Frank Johnson: Another casualty of the next-gen war
As a generation of young'uns raised with video games matures into full-fledge adults and starts careers, their expendable income harkens back to the toys of their youth, which have grown up and matured alongside them.
Developing along with this rising demand for broader gaming options has been a rush by developers and electronics companies to fill the market with the necessary supply.
Fundamental economics teaches that this creates an atmosphere rife with competition and that such fierce feuding raises quality and lowers price.
Although I am no economist, I have observed a significant flaw in this free-market free-for-all. If you take a peak around the Internet these days, you will notice a rising trend among top-reviewed games. It seems the average length of the single-player campaign mode for most games has fallen to dangerously low levels, coming in at a measly six to 10 hours.
In contrast, the price of a next-gen game has increased from $50 to $60 on average. Where has all the time gone?
Less Bang for Your Buck
In days of yore, if the single-player aspect of a game didn't please the consumer, then the product was in significant trouble. No online mode could exist to redeem an unfulfilling solo experience.
The kind of split-screen multiplayer that was standard then didn't have the depth the Internet offers.
As solo campaigns have had to bear less and less of the brunt of a game's appeal, developers have shifted their focus to other components.
Given that a developer's time and resources are all too finite, modern publishers are given a hard decision about how much to spend where. "Warhawk" stands out as a great example. The original game came out as a launch title for the first PlayStation console and featured air combat almost as exciting as the Sega classic "Urban Strike."
"Warhawk" consisted of a campaign spread across six levels that engaged the player against the evil megalomaniac Kreel and his sinister plot to use a substance called "Red Mercury" to render his army nigh-invulnerable. I can attest from personal experience that these six levels had a difficulty curve that upped the gameplay time well above 10 hours.
Although the game was not extraordinary in its critical or commercial success, Sony opted to remake the game as a title for the PlayStation 3 and begin pushing it as one of their "killer apps."
The game's development quickly become convoluted and the subject of much criticism and speculation. Instead of continuing the fight against the dastardly Kreel and his minions, developer Incognito choose to ditch the single-player game entirely, presumably out of a fear that they would be unable to craft a decent solo or multiplayer experience with the resources they had allocated for the project.
The game was released in late August to mostly positive marks, but some critics complained about the $40 price tag (which included a headset) and wondered if the game had enough meat without a campaign mode.
That particular question remains open to debate, but it is certainly disheartening to watch a flagship game see its viability sliced in half.
The Plot Shortens
More disturbing, however, is the trend being established by truly blockbusters games such as "Halo 3" and "Heavenly Sword."
Both Sony and Microsoft have touted these games as epic, cinematic and engrossing experiences. But is said adventure really larger-than-life when you can polish off the experience in the space of one dedicated evening?
Games like these spend up to three years in development, furious development at that, but as a consumer, I can't help but feel slightly insulted that three years of hard work on their part and $60 on mine boils down to only several hours of game time.
Now, in my opinion, one of the things that makes something like, say, "Lord of the Rings," "epic" is that the story is about 1,500 pages long, not counting all the numerous appendixes or the ponderous "Similarion." Of course, that isn't length for length's sake, but instead helps Tolkien's world have the breadth and scope to be quite immersive.
Thus, a pitfall of the power of next-gen technology emerges.
As programmers focus more and more on making sure their blades of grass look better than the next guy's, a trade-off occurs. While said grass may look gorgeous, there is suddenly a lot less of it.
Because of this growing trend along with rapid consumer demand, developers are forced to package an online multiplayer experience along with the original product. In some cases, this can limit the quality of both aspects and limits the creativity of game creators by forcing them to always think within a certain paradigm.
Time Equals Money
Perhaps my 22 years doesn't make me quite as youthful as I would imagine, and the idea of a long, drawn-out and engrossing single player experience is splintering among the various modes of play, both online and off, that continue to crop up as the capability of consoles explodes.
A generation of teenagers raised on three-minute YouTube segments and the fast-paced comedy of "Robot Chicken" may not have the attention span for the kind of experience that I enjoyed.
Still, not all the money is in the melting pot quite yet. The most recent stand-alone, single-player game to deliver on the promise of an epic solo experience is "Resident Evil 4," which had a 20-hour-plus story mode and a boatload of extra missions and modes.
As a result, RE4 became one of the most popular games for last-gen consoles and pushed millions of copies across a variety of platforms. If next-gen developers are looking for success in gaming's brave new world, perhaps they should take a lesson from their predecessors.
Frank Johnson is the Lake Sun's senior next-generation console gaming war correspondent.