8. A Game Need Not Be Longer Than Is Necessary
Though it's depressing how short games seem to be getting these days - but we'll get to that in a minute - it's not really acceptable for games to pad themselves out with sections that are solely intended to make the game seem longer than it is, and though they do that, they also make said game
freaking boring a lot of the time. Take the infamous Library level from the first Halo game; it's a slow, boring, repetitive slog that goes on far too long and basically stops the game dead in its tracks for around an hour or so. The subsequent levels have to then up the pace and remind us that, yes, we are playing a revolutionary shooter that would not have lost anything from getting rid of this level, even if we'd then inevitably be whining that the single player was even shorter than it already is. This proved frustrating in the early GTA games on the PS2; we'd have to drive to a mission, which would often take 5-10 minutes, and got boring pretty fast once we'd gotten the lay of the city. However, thankfully from San Andreas onwards, we were allowed to "quick-travel", keeping the story's momentum and also making mission failure a lot less infuriating. This is also often a problem with RPG games; don't set us a mission that's a 15-20 minute ride away and then tell us that your game is "long" when it's really just "overly sparse". Padding is so obvious when it happens, and it gives the impression that developers think we're idiots.