TaluxB: Unnecessary Levels

Extra content isn’t necessarily a good thing. Seeing ’90 hours of gameplay’ written on the back of a box is almost a negative to me. 90 hours of what, exactly. How do you even fill up a game with so many hours of interesting content?

Four-fifths of this room should have been deleted.

A longer game isn’t abetter game by definition. It’s a strange kind of money-to-time rational economic logic that games have. Movies don’t need to run for three hours to give a great experience. Books don’t need to be a thousand pages to tell an engrossing story. Yet reviewers will frequently fault a game for being less than fifteen hours long.

I can think of a lot of awesome games that were relatively short. Resident Evil 2, Call of Duty 4 (single player), Metal Gear Solid, the first three Silent Hill games, Half Life 2 and Portal are some of my favorite games. Most of those only lasted for five hours or so.  The levels in Mario 3 were tiny in comparison to any modern platformer, but in my opinion it’s still the best game in the genre – perhaps because the levels were so quick, varied and interesting. Those first couple of Sonic games were also pretty compact. The original Fallout could be completed in just a couple of hours.

The main argument I have against a lot of longer games is that they force developers to put in artificial barriers and obnoxious challenges. Respawning enemies, grinding, finding the pointless red key, mazes, excessively difficult sections, hordes of weak monsters or ridiculous amounts of backtracking are all things that make gaming a chore.

The big hallway in Resident Evil 4 is a perfect example of unnecessary filler. Leon, the main character, finds himself battling through an old castle filled with undead, parasitic monks who are led by a 3 foot tall guy wearing a Napoleon hat. The castle itself has a bunch of really cool stuff in it, like a giant mechanical statue Napoleon guy running after you, semi-invisible acid spewing insect things in the sewers, an optional shooting gallery mini-game, a predator-like monster that you kill by freezing it with nitroglycerine, insanely fun cutscenes, and self-destructing sunglasses. It has  so many great moments and yet, for some reason, there’s a big hallway filled with horrible numbers of boring, respawning enemies. Why? Why, other than gluing a half hour on to the game, would you bother putting in the hallway at all? There’s already tonnes of awesome content in that part of the game. It’s almost like there’s a sign on the door saying ‘you must endure half an hour of crap before getting to the fun part.’ It ends up making an otherwise fun section into one that just feels mediocre.

I can only wish that room had just a couple of enemies, perhaps a suspenseful moment and a note or two to read. Then it would have been cool or creepy instead of just boring.

I’d love to see more games where the experience is shorter but more exciting. A game can always have replay value through the use of challenges or bonus stages. An FPS like Call of Duty 4 can have a multiplayer segment that makes up for the short single player mode. Reducing the immersion and excitement of a game just to put a few more hours in seems like a bit of a crime.

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