Playing some Mercenary Kings currently, a run-and-gun Metal Slug-a-like from 2014 that like so many others comes straight out of my 'games to play that will honest-to-goodness get played someday' list. It's been something of a disjointed experience to say the least, a game that's provoked some thoughts about one of the pre-eminent qualities of modern gaming: the time it takes to complete, to finish and to call it a day.
As I'm writing this I'm just over halfway through the aforementioned title. Halfway through its 113 missions, each one taking on average 5 to 10 minutes to complete, (barring do-overs and restarts, plenty of those as the difficulty stacks up). The website howlongtobeat.com suggests it takes a touch under 20 hours to complete and that sounds about right. A modest sum in comparison to some games but its prompted the question regardless.
Now this is not going to be one of those one-size-fits-all answers I know. A lot of factors at play when one considers how much game is enough game and when to bring it on home. It'll vary from player to player, from genre to genre and sometimes, by the game itself and who is making it. A JRPG will tend to outlast most cinematic third person action adventures and some games don't have an end point by design as with most MMO's. Let's just put those to one side right here
So what does that leave me with? Going back to Mercenary Kings, this was a game I was initially pretty high on. Great art style, solid combat mechanics and the feel of a classic action game of yesteryear filtered through modern nostalgia and updated to great effect. A few hours in and I began thinking that this might be one of the better games I've played this year in fact, I was having some fun with it no question. Then it happened. Or rather, it didn't.
It just kept going, onwards but not forwards unto a compelling finale. It missed the mark. It didn't stick the landing. It was a swing and a miss but why? The core gameplay is solid yes but I don't know if it sustains the total duration of the gameplay as well as the developers might have hoped. Had it ended at that 20 hour mark (it didn't for me) it might have found that sweet spot and finished on a good note. Instead it just goes on, and on and on. The difficulty increases but the new content starts to feel pretty stretched out and the justification for more than a hundred missions soon wears thin. Personally whatever goodwill accumulated during those early hours soon gave way to frustration and a sense that this game was being padded out beyond all reason.
Now is this a question of game duration or one of quality? Or are these questions all tangled up in each others business? There are some curious game design choices in Mercenary Kings and a slavish devotion to the games that inspired it for good and bad. Some design choices belong in the past and we left them behind for good reason. A touch too much repetition and backtracking sealed the deal on this game not getting my recommendation any time soon.
Alternatively is it a question of the audience and how some parts of it have more free time than others? If you happen to be one of those lucky people with ample free time, would your take on this be radically different from my time-poor self? Having checked out the Eurogamer review on this game, it's take is that the game is overly generous with its content which is certainly one way of putting it even if it's largely making the same point. There's not enough game to justify the duration of it.
A thorny issue to be sure, modern games for the most part are pretty generous with their content. Vying for the precious disposable income of their consumers, game developers and publishers seem to have spent most of the past decade engaged in overcompensating for the anxiety that such money may go elsewhere. The scale and scope of modern AAA gaming has crept up to the point that most new releases are major time investments requiring dozens of hours to complete if they don't happen to crack the hundred hour mark when you add in all the extra lashings of content.
Putting aside the MMO's and considering only those games with a definitive beginning and end, is this runtime a good thing? Is it mainly a problem for bloated open world experiences and not much else? Do you really count all the extra sidequests and collectibles in a game's total playtime? Sure there are outliers which will justify a huge time investment but are they the exception to the rule?
In the case of Mercenary Kings, there's an extra wrinkle in the time chart. It was a Kickstarter funded game after all and so perhaps there was extra pressure imposed on the developers from within to justify all that sweet pre-emptive investment. Maybe it was mandatory on account of some Kickstarter goals or maybe they just wanted to get as much game out there as they could in response to the goodwill garnered by fans. A lukewarm critical reception upon its release was somewhat improved by the release of the Reloaded update in 2018 and clearly there was a desire to pack it as full of content as they could, but did this make it a better game all said and done? I don't know.
Maybe it's a sign of video gaming as a relatively young medium compared to literature and film that it's struggling with this question at all. Far as I'm aware there is no magic formula for the duration of films and books either. Just good old gut instinct for the story being told and how long it takes to tell it. Maybe gaming will get to that point where brevity, where appropriate, becomes the norm? Maybe brevity will remain the preserve of lower budget indie gaming? Maybe, much like the games I'm referring to, this post has already gone on too long as well?
Catch you next time.
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