Quality or quantity?

[MichaelStuart]

About 20% Quality 80% quantity

 

Might you have accidentally tranposed those figures?

 

Nope.

Rather have long enjoyable game, than a short brilliant game.

[Tsuga C]

Nope.

Rather have long enjoyable game, than a short brilliant game.

 

Ah, I see. My interpretation of the OPs question was a smidge different. Carry on.

[AGX-17]

There's simply no way that Obsidian would make game topping out at 20 hours of play time, side quests and reading dialogue included. It's not even a concept worth considering.

 

There isn't an inverse relationship between game length and game quality. It's not as though making a long game causes a set, predefined amount of quality to be spread thinner and thinner as the game gets longer.

Edited October 18, 2012 by AGX-17

[GhostofAnakin]

Quality. I'd take, for instance, 30 hours of quality over 60 hours of quantity. Or I'd take 8 deep, well written NPC companions over 16 shallow, cardboard cutout NPC companions with no personality.

 

I can understand those voting for balanced, but why would anyone vote for quantity?

[Grand Heresiarch]

Reading over this I cannot help but feel that the question itself is fundamentally flawed. If the game lacked sufficient quantity (i.e overall size/time) it would, in my opinion, fail to deliver on its promise. Similarly if the content was mind-numbingly dull, it would be rightly viewed as a failure. This is, in essence, a false dichotomy as "balanced" is not really a well defined term. I think that lacking either length or quality will make for a poor showing. If the game is to succeed in delivering on the promise of the Infinity Engine predecessors it must necessarily have both.

[rjshae]

Yeah, I definitely live with good and long instead of perfect and short.

[Doxy]

Got to be 60% quality and 40% quantity for me.

[Mrakvampire]

I propose that Obsidian will remove all features from game (like classes, races, stats, NPCs etc.) except one.

And put all effort to make it more 'deep', 'well-written' (and so forth) to increase it's quality to near infinity.

 

Cause, you know, everybody knows that if you reduce quantity, quality automatically increases proportionally. So, if quantity is reduced to something near zero, then quality will be somewhere near infinity.

Edited October 19, 2012 by Mrakvampire

[AgentOrange]

Both.

[Gahir]

Obviously quality should be a leading factor for this game but having played Baldur's Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2 lenght of gameplay goes hand in hand. However I feel that quests should be linked more then they where back then, some random quest which makes you run to point A-B and pick up X/kill Y isn't really interesting.

 

Make the quests ramp up more and add to the epicness feeling, draw the player into the story and give us the feeling it is actually leading somewhere instead of having a main line with some character chains and the rest as content stuffing. Heck you could even innertwine lore from sidequests into the main story and players will get the Aha moment of recognosing lore and adding to the romance of the overall story.

 

I think I saw it mentioned before inh this thread where somebody was talking about MMO situations but there is also an example from WoW where they used phased quests which seemlesly integrate into another and into the lore of the zone you where exploring. Now I'm not saying it should be that extensive but it would make for a framework to work with.

[C2B]

Both are important, but I tend to prefer quality over quantity in most cases.

[Angrenost]

I, like most people, am busy with all the possible things to do, so quality.

[ArcaneBoozery]

I voted balanced. Obviously we all want the game to be of high quality, but there is this false notion that in order to do that it has to be short. There are plenty of high quality RPGs that also have great length: Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 were both 100 hours long or longer, Fallout 2 was around 100 hours, Gothic 2 was fairly long, as was Divine Divinity, and these are just the ones that immediately come to mind. I really hope PE will be way longer than 40 hours as some people here suggest, as that's pretty short for an RPG. Length isn't just a matter of having more content, although that's really important too, but it also gives this sense and atmosphere of a real world, as opposed to smaller RPGs feeling more like modules. The way I see it, Obsidian's initial asking for 1.1 million was for about 40 hours of gameplay, since it's hard to make a serious standalone RPG thats under 40 hours. But since then, they raised almost 4 times that amount, with much of it explicitly for more content/length: longer story, new region/faction, stronghold with associated quests, and finally an entirely new HUGE city, not to mention other stuff that should add hours of gameplay like crafting, finding out extra companions' stories, etc. So given that, I hope it will be at least in the 80-100 hours range, hopefully closer to 100.

[Cultist]

EAWare and Dragon Age 2 is the best example of Quantity approach. No thanks.

[simon_templar]

Do you want billion things to do in game when there might be occasional boredom included...

 

or do you want less but better and more meaningful things to do?

 

I don't have much spare time so I vote for shorter gameplay where every moment feels like gold.

 

For me most important in game are:

• dialogues
  
• interactions
  
• game mechanics for me best would be from Baldur's Gate
  

 

I'm afraid about quality - 2 big cities, quests might be boring, repeating. I was actually happy when there wasn't any big stretch goal after 3.5 mln. I would prefer smaller world but more complicated, with interactions like in fallout 1 and 2 (even more), most of fun for me would be if your actions would be changing world during the game for example you killed mayor of the city and beautiful town becomes ugly and dangerous. But this would cost a lot more effort than normal, that's probably impossible with that budget and time.

[Nomine Vacans]

Stupid question.

[Bhaal]

Do you want billion things to do in game when there might be occasional boredom included...

 

or do you want less but better and more meaningful things to do?

 

I don't have much spare time so I vote for shorter gameplay where every moment feels like gold.

 

For me most important in game are:

• dialogues
  
• interactions
  
• game mechanics for me best would be from Baldur's Gate
  

 

 

 

Agree, quality should prime. I think in terms of quality we can hope PE will be "adult" (Planescape Torment) because we have enough RPGs for kids (Dragon Age 2 etc...).

[Chr1s]

Their isn't a clear answer to this but to me both are VERY important for example, a short game with super high quality can make the game a blast to play but you're unlikely to pick it up again and low quality but many game hours make you hate the game and not come back either so imo it's important to find a good balance between high quality and length which isn't the easiest to do with a kickstarter budget but it's possible with care ful planning and knowledge.

 

here's what i like: no or very limited amount of cutscenes (because i prefer gameplay over watching the story and good storytellers don't need the use of cutscenes to succeed and older games like torment/BG are good examples of this, no voiced protagonist which i like mostly because my younger days was filled with these older rpg's and to me no games today come near their storytelling, D&D type combat is another thing i'm a huge supporter of here and at last isometric camera is a must in a old school archetype game.

[MoobooMagoo]

Quality for sure. The main quest should be well written, of course, but as for side quests I would prefer there to be fewer, well crafted side quests. I want as many to do as I can, but I wouldn't want the quality to suffer just to throw some in. A few little side quests here and there aren't bad; maybe you get to a town and there is a kid that wants you to save their pet or something, but if EVERY NPC has some inane quest for you then it is just going to feel tedious.

 

I also like the idea of at least one side quest that spans the entire game. Those are usually really fun.

[vv221]

Have faith in Obsidian:

We're going to have quality AND quantity!

[iHeldan]

Yes, my question was simple but your answers were great! It's important that we talk about these things. Thanks everybody!

[Tana66]

I have to jump on the bandwagon of wanting Quality, definitely, with the understanding that you simply won't be able to satisfy every camp's definition of what level of quality is acceptable, and what aspects of gameplay most deserve your supreme efforts. I personally like the option of having "hobby" actvities ingame that can benefit myself or my party, especially during times when I can't get heavily involved in a campaign or other drawn-out dungeon because I'm waiting for something IRL, but just want to jump in and visit for a short while. I am excited about this game, and applaud your current and future efforts. I have supported you to the maximum that my currently crippled budget allows, but thankfully that will include a Collector's Edition of the game and a T-shirt, so I'm happy. Although... if you all get carried away with the signings and slip some ink onto a few random CEs that would be awesome too!

[SimonJ]

Definitely quality over quantity. I have played too many games full of bugs that rapidly sap the enjoyment from free-roaming environments and eye-candy. My personal opinion is that I enjoy a good story that is well realised and immersive. I get easily tired of too many go fetch quests.

 

I recognise that it is challenging to have replayability, but there are lots of games that completing even one playthrough feels like enough. The gool old cprgs that everyone mentions have all of the features that make you want to replay them as different classes or races etc

[Avaruz]

For me, it's about finding the RIGHT balance. When you create more content, make sure it adds something to the game. It was done in Arcanum, and can be done again.

[teknoman2]

usualy im for quality, but if quality means a single well written quest in the entire game then it gets a bit boring. so i prefer a ballance of 60-70%quality and 40-30% quantity