Llyranor

Heh. You couldn't pay me to replay most of those.

The lawsuits at around the same time didn't help, I guess.

And just out of curiosity, gromnie, how much did it take you to finish FO, and how satisfied were you with it?

"Learning from your mistakes usually means that you get to do new mistakes." Which is already a step up from stagnation. Though, I guess some people like the status quo of mediocrity, since it's pretty subjective.

That'd be the main strike against CURRENT digital distribution. The costs haven't gone down significantly yet to compensate for the removal of the physical product. As it becomes a more popular method of distribution, though, we shall see.

The devs already pointed out that story/writing is technically done. One wonders in a way if what happened with KOTOR2 is actually a contributing factor in a potential shortening of NWN2. Heh.

It has nothing to do with length. It's about the design. I have no problems with a 200-hr game with excellent design throughout. "10 hours chatting, 5 hours combat, 10 hours chatting, 20 hours combat" is bad design, and precisely how people can multiply a game's length by adding 'content' that really is just an afterthought. Arbitrary segmentation of the game into 'story/roleplaying' and 'gameplay/combat' elements is bad. That's where the 'let's add more combat, add another dungeon!' comes in. Their relative mutual exclusion comes through as outdated. Does the story suddenly stop because you enter a 'dungeon', or is it because design dictates that area as filler? The ultimate culprit is lazy design, regardless of the game's length. A projected length (whether false or not) doesn't show anything about the quality of the design. If the game is 20 hrs and shows better *consistent* design than what the genre currently offers, then it wins in my book. If it doesn't, then it has already lost, in which case I could care less if it's 20 or 40 hrs. It could still be enjoyable, but then all that'd matter is that I'd feel the game provided a complete experience. Would I want a 40-hr game with consistently good design? Sure, I'd want a 500-hr one, and I want Patrick Steward and awesome soil erosion and next-gen graphics and a full orchestra and top-notch writers too. People always want more, but people don't matter. Would you rather play through 20-hr FO, or 60-hr POR2? And hey, I'll admit my point of view is influenced by the fact that (if it works, of course), NWN2 is already virtually guaranteed more lasting value than all CRPGs I've played before even if it had NO campaign. Would I be happy with a singleplayer-only 20 hr CRPG? Given CURRENT design? No, but that'd have more to do with trying to compensate relative lack of quality with quantity. It might fill you up temporarily, but you get hungry again soon after. In a way, if the industry trends are aiming for shorter games (you can debate how packed they'll be, but meh), then in a sense the console trend is almost a good thing. 'Rental' games have their appeal, in a way.

Only if you want to make the assumption that most current RPGs with their 30-40 hrs have 'good quality'. You might, but I'm not.

If there is wasted dev time, and it was spread across 40 hrs, then it would just have been the same lacking content diluted throughout a longer time. I don't see the point.

Regardless of whether the game is 5 or 80 hrs long.

Yeah, only 20 hrs has a lot more room for leeway than 45 min. How much content or breadth do you think you can pack into 20 hrs? Unless they cut dev time way down (and IIRC, NWN2 dev time is more or less similar to BG2), then all that design work goes into that time. Would Fallout have been more satisfying if it was 40 hrs long and had a lot of random dungeons throughout that provided little more than more opportunities for combat? Filler comes in many sizes and shapes. That's when game length and development time intertwine. Let's recap here: 1) Dev time similar to BG2; 2) Story and writing are ALREADY complete. You mentioned Call of Duty. That game got me more involved emotionally in less than 10 hrs than BG ever managed in 150+ hrs. Did length play a part? BG wouldn't have got me involved if it was 20 hrs or 300.

New 'Making Of' video, featuring combat. http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?type=mov&id=10175 Yay! MoCap!

Heh, unless NWN2 doesn't actually *work* or something, it's already virtually guaranteed more playability than every other RPG I've ever played (probably combined). I love modding, and the features they're adding on the end are frankly very cool. Lasting value isn't even an issue in this case. People argue that 20 hrs isn't enough to have emotions conveyed in order to feel satisfied with the product. How many movies can you fit into that? How many novels? You can throw in complete TV series within that timeframe. I've seen many fully satisfying Wuxia or anime series that would have been too long had they been extended over 20 hrs. Were they more satisfying than BG2? NWN1's OC? You bet. There was more story packed into them in lesser time, and the stories were complete and more satisfying. 'lol different mediums you suck i mean YOU SUCK' Needing 'longer times' to convey those emotions and provide completeness of story is a crutch. "Hmm, the story isn't long enough. I know, let's add another chapter where you fight off MORE time-travelling lizards! We'll add a few lines of text here and there to involve the player more! Brilliant!" Maybe you guys are satisfied with the current gaming conventions, but I'm not. It doesn't matter if the game is 20 hrs or 60, if those conventions still apply. The relative lack of emotional portrayal is there, replaced instead by REPETITIVE gameplay, rather than gameplay that would be rarer, yet more unique and actually RELEVANT. I don't feel any satisfaction in wiping out an ENTIRE building of every living piece of crap in there, just for the principle of 'more gameplay'. Look at those longer games. BG2 was a linear romp. NWN1, linear romp. Morrowind, Oblivion, linear story. Arcanum, linear quest. KOTORs, linear. Having the 'choice' of choosing your planet isn't really a meaningful choice. Choice implies consequence. So much for the roleplaying greats. You can create an illusion of nonlinearity by having 'lots of things to do with the world', but you're still a pawn of linearity. If 20 hrs means that more design development time is spent on increasing the breadth in the INTERACTIVE storytelling/roleplaying experience, all the better. If not, too bad, it would still fall victim to the current genre conventions - in which case, it would stop mattering how long the game would be, anyway. The point is one of completeness of experience, and if the design team is unable to convey that in 20 hrs, they wouldn't have been able to do it in 60 hrs either. Some people complain about JE being too short to be able to do that. I didn't play it yet, but BG1+2 didn't manage to really involve me in emotionally, either, and I clocked in 150+ hrs for those. Sucky design is still sucky design. If you like the illusion of having a 'deeper' experience because it's longer, I guess that's fine too.

I'm not associating with you dorks.

Basically, is the story going to feel complete? This isn't something you can arbitrary tag to a game without knowing anything about its story design.

What about if you break or lose your CDs?

And that's the bottom line, only it goes both ways. The correlation is minimal. A short game that sucks most likely does so because of sucky design. Lots of long games suck. PoR2 is 60-hrs long. Sucky suck suck. Is my optimism in NWN2 founded on its length, or on my views on the developers' consistent level of quality? Many people also did not enjoy Oblivion. I doubt its length had anything to do with it.

Here's the thing for me: BG2 isn't well-remembered, anyway. What you consider good content, I saw mostly as just stuff to do. I didn't feel the game being longer made it any better. Enjoyment of the game had little to do with its length to me. Quality is key. As a dungeon romp, the game consisted mainly of combat. Enjoyable, yes, but many of those encounters were just repetitions of previous encounters ('with a twist'). If the game was half as long but the design team spent that time making each confrontation more unique and memorable, I'd probably have enjoyed it more. There's a difference between halving game time and halving development time. Second, cutting any story right in the middle is a lame example. A half-complete product is still a half-complete product, even if it's 200 hrs long. The same applies for the converse. Take IWD and throw in 20 hrs of additional combat (eg. same encounters over and over once again), spread across the same dungeons (or many even some new areas, but with no additional associated story). Still fun? How about making the PCs twice as slow? Lame design? Isn't IWD walking pace considerably faster than BG already, anyway?

Did you find those longer games more enjoyable and memorable (and particularly BECAUSE of their length)? I sure didn't.

Ahahahahaha. HELL NO. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> ..... What?

Again, design vs length. The design problem is still the same regardless of the game's length. It's a compromise, if you will. I'll take a shortened game if it means more actually pointful content is packed into it. Or it would be, if a longer game actually resulted in a more memorable story or more compelling gameplay. My enjoyment of CRPGs has nothing to do with their length.

Suspect? Perhaps. Then again, I don't remember any of the CRPGs have '40-60 hrs' worth of story, or having so much memorable gameplay to fill up that much time. Like I pointed out before, the issue wouldn't be with the 20-hrs in and of itself. It just has to do with game design and whether the format would just be a direct projection of past longer titles in the genre. As mentioned, NWN2 probably won't revolutionize genre conventions, nor does it seem to be aiming to. So, my comments as a whole *probably* don't apply to NWN2 (which, frankly, doesn't bother me that much, given that my main interest lies in the toolset). Still, design vs length. As Dhruin mentioned, I don't remember Fallout being more than 20 hrs, either.

Not when the excellent story and compelling gameplay aren't directly associated with the 40-hrs. There've ALWAYS been sections (sometimes quite large ones, too) I didn't enjoy in all CRPGs I've played, and I would have happily seen them cut; that kind of fluff actually gets in the way of 'excellent story and compelling gameplay'. In fact, I *am* fine with 20 hrs, if that meant the elimination of filler content. Of course, then comes the slippery slope of simply making games shorter without actually getting rid of the filler. That's a design issue, not one of length.

Well, given how the awesome info is coming from an ambiguous quote translated from German, I'm not drawing any early conclusions yet. In any case, I'm probably more open-minded about this "announcement" because I'm actually in favor of shorter, more condensed games. I don't want a 60-hr game with 75% spent in dungeons fighting mobs of morons. An inherent problem, I guess, is that I don't really see NWN2 as aiming to turn the CRPG design conventions upside-down, so it probably won't be all pure content awesomeness, either. Now THAT is a concern.

For the record, I finished Oblivion's main quest in under 20 hrs. What a short game!!! Bethesda lied!