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Comment by proverbialbunny | Hacker News Reader

Is that why games have gotten shorter? I'm from the NES - PS1 era of gaming where games would regularly take 60+ hours to play through.

FFVII is still one of my all time favorites and is a good example of that. I think the first real fast game I played through was Metal Gear Solid. I'd rent, then buy if I liked it back then, and I played through all of Metal Gear Solid in something like 2 or 3 days. It was the first game I enjoyed that I did not buy, because I beat it while renting it.

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It seems to me that you're mostly talking about RPGs. I can't think of any NES-PS1 platforming/shooter/action games that had 60 hours worth of content.

If you look at today's RPGs, they're still _really long_. It is expected that most players who play Persona 5 Royal will take over 100 hours to complete it, which is pretty wild considering it's not a 'grinding game'--players aren't taking that long because they're fighting the same enemies repeatedly hoping for a rare item to appear. There really is 100 hours' worth of contents.

FFVII was used as an example because the re-release is 3 games, and each game is considered long for today's standards.

They're adding a ton of content, though.

I think there's a bit of bias in the games you played. There have been externalities affecting game design since the NES.

Early NES games were modeled (or ported) after arcades, which incentivized you to put in a quarter, play a handful of minutes, then put in a quarter to continue. This didn't translated well at home. So game designs moved away from that format.

When movie rental places started offering games (late NES early SNES days) they started making games take longer than a rental period to beat (2-3 days). One well known example is the monkey puzzle in the Lion King game [1]. I distinctly remember renting NES games and beating them in a few days before returning them. Specifically, one of the later Mega Man games. Granted, I owned other Mega Man games so I was familiar with the format. I still would have loved to play that game over and over, but I only rarely was able to buy games.

[1] https://www.thegamer.com/lion-king-remaster-monkey-level-con...

When console games started selling for $59.99 (or more), I found it difficult to justify purchasing most single player games unless they really were jaw-droppingly amazing because the hours to dollars ratio started becoming very low.

Meanwhile a multiplayer game - whether it be a MMORPG or a FPS, would net you countless hours of entertainment.

> When console games started selling for $59.99 (or more)

So last century? Big single player 16 bit games were $80usd (e.g. Phantasy Star II) and $59.99 was not unusual for run of the mill licensed or sports games.

https://i.redd.it/ikerxbqipf821.jpg

It's amazing that 59.99 survived as a standard price for games as long as it did.

People look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them 59.99 for a game is a bargain compared to the amount of value you get with modern titles. I remember buying Nintendo and Sega games for the same price. Magazines only covered the biggest games, so the most informed you could be as a consumer is based on how cool the box art was, and most could be finished in an afternoon once you figured out the cheap mechanics designed to force you to start over.

> Meanwhile a multiplayer game - whether it be a MMORPG or a FPS, would net you countless hours of entertainment.

Not always. Consider that there are now so many the pool of potential co-players is spread among many. And servers don't stay up forever. As a patient gamer I usually miss the first wave. Then you're at a big disadvantage in skill or level.

And frankly there are so many jerks online that I prefer single player even if it means moving on to other games more often.

We're obviously remembering different NES games.

The NES games I remember could generally be beaten in no more than an hour, if you knew how to actually do it without dying 1000 times.

A good warpless speedrun time on Super Mario Brothers is about 19 minutes.

If warps are allowed, it's under 5.

Legend of Zelda? 27 minutes

Ninja Gaiden? 12 minutes

It's a bit absurd going off of speed runs is a way to accurately identify a game's normal play length.

I think all the games I had were 60+ hours, but I just liked JRPGs more than most genres.

FFVIII was picked not only because it was one of my favorites (FF1 too, SMB3, ...), because the remake today has turned it into 3 games, and even then those 3 games seem long by today's standards.

There's a bit of difference between an NES and as PSX, which came out a full 2 generations and 12 years later.

The NES didn't have any way of saving, for instance.

The two have about much in common as a PSX and an Xbox1.

Most NES games had a way of saving, except the earliest NES games.

Most of them had codes you'd type in that was a save point. Many had actual save states on the cartridge.

The earlier games got around not having a code by having a secret early on the game that was revealed later on in the game so you could skip all of the parts you previously played.

I wouldn't consider codes a save. They often loss state.

Basically just an encoding of "start at level X with Y lives". Maybe not even lives.

There were only 54 NES releases with actual, battery based saves, out of 716 officially released and licensed titles (and heaven knows how many bootlegs).

So, "most" is an overbid.

Well, most of the ones I wanted to play at least. ^_^

Zelda II the Adventure of Link had a save feature. I thought Kirby's dreamland did as well. There were a number of games that had save files although of course many did not include the needed hardware on their carts.

FWIW, the SNES also had no storage, and saves were in the carts. Not until the N64 did Nintendo ship a device with fungible, non-cart storage.

To be noted the famous term "Nintendo hard", which indeed... doesn't indicate that Nintendo games would be typically finished quickly (at least, without considerable skill) :-)

Interestingly, based on the Wikipedia page¹, the historical difficulty of the Nintendo games is quite nuanced.

¹=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard

What games do you play these days?

I have the opposite experience - I feel buried in 60+ hour games I want to play and feel like games could be shorter.

Yep, they were pretty short, and a lot of them had no save feature so had to be finished in one sitting (unless your parents let you leave it running and just unhook the coax cable so they could watch TV). I remember going to a local game store that would let you try out used games in the store to verify that they worked, and I actually beat a game at the store.

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