A YouTuber under the account “PlayMeThrough” posted a play-through video of the newly released PS4 game, The Order: 1886. The game is a single-player action-adventure game that takes you through an alternate reality London where an ancient order battles half-human, half-beast monsters. Sounds like fun to me! It took PlayMeThrough about five hours to complete the game. He also noted that about half the game was made up of cutscenes and half of it was gameplay.
“Not much replayability. You can’t level up any skills or anything and there is no New Game+. And you cannot skip cutscenes either, so it would be the exact same experience I’m afraid. Pretty much the only side thing you can do is looking for collectibles, but that’s it. No challenges or whatever.” – PlayMeThrough
The game costs $60 and I would suspect a video game consumer would be pretty upset they could get through a game of that caliber in that amount of time, especially when a large part of it is just watching cutscenes. At this point, I would love to show you the video of the play-through…but this gent’s YouTube account has been deleted. That might have to do with him releasing over five hours of game footage before the game is even released on February 20.
But hang on! Forbes’ Erik Kain writes that The Order: 1886 will take you much longer than five hours to complete, especially if PlayMeThrough was just gunning through it. Kain mentions that people were playing through Dark Souls in a half hour while he has over 100 hours logged on the game. The point is that the content is there. You won’t run out of things to do after five hours.
“Other gamers who have played the game are reporting anywhere from eight to fifteen hours. This sounds much closer to my own experience.” – Erik Kain, Forbes
The point is, a game’s length doesn’t matter. It’s what you do with your time in the game that makes it valuable and worth playing. Sure, you could blast through Skyrim and stay on the main quest the whole time, skip the civil war quest line and be “done” with the game much, much sooner than most players. But who does that? I want to explore the world from corner to corner until there’s nothing left to find!
Ru Weerasuriya, CEO of the game developer Ready at Dawn, talks about why game length doesn’t matter:
“I hope people who do like these kind of games, do play them. But I also want to be in an industry where me as a gamer, I’m given the choice to do that. I’ve played games that lasted two hours that were better than games that I played for 16 hours. That’s the reality of it.”
See? A game that lasts a shorter amount of time can be just as pleasing. No one needs to feel insecure about how long their game lasts. Everyone’s games will get played. You just have to find the right gamer and fill their needs…with gameplay. It’s really crazy how the community is blowing up about game length and if it matters.