activity to beat it. (I grew up calling it DW and I’ll call it that to my grave. Except DQ8.)
attempts to break Nes controller via Spinning Piledriver-to-Storm Hammer towards nearest wall, but breaks wall instead.
Speaking of challenges, most of mine were due to language barrier when I was like, the size of a fire extinguisher. Although I did learn English VERY FAST after learning to read…
Still needed to learn the “logics” of videogames where:
YOU JUST HAD TO BREAK THE DOOR WITH A POT… instead of a well-placed shoulder charge or pushing it…
Oh, and don’t rescue the dame in the chains, instead, slaughter her with the ARROW.
Also, I got stuck in Zelda: Link’s Awakening more times than you can imagine. And … The Water Palace in Ocarina. Brrr. But those were reasons why you learned to enjoy completing games by yourself… nowadays, it seems like you need a FAQ to even get to know about some features in a game… (Anyone remember Chocobo Breeding? Not a single word in the manual…)