A Short Order

It seems like The Order: 1886 has caused quite a bit of a stir lately. I haven't played it, but here's a review from Giantbomb where they play the game (41 minutes, no transcript, but there is a text review as well).

The Order is set in a fantastical, but somewhat grounded alternate take on Britain in 1886. In this timeline, the order of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table still holds sway as men and women who have found ways to extend their lifespans to hundreds of years. Or, at least, that's the implication. In this take, the knights of this order are battling the half-breeds--Lycans, to be specific. That's fancy talk for "werewolf," in case you didn't know. To battle this threat, they'll use a lot of standard video game weaponry, like an array of pistols, a few rifles, and some more "science" weapons, like a lightning-launching arc gun or a piece that fires thermite dust at targets only to ignite said dust with a launched flare, burning your targets where they stand.

The issue with the game seems to stem from the fact that it's about 5 hours long.... with roughly 3 hours of cutscenes. And a generous helping of everyone' favourite game mechanic - QTE (Quick Time Events, a.k.a. press X to Jason (where you have to press buttons in time in order to perform certain actions)). Despite the short length of gameplay, the game retails at what I assume will be full price (it's listed at $60 in the US, so who knows what kind of crazy price it'll have over here). The reviewers in the video said that even the parts of the game where you do get to play are very repetitive. It's the same QTEs over and over again.

Someone at work asked the question, "Is it really that bad that the game is short? Especially if people are informed of the fact beforehand, which anyone with an Internet connection should be."

Personally, I would have felt incredibly ripped off if I had paid $75+ for a game that was only 5 hours long (I picked $75 because that's roughly the AUD value of the USD at the moment. :( ). That probably stems from my childhood, where my siblings and I didn't have any pocket money, so any games we had were birthday/Christmas presents, or by convincing our Dad that he wanted the game (which wasn't that easy other than first party Nintendo games). So we chose our games carefully. This was before the days of extensive game reviews, so that meant sometimes our choices weren't all that great, and we ended up with a dud of a game that wasn't all that fun, or only lasted a day or so. It was so disappointing, because it would be a long wait until the next game. So we valued replay-value quite highly.

There's also the tough competition out these days. From the free-to-play games, to the cheap phone games, to the amazing discounts you can get from buying a digital copy of the game through Steam or Greenman Gaming, $75 could buy you a lot of enjoyment. I bought Plants vs Zombies for $9.99 and have 94 hours of gameplay logged (although some of that is just idling with the Zen garden). In my mind, I kind of equate $10 to 2 hours, because that's a cost of a movie ticket, and a movie is roughly 2 hours. That's why when I look at game purchases, I look at how much entertainment I'll get out of it, including how much time I'm likely to get from it. If a game looks like it'll have a low replay-vale, then it really drops a lot in my eyes. Games that are more "Hey, I want to do something new", like Papers, Please, will modify my judgement call, but overall, it's a cost-benefit judgement for me.

May not be the best way to think about whether a game is worth buying, but that's my approach. Though I have been leaning towards just buying games that sound interesting, since I have more money than time these days, and I'm not losing a huge amount by spending $15 on a cool sounding game. Which is why buying a short game these days doesn't bother me as much as it used to.

One of the arguments in favour of the game is that it shouldn't matter if it's short if it's also amazing. I understand the argument, but a game would have to be really, really good. I was dubious about To the Moon, which MrMan5.5 tried to get me to play for a very long time. I clocked 4 hours in it, and I felt some of it was very repetitive, but the story was really good, and I'm happy that I bought it. Based on the Giantbomb review, I don't think The Order is going to fit the bill. Being a short game isn't itself bad, but being a short game with a high buying price, while not being that great isn't good.

A game that I have played, that fits the whole not very long, QTE and cutscenes game is Heavy Rain (where "Press X to Jason" comes from). Admittedly, I bought that game heavily discounted. This game is almost exclusively QTEs (I say almost, because there are some parts of the game where you have a long time to react - or at least it seems that way). I think the game was marketed more as an interactive movie, rather than a game-game, so I wasn't disappointed in that aspect at all. I really enjoyed the story, and the QTE aspect of it wasn't incredibly repetitive, i.e. it wasn't just the same thing over and over again. Also, the game did a really great job of sucking me into it, making me feel like I was all the characters that I was playing as. And not that I really took advantage of it, as one play through was enough for me, but you could get different endings to the story based on various choices you make throughout the game.

The difference for me, is that Heavy Rain never tried to disguise what it was, and so I felt like I got what I paid for. I don't really like the argument that if you do your own research, then you deserve whatever you get. Especially when you consider that some people pre-ordered the game. Someone has to suck it up and play it first, so if everyone just waited for reviews, then you'd probably only have game journalists reviewing things, and given the events that transpired last year, can we really be sure that they're giving an honest review of the game? I don't know if Giantbomb is legit, but they do provide the games database that Twitch uses, so they're doing something nice.

All in all, I don't mind that here are short games out there, as long as they're not trying to deceive you of the fact. If they're short and they're charging you a lot of money, then they'd better be really interesting.