It’s a frequent complaint of gamers that modern games are simply getting shorter and shorter; you need only look as far as the 4-5 hour Call of Duty campaigns to see how true that is.
However, as an adult I find myself increasingly more strapped for time, and so above all else I favour games that make the best use of it; I prefer exhilarating 6-hour games over bloated, laborious 20-hour slogs. Though far too many games are too short, yes, there are also plenty that seem to not know when to put things to bed.
Though some games keep going long past the logical end-point, a trickier tactic that developers use to mask their padding is to insert the filler elements throughout the game as “downtime” between the big set-pieces, such that you don’t recognise them as easily. Still, here are 10 games that didn’t quite get away with it as convincingly as they thought.
Here are 10 video games that didn’t know when to end.
10. Metal Gear Solid
There’s no denying that Konami’s Metal Gear Solid is a great game, and I would go as far as to say one of the best ever made, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, as demonstrated by one glacially paced, needless slog of a section in an otherwise breathlessly entertaining game.
Near the end of the game, you’re required to prepare a PAL key card which will apparently deactivate Metal Gear REX and prevent Liquid Snake’s nuclear strike.
To do this, you have to first take the card to a cold area (the warehouse) and then a hot area (the furnace) to change the shape of the card. This essentially amounts to a woeful amount of back-tracking that was so loathed by players that this section of the game was altered for the GameCube remake The Twin Snakes, speeding it up considerably.
It’s all for nothing anyway, as the PAL card in fact ends up activating REX, and finally the game gets back on track. Though the sections that follow through to the finale are excellent, the game could have been a good 30-40 minutes shorter if this segment had been excised completely, along with having to run back to the armoury to get a PSG-1 to fight Sniper Wolf earlier on in the game. Both of these instances just reeks of filler.
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8 Comments
To be honest you are right about far cry 2 – Most of the missions and side missions were all the same. It was a four hour game repeated over and over again. The respawning checkpoints, guns breaking down and the inability to get a one shot kill via headshot didn’t help either….
I remember trying to tolerate Final Fantasy XIII. I mean, for all it’s flaws it was very pretty and still had great, turn-based gameplay…
I followed that linear path, and I followed that linear path, knowing that it would have to open up soon.. not on disc one apparently.. Okay. Onto disc two and I’ll continue following that path and continue following that path and.. “Insert Disc Three”.
That was it. That was breaking point. I could not go on! There was no freedom, at all, on either of the first two discs. It felt like a 15 hour tutorial! All the more-so because it was still introducing new battle manoeuvres and techniques to learn. A two (out of three) disc long tutorial. Had I played on, I can’t imagine there was a whole lot of space to explore when it finally did open up. Absolutely abysmal!
…yet I still have a craving to play it again now. Maybe, I think, maybe I could tolerate it again. After all, the battle sequences were still Final Fantasy done right! And it was so, so pretty…
I mustn’t let that devilish delusion get the better of me.
I can see where your coming from with Resident Evil 4, the island seemed excessive but still ended up having plenty of excellent sequences within, especially the running battle with Krauser. It felt justified in the end.
That sequence in Metal Gear Solid was filler, but it was a fairly short game anyway, so I can kind of understand why they wanted to pad it out a little.
Agree with all the Jrpg’s though, especially where you have to waste time grinding levels.
That’s another thing! FF XIII made it kind of impossible to grind levels high enough… I mean, there was nowhere to explore. The only enemies to face were on that straight, narrow path and – if I remember correctly – you could rarely backtrack and they typically only spawned the once. I do like a challenging boss fight, but with RPGs like that… I also appreciate being able to outlevel the opponent. It’s nice to be prepared.
Regarding Dark Souls you’re really missing something key here: The game is about challenge and satisfaction from overcoming it, and part of that is tension. If you make failing a boss fight have absolutely zero consequence (respawning outside the boss room) it takes away from that substantially. It’s also about halfway through the game that the player generally is supposed to figure out “oh wait, rather than fight these guys over and over again, using up some of my valuable healing, and dying just to lose the souls that I might have collected, I can just run past them to the boss.”
There is validity to some of your points here – namely that the use of filler sections/backtracking just to pad out an experience is poor design – but most of these cases had nothing to do with the game ‘not knowing when to end’. The gameplay in MGS was sub 5 hours, even with the backtracking. FF13, while having abysmal pacing, you said yourself is only about 15 hours once you get out of the tutorial and into the game. Then you call out a game because of PS2 loading times? Really?
The real name of this article should have been “10 video games that tried my patience” since that’s really the only thing these games have in common. Shoot for quality over quantity… 18 articles this week man… jeez…
Dark Souls can be completed in 1 hour, as seen in speedrun videos. The first few hours might be tough until you start getting better gear and have a good build. After that everything becomes easy.
If this was my opinion this would be a list of my top my top ten games off all time. The longer the better. Ff13 did open up completed every side mission all 60ish of them which are mini stories of there own
I agree with Lost Odyssey. I found myself doing exactly what this described several times after I got past buying 2 new copies due to some maufacturer defect on the discs. But while I enjoyed the storylines, it was a pain to always spend more time grinding and looking for quest items which at times seemed to be impossible to find.
I really enjoyed Final Fantasy, whether the game didn’t know when to call it quits. All of them are like this, and I always enjoy them.
The one game though, I wished hadn’t seemed so long though, I really did enjoy the storyline, with as linear as it was at certain points was Infinite Undiscovery. With Top Notch Graphics and a Great Open World Battle system, this game was amazing but with 4, or 5 discs (I cant remember) It seemed like this game was never going to end.