Are you sick of being told that you have to suffer through X amount of gameplay hours before the 'real game' begins?
When it comes to the wonderful world of gaming, that perfect length of bang for buck in terms of a single-player experience seems to hang at around the 8–10-hour mark. The Call of Duty franchise tends to cop flak for regularly having short campaign experiences, while anything that offers a compelling experience past the 10-hour mark tends to be praised for leaning towards the right side of the ‘money invested versus campaign length’ scale; particularly if said game isn’t an RPG (given that RPGs are expected to have lengthy single-player experiences).
But a disturbing trend continued to rear its ugly head throughout the gaming year that I first developed a loose awareness of in 2009 with Borderlands. The trend in question is the disclaimer that asks gamers to ignore a certain initial portion of gameplay before the ‘real game’ begins. Two big first-person shooter titles of 2011 were guilty of presenting this disclaimer: Rage and Battlefield 3.
For the record, I wasn’t a massive fan of either campaign (Rage a whole lot less so than Battlefield 3), but the issue first became clear with Rage when a fellow games journalist told me that I had to “give it a few hours before it opens up” when I was complaining about the first couple of hours of the game. My peer was right in that the game got (marginally) better, but regardless of my overall feelings on Rage, I hated the idea of being told that I should tolerate a few naff hours of gameplay before a game gets better.
I was guilty of offering the same disclaimer with Battlefield 3 when I was telling a colleague that he should persist through the first few hours to get to the better part of the campaign. “Why should I have to play through three to four crap hours just to get to the meat of the game?” was his response. Touché. He was right. Personally, I enjoyed the second half of Battlefield 3, but it did require a frustrated few hours of disjointed gameplay before I got to the meat of the game.
Particularly during the Christmas release period when there are so many gaming options available to us, it seems the right time to highlight how unacceptable it is to placate gamers with such disclaimers. At the end of the day, it’s also a hell of a risk to assume that a few bad hours of gameplay won’t have tainted a player so much that they will be able to enjoy the subjective promise of better gameplay.
While my gripe is true of any entertainment medium—movies, books, music—the sheer level of time commitment for a game coupled with the cost makes it even more pertinent that game developers can capture our attention in the first hour of a game. Hell, they should be doing it from the word go. As reviewers or purchase recommenders we should never have to say the opening levels of Uncharted 3 are slow and feature boring gameplay, Duke Nukem Forever starts with a fizzle but opens up later or that the meaty cases of L.A. Noire come after the halfway point.
Yes, I understand that a campaign has to build the further you get into it, but this shouldn’t be an excuse for X amount of initial hours to suck just so the rest of the game feels bigger and better by comparison. I believe that gaming is at a point where we can demand that developers start big and build to something even bigger.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012