Josef Fares, the Swedish filmmaker collaborating with Starbreeze to create the upcoming downloadable adventure Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, has strongly criticized the excessive running times of numerous games.
“I sense that many games have reached a point where it feels like three to four hours could easily be subtracted,” Fares told Eurogamer. “If you play Max Payne 3, after one hour, you’ve essentially experienced the entire game. They merely change the setting. I adore Rockstar, but come on!”
Brothers, a fairy tale-themed game in which you control two characters as they seek a cure for their father’s illness, is expected to last between three and four hours. By many modern standards, this runtime might be regarded as relatively short.
“Brothers is the antithesis of those games – everything you see occurs only once. It’s a three or four hour game. We could have made it ten hours if we desired, but it’s crucial to maintain the player’s curiosity and keep them on a journey.
“Why should we inquire about the length of a game? The question should be whether it’s a good or bad game, not how long it is. This game is precisely as long as it needs to be. Whether it’s 20 hours or one hour, it doesn’t matter.
“Who cares about getting value for money? You never question how long a movie is – people say they spend this money and they want to get value for their time. But getting value for your time means if I have three truly excellent hours, that’s value for my time. Then I can move on to do something else. It’s not about replaying ten hours of rubbish.”
Starbreeze’s Brothers has already been compared to Journey, another downloadable game that achieved success and also dared to be concise. “People talk about Journey being short,” Fares said. “It’s not a negative thing to be short if it’s powerful. In many ways, Journey is longer than all the other games out there because it remains with you – perhaps not when you’re holding the controller, but it lingers in your mind.”
