this topic has been covered somewhat, so I'll restate what I said: Beat it in a weekend. Too short.

Shambler, flame me all you want. 

You at the very least get an 'A' for consistency. 

You also get an "F-" for making sense.

The thing is, that Zwiff found it short is neither here nor there. You can't look at the length in isolation, only in comparison to other games.

And, compared to other recent FPS/3PS games, Doom3 was long. Possibly compared to a lot of older ones too.

For me, it was both long enough but I'd have happily had it longer because, well, bloody hell I was enjoying it =).

I would, however, liked a bit more variety (more Hell / Caverns or other stuff, and Pinkies and Mancubi), and a bit less random labs full of Imps. I.e. I wouldn't have wanted it to be longer by containing more of the latter.

Definitely a full meal though. 

Doom3 didn't even approach Deus Ex for length. Deus Ex I'd argue is a 'full meal.' Doom 3 was like a ham sandwich or something.

Deus Ex 2? I'd use the word 'snifter.' 

what is it with this bs with people wanting shorter and shorter games... wtf is wrong with all of you?
O_O

developers consider 20hours of gameplay acceptable? pish posh! 

Dont let them get away with giving you an Expansion Pack worth of play at full price. 

developers consider 20hours of gameplay acceptable? pish posh!

The point, of course, is not game length. (I believe we've discussed this before.) Rather, the point is that a game might be short from the start sequence until the end sequence, but the gameplay is rich enough that you can easily replay it many, many times. Thus, when a game is 8-10 hours from start to finish, the game actually would have 32-40 hours of gameplay.

Unfortunately, SP FPS games usually do not have gameplay rich enough to support playing the entire game four times. Some of this is due to plain, redundant gameplay; and some of it is due to boring, linear level design. 

I think an exception would be RPGs and adventure games. Part of the point of RPGs is to explore the world and build a character, and thus an 8-10 hour RPG would not have much exploration or character building; unless it was hugely non-linear and you were able to restart the game on a harder skill setting while keeping your existing character, but that's a different matter altogether.

And for adventure games, well, those are based a lot on solving puzzles, which is not conducive to replayability. Thus, adventure games need to be longer to facilitate a rewarding experience. 

I agree with you somewhat, RPG. The point isn't whether it was long enough, but whether we were satisfied at the end of the game.

My answer is that I was not satisfied at the end of the game. The levels were fairly linear, many standard "monster pop up ambush" tricks tended to get old but kept me on my toes, and the story was somewhat involving.

Don't get me wrong, I think the game is high quality and entertaining. It's nothing truly unique or special, but the gameplay itself was fun. And I understand that they can't make the game incredibly long for a number of reasons, some being the amount of detail and effort required in each map, size of the disk space, etc.

I just think that if there was more game, if there were additional levels for maybe another 5 or 6 hours the game would have given me a satisfied feeling, because, although I thought the game was fun, there just wasn't enough to really dig into overall.

But perhaps if they didn't over use imps, the variety of combat would have given me a satisfied feeling too. 

um, HELL no. i don't want to replay games. i want to play them once, and have good memories of it.

ie: i want something of decent length (>30hours) that will keep me interested all the way through.

why would you want to replay an SP game unless there were major route choices to be made? (ie: making one choice would alter 1/4 or more of the game)

i really don't understand that. seems to me, making a game that has a high replayabily value really means that the developer can be lazier and yet still have the same theoretical game duration. 

But as long as developers think that quantity is better than quality, you're never going to feel satisfied when you stop playing.



P.S. to necros: "why would you want to replay an SP game unless there were major route choices to be made?" Because it was fun, and would continue to be fun when you replayed it. Because it was still challenging. Because you could still improve. Etc. 

while i understand what you are saying, i just can't imagine playing a game over again... like playing d3 over again would be silly to me (never even occured to play the game again) because i know where most of the monsters are and won't get scared anymore. this is even more true with heavily story dependant games.

except something like systemshock2 or morrowind where you can pick a different type of character and the whole experience changes. that's diffferent. 

where you can replay it as a pacifist or an assassin. Now, that's variety. 

3 Characters, different play styles. Good, fun, challenging gameplay, each time you play it. That is a quality game that left me satisfied the first time through, and even more so the other two times. I wish I could've gotten the expansion pack to install and work. Oh well. One of my fav. games.

Doom 3 this is not, but still, Doom 3 is a fun game. 

short to me. I finished it rather quickly doing 2-3 maps a night, the ending was almost a surprise to me as I didn't expect it quite yet. I figured there would of been some more progression until the finale. I felt satisfied like an overeater who realized that he doesn't quite need dessert with his dinner.

for the record I'm STILL playing Farcry, which is definitely a longer game than D3 was, I'll finish it yet!! It has dessert. :P

Dues ex, yeah that was hella long. I was full well before the halfway point I think. 

...you must be really, really dissatisfied with pretty much every FPS released in the last few years. Perhaps that's why no-one is mentioning any, because they were so short to you that you didn't even notice playing them.

As I've said before, the point is COMPARATIVE. Doom3 is comparatively a long game by today's standards and certainly a respectable length by FPS standards throughout history. 

I thought Far Cry was fairly long - it probably took me longer to finish than Doom 3 anyway. However, although I was wondering if I was near the end of Far cry some 4 or 5 missions before it actually arrived, I didn't feel annoyed that there was more, because what was there seemed to be fairly varied and I enjoyed the overall experience more (even though the monster designs did suck a bit.)

Doom, on the other hand, left me hoping the end was near whilst playing through early sections of Delta labs. I think that if id had introduced more monster types earlier on, it wouldn't have started to feel stale so quickly.

I definitely won't bother replaying Doom 3 it... unless maybe I get a huge beefmeister of a pc that can run it with all graphics options turned on, at high res, 4x anti aliasing etc. That would only be to look at the graphics though :) 

I think at issue here is how much free time you have. Now that I have a job and new hobbies I don't have as much free time as I used to. PoP and Eternal Darkness could both be beaten in a weekend but they're the games I've had the most fun in for a long time. I'm sick of filler.

I want a 15 hour orgasm, not a 40 hour reach-around. 

i'd rather have a 40 hour orgasm, thank you... 

good luck with that 

was that i don't see why the only options should be 15 hours of goodness or 40 hours of crap. why is 40 hours of goodness not a viable choice?

instead of asking developers to make less stuff with more quality, can't we ask for more stuff with more quality? we do pay enough money for they games anyway, right? 

. 

I'm the king of homonymic dyslexia
you are in good company 

Content creation means money. Mappers, designers, texture artists, sound designers, actors, modelers, writers, testers; all these people need to come together for high-quality content and they all need to be paid. And the longer a game takes the more you need managers and secretaries and support etc etc. Unless you can guarantee the kind of sales that even EA has never seen: no. No you don't pay enough for 40 hours of good action game content. You do however pay enough for 40 hours of find: 500 gold stars, 200 blue pendants, 130 lost elves, 20 magic wands, 7 special coins, and 1 donkey with diarrhea. 

so jack up the price then. i'd pay 15 or 20cdn more for something of "long" gameplay length.

games are getting cheaper now, i'm guessing from the decreased length of games.

back in 1995, it was about 70 or 80$ cdn for a brand new game.
Now, i pick up games for around 60. D3 was 65$ when i got it about two weeks after it was released.

heck, Myst4 was 50$ CDN and that had a hell of a lot more content (2 dvds worth) if you think of general design time. (including engine dev, because it's so different from typical slideshow games).

i'd pay 80$ again for a 40-50 hour long game of the same quality as d3 was.