Can A Game Be Too Big?

[dlevere]

By Ben Reeves



We're nearing the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which looks awesome, but I'm also intimidated by the idea of playing through such a massive beast of a game. Do you think that a game can get too big, that a game can get to the point that it hurts the quality of the title?

When I was younger, I used to love the idea of diving into a game that was so massive it took months to beat, but as I've gotten older, I've found that I have less and less time to give to demanding games.

It's a tale as old as time, I know, but I first started to feel like a game was too big for me when I was playing Skyrim, and now I'm staring down at the Witcher 3, and I'm wondering if I have what it takes to commit to that game? I remember playing Dragon Age: Inquisition and thinking that I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it didn't force me to complete a certain amount of side quests before opening up the next main story mission.

What about you? Do you think that long games are usually better? Do you think that developers who are trying to make a long game sometimes fill it with so much content that it can hurt the overall quality of the product? Could some longer games be better if they were trimmed down a bit?

[bungholio]

Yeah, games can be too big. People like exploring, some consider it a challenge and they will explore every inch. Then you get things that randomly generate new areas and whatever else. They get too big, and kind of annoying. It would be amazing if they made it big but something so awesome you'd really want to explore, unlike minecraft's generated junk.

[MathUser]

Yes, games can get to big. I like smaller games now. I kinda don't want to commit to really long games most of the time.

[ReyVGM]

If you lack time or if you just want to finish a game, then yes, games can be too big.

But if you're the type of person that only plays one game, or a few select games, then no game is too big.

Wouldn't you have loved if Final Fantasy 6 or Zelda A Link To The Past or Chrono Trigger were a lot bigger and longer? Even if it's post-game content. We would have devoured that back then.

[xirtamehtsitahw]

Pokemon is a very commonly-touted example of a game getting too big. The first generation of games had you catch "only" 150 Pokemon (not counting Mew, who was insanely difficult to get outside of the ever-popular GameShark). Nowadays, however, there are over 700 unique Pokemon (not counting the countless alternate formes and Mega-evolutions).

If you want to talk sheer SIZE of the game (as in how many gigabytes it takes up on your console's hard drive), then look no further than the average PS4 or XBox One game--those suckers are easily 40 GIGABYTES each! Compare that to the original game which relaunched the video game industry in America, Super Mario Bros. At only 40 KILOBYTES in size, it is one-MILLIONTH the size of one of today's monstrous pieces of interactive eye candy.

[ReyVGM]

No one is actually talking about disc size, it's about the game world size.

Pokemon is not too big. Just because it has 700 monsters does not mean the game is too big. It has a lot of pokemons yes, but that's like saying Final Fantasy 6 is too big because it has over 500 items.
Pokemons are pretty much weapons/items/armor into one, and there are plenty of RPGs (even old), that surpass the amount of current pokemons.

[Demonic722]

If you lack time or if you just want to finish a game, then yes, games can be too big.

This. If you're a young gamer, you probably have ample time to devote to games. I'm sure their views vs the older gamers with busy lives will have different opinions on this subject.

[xirtamehtsitahw]

This. If you're a young gamer, you probably have ample time to devote to games. I'm sure their views vs the older gamers with busy lives will have different opinions on this subject.

This. I had a hard enough time, about 15 years ago or so, completing the Pokedex on Pokemon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition. And that was when there were only 150 monsters to catch! Imagine the sheer difficulty I would have trying to complete the Pokedex on a third- or fourth-generation game, let alone one of today's sixth-generation titles.

I do applaud Nintendo for constantly trying to find new ways to give people more and more incentive to complete the ever-expanding Pokedex, but it's getting to the point where a lot of gamers are simply put off by the sheer number of monsters you have to collect in recent games. IMO, once the number of Pokemon surpassed 400 (ergo, the fourth-generation games), it became too much of a chore to track ALL of them down.

Even the number of Legendary Pokemon has become ridiculous. There are at least FIFTY of them now, not just five, as was true in the first games. And, besides, the fifth Legendary, Mew, was so hard to get that owning one legitimately was grounds for jealous glares from your friends (Hey! How'd you get Mew? I don't have her! That's so UNFAIR!).

Nowadays, pretty much every Legendary Pokemon (apart from Hoopa and Volcanion--Diancie has been released) can be accessed by nearly everyone. They're not as special anymore (and they're usually banned from most tournaments anyway, so they spend most of their miserable existence crammed into a PC box).

[final kaoss]

This. I had a hard enough time, about 15 years ago or so, completing the Pokedex on Pokemon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition. And that was when there were only 150 monsters to catch! Imagine the sheer difficulty I would have trying to complete the Pokedex on a third- or fourth-generation game, let alone one of today's sixth-generation titles.

I do applaud Nintendo for constantly trying to find new ways to give people more and more incentive to complete the ever-expanding Pokedex, but it's getting to the point where a lot of gamers are simply put off by the sheer number of monsters you have to collect in recent games. IMO, once the number of Pokemon surpassed 400 (ergo, the fourth-generation games), it became too much of a chore to track ALL of them down.

Even the number of Legendary Pokemon has become ridiculous. There are at least FIFTY of them now, not just five, as was true in the first games. And, besides, the fifth Legendary, Mew, was so hard to get that owning one legitimately was grounds for jealous glares from your friends (Hey! How'd you get Mew? I don't have her! That's so UNFAIR!).

Nowadays, pretty much every Legendary Pokemon (apart from Hoopa and Volcanion--Diancie has been released) can be accessed by nearly everyone. They're not as special anymore (and they're usually banned from most tournaments anyway, so they spend most of their miserable existence crammed into a PC box).

I remember so many years ago in the early 2000's I had a Prima Guide or some other kind of guide at the time and a pokemon game, forget which one. I spent almost all night wide awake and actually caught them in one sitting, all with the help of the guide and a secondary pokemon game/gameboy.

[xirtamehtsitahw]

To catch all 150 Pokemon in a single sitting isn't that Farfetch'd nowadays (sorry, had to throw a pun in there), considering that speed runs of less than 3 hours to catch all 150 Pokemon and beat the Elite 4, then collect Mewtwo have been done numerous times. To do so, however, you have to pretty much know every single square inch of all the game's numerous rooms, caves, tunnels and gyms, so as to know the absolute shortest path to take in each case, as well as exactly what Pokemon will appear where (and which ones you have to trade for).

Needless to say, even a first-generation Pokemon speed run isn't for the faint of heart. Don't even get me started on the whole Nuzlocke craze...Kaizo Pokemon just ISN'T my thing...heh heh.

[Pyriel]

"Too big" is rather a hard thing to pin down. If it's strictly time commitment, then virtually anything can be too big for an obsessive completion-ist. Personally, I'd say Skyrim doesn't qualify generally, because you have the option of playing very little of that game if you prefer. Just setup a Nord warrior with a two-handed sword, pick up a follower, and blow right through the main storyline. If you need to see absolutely everything to feel like you played the game, that's your lookout. On the other hand, if you're looking for quality, the game is loaded with bugs both in the engine and within the scripting and data, so that's a strike. Many of the quests are of the, "fetch two bear claws, four ice wraith teeth, and a deathbell". Why? Because the lady who wants them will give you a ring with +15% to Alchemy. So there's a ding on quality of game content.

I'm with ReyVGM for the most part. If A Link to the Past or Final Fantasy IV, V, VI or VII had been a lot longer, I would have loved it. Extra continents with more sidequests and espers, whatever you want to throw in.

One thing I'm not a big fan of is challenge dungeons and challenge missions, at least when they ratchet up the difficulty to full annoying. It took me three tries to actually play Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days from start to finish, and one of the primary features is a ridiculous challenge mission system where you replay story missions with frustrating conditions. A lot of items and upgrades are hidden behind it, including the best weapon upgrade. That can't be unlocked until the post game, and you have to do all the challenges of one type perfectly to get it. What's the bloody point? The mission conditions are things like "don't miss", which if you've been upgrading your skills is almost assured to happen, especially when your character learns to dual wield, as he tends to miss with the offhand blade after a kill. You can miss once in the hardest mission of that type, and after that you lose ranks. It's the last or second to last story mission's challenge, so it's impossible to not dual wield in it, which leaves you trying to gimp your character so that everything dies in an even number of hits. Then at the end of it, you fight probably the hardest boss in the game, so the designers were basically trolling 99% of the players with that requirement. They do that kind of garbage in every game in the series. It always kind of sucks, but people talk about it so much, and certain types of gamers will spend large amounts of time devising perfect strategies, that Square seems to think they're being praised for innovation and just keeps right on doing it.

Days also had this thing where every damn enemy had enough hit points that they took 50-60 hits to kill unless you had enough MP to exploit an elemental weakness. In the weakness case, it might only take 2-4, and then your MP ran out after killing maybe 10% of the enemies on the map. Enemies also disappear and respawn if they wander too far from where they spawned, so you'd be 40 hits in, and the enemy would decide it wanted a do-over. I don't recall them repeating that nonsense as a way to make battles epic. Unless you count FFXII and its 5 million HP bosses where you'd set up your gambits and let the game masturbate for like three hours while you checked periodically, so you could get things started again if the party leader croaked from an instant death attack, and that stupid "choose a new leader" prompt had popped up.

So yeah, if making your game bigger or your enemies bigger or whatever just means upping whatever numbers in the laziest way possible, it's quite easy to make a game too big.