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Eloquent Conversationalist
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 Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 12:45 pm
You know how you get a movie, and it's all 'THIS MOVEH IS 157 MINUTES LONG!'
It's nice to know, right? You know how much of your time is being taken up by watching this movie. AND IT'S RIGHT ON THE BOX.
Now with games... You have no idea how long the general gameplay will take, there's not 'This game takes a casual gamer about 3 hours on the first playthrough'. Nope.
You don't even get a hint!
I say games should have an EBT (Estimated Beat Time), That way, when you rent a game, you know 'well hai, if this game as an EBT of 5 hours, and I have nothing else to do tonight... I only need this game for one night!' etc.
What do you think?
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Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 1:06 pm
Weird, but it would be good.
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Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 1:43 pm
Is the EBT the amount of time it takes to beat the game, or get 100% completion? Which sidequests get factored in, and how are they determined? What about games with several difficulty levels? What about New Game+, especially when it's something like TWEWY and doesn't require starting a new file? What if the game spends a lot of time loading? There are things like these that would cause problems for figuring out an EBT. That said, it'd be a nice feature and I would like to know roughly how long a game will take me to beat.
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Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 1:49 pm
An estimated time gameplay time is a bad thing to put on a game. Some reviews have estimated gameplay hours, the last one I read was for Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. It said it had 300 horus of gameplay, I mastered it in under 150 hours. So, they're terribly done and how can you estimate something like that? =/ People would depend on something that varies too often.
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Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 3:09 pm
A lot of times it differs from person to person.
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Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 3:13 pm
Teh AK A lot of times it differs from person to person. Yeah, but say they got an average time. Then you'd soon develop an instinctive "Oh, I finish games on averaged an hour less then the standard time."
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Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 3:59 pm
If you beat it in less than the EBT you'd feel like a f*****t.
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Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 4:44 pm
It's a nice idea on paper, but I think it would be really difficult to do well.
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Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 7:23 pm
Zephyrkitty Is the EBT the amount of time it takes to beat the game, or get 100% completion? Which sidequests get factored in, and how are they determined? What about games with several difficulty levels? What about New Game+, especially when it's something like TWEWY and doesn't require starting a new file? What if the game spends a lot of time loading? There are things like these that would cause problems for figuring out an EBT. That said, it'd be a nice feature and I would like to know roughly how long a game will take me to beat.
You don't see a movie telling you the time length of the ads, included or excluded. Or if the time length given on the back of the box is with or without deleted scenes.
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Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 8:22 pm
Syn Angellus Zephyrkitty Is the EBT the amount of time it takes to beat the game, or get 100% completion? Which sidequests get factored in, and how are they determined? What about games with several difficulty levels? What about New Game+, especially when it's something like TWEWY and doesn't require starting a new file? What if the game spends a lot of time loading? There are things like these that would cause problems for figuring out an EBT. That said, it'd be a nice feature and I would like to know roughly how long a game will take me to beat.
You don't see a movie telling you the time length of the ads, included or excluded. Or if the time length given on the back of the box is with or without deleted scenes.For a New Game+, sure. It's not too difficult to separate the game pre- and post-end credits. This applies to some extent with loading screens, as well (although you can't skip loading screens the way you can skip ads). But knowing how sidequests factor into the EBT would be nice, especially considering how many sidequests some games have, the fact that part/all of some will be required to beat the game, or they won't be essential but a lot of gamers will still finish them for some other reason. On a tangent, I was looking at a few games at the store a couple of hours ago, and one of them mentioned something about "40+ hours of gameplay" on the back. So EBTs on games do exist, they're just very vague and not very common.
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Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 9:50 pm
Perhaps an average might help.
Of course, they'd work best with no side quests or anything. So it'd be like "EBA 10 hours" and you'd know that that's just the main story line. If you do sidequests, then you know that it'll be higher. If you speed run, you know it'll be less.
INTERESTING IDEA KUZO!
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Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 12:32 pm
Good and bad at the same time
People would look at the box and say "oh its to short" and won't but it cause they think they'll beat it fast but when you buy it you have no way in knowing and you play it and see how long it takes.
But still it would be a pretty cool idea
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Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 1:54 pm
smells like fail spirit
then you'd get Asians and fat guys with no lives screaming "EYE BEET THIZ GAYM EN TOO OWERS THO THA EBT SEZ SICKS!!"
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Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 9:20 pm
Companies are in it for the money and would probably never opt into this unless it was mandatory. It would hurt business because games with low EBTs wouldn't sell as well as they would without it being displayed.
So hypothetically, this would only happen if the console companies made it mandatory, and the only company I can see even remotely thinking about doing something like that is Nintendo.
Also, it would be very hard to determine. Your analogy is movie run-times, but those are concrete and unchangeable. Game time isn't.
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Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 11:01 pm
This isn't a bad idea, but I'd rather not have it.
It would let you know about how much of a game you have left, or if it's inaccurate(or accurate) it could make you feel like the game was too long or short.
However, it would raise the competition. People might practice to get below the EBT. I feel competition is good. smile
That also means, people might not fully enjoy the gameplay.(Try playing EB without talking to any NPC's, it's not the same.)
Finally, companies would have to figure out what to base it on and spend extra time figuring out that number, which would make games take longer to come out.
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