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. 

I would too. But then parents go into a game store and look at game A which costs 40 and game B which costs 80. Also, game A says "realistic 3d" on the box and has brighter colours. Which does that parent pick? For that matter, which does the moron EB clerk recommend? People who know their shit are a minority market. 

I'm not sure about Canada, but D3 was pretty pricey in the states. From what I see, most games here are around $40 - $50. Doom3 was about $65, Dawn Of War around $35-40 I believe. 

that's actually quite a bit. is it possible the price dropped that much in two weeks? O_O 

Not worth it. $45 perhaps.. most games are $50, maybe $55. 

necros: just a possibiliy: in '95 the cnd$ was what? .60-.70$ compared to the US$. Right now it's at around .80$

as well, if you've checked the news in the last while, games prices are on their way up
http://money.cnn.com/2004/09/29/commentary/game_over/column_gaming/index.htm 

beated d3. end boss sucked 

d3 was rather long. Mind u, thats from a point of a man who can only spare few hours in the evening on games.
But overall, I dont like long games, I lose interest quickly. D3 is first shooter I bothered to finish since rtcw.

agree, popa: the ending was almost a surprise to me as I didn't expect it quite yet. 

I bought it on release day for this much:
http://wwww.lunaran.com/pics/doom3box.jpg

Whoever said games are getting cheaper ... is this in Canada? Games are doing nothing but getting more expensive here. When I showed my dad Doom3 when he came home the day I bought it, he looked at the pricetag with a scowl and "The hell ever happened to $39.95?" 

-_-

apparently it's just Canada...
i forgot to take into account the falling USD. sorry dudes.

if that's taken into account, +20$ = 100$ which isn't really justifiable. :P