Games are just massive lately, taking up so much of the players’ time that we are often playing a game for so many hours that we will miss out on other titles. If you aren’t playing one of the many time-sinking live service games that require you to be there day-in-day-out! Do we need smaller titles?
Game of the Year award winner last year was a smaller game, Astro Bot. “From the start, we were in the mindset that it’s OK to make a compact game … it’s OK to make a small game,” said Astro Bot’s studio head Nicolas Doucet at a GDC panel. Sourced via GamesRadar+. Doucet continued with “So for us, it means that we’re making something of such scale that we can control it fully. That’s from a development standpoint. But not only that. For the players, we all know that players today have a backlog of games and cannot complete their games, so the prospect of a game you can actually complete is a really persuasive argument.”
What a thought…completing a game. You can complete Astro Bot’s main campaign in about 10-12 hours while 100 percenting it in 18-20. 100 percenting a game in 18-20 hours feels unheard of lately. Insert the month of FEBRUARY! February kicked things off in a very large way with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, a game that will take 50 to 60 hours to b-line the main story, but then you’ll miss out on so much of that game if you just straight-line the story and don’t immerse yourself in that world, which will take 150 plus hours to complete it all. I played 30 hours of the game before getting to the wedding, a main story plot of KCD2 that’s supposedly early in the game. If you know you know! Then Avowed followed that up and Monster Hunter Wilds released at the end of February, not to mention everything else in between those releases. My backlog of games never shrinks, it only gets bigger. It feels great when you complete a game, but not many of us complete games anymore. Only 10-20 percent of players actually finish a game they start, because there are so many games released every day.
With Astro Bot focusing on a smaller scale game, it allowed many players to get and get out feeling a sense of accomplishment. The days of playing smaller games feel almost all but forgotten. Yes, I know there are smaller games out there. Don’t come at me. But, look at what you’re playing right now. Is it a small title? Or something that takes a lot of time and investment to complete? With so many large games coming out lately, now Assassin’s Creed Shadows that I’m working on, the map alone is massive! It can be a nice change of pace to play something smaller.
Ask yourself how many games are you playing right now? What was the last game you completed? Let us know below!
