Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons dev aiming for quality over quantity
Swedish filmmaker turned game developer Josef Fares has been questioning the modern focus on how long a game is.
Fares has been working on Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons with Riddick and Syndicate studio Starbreeze and reckons that there is something to be said for the quality of gaming experience being produced.
"I feel many games have come to a certain point where you feel that you could have taken away three to four hours easily," began Fares. "If you play Max Payne 3, after one hour you've played the whole game. They just only change the setting. I love Rockstar, but what?"Why should we ask how long a game is? The question should be is it a good game or a bad game, not how long it is. This game is as long as it has to be. If it's 20 or one, it doesn't matter.
"Who cares about value for money? You never question how long a movie was - people say they put this money down and they want value for their time. But value for your time is if I get three really good hours, that's value for my time. Then I can do something else. It's not that I replay ten hours of sh*t," Fares added.
"Brothers is the opposite to those games," he went on. "Everything you see, it happens only once. It is a three or four hour game. We could have made it ten hours if we wanted, but it's important to keep the player curious, and on a journey. People talk about Journey being short. It's not a bad thing to be short if it's strong. In many ways, Journey is longer than all the games out there because it's with you - maybe not when you're with the controller, but it stays with you."
Thanks Eurogamer.