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So just how long do you need to play a game in order to have a valid opinion about it?
Jimmy_Scythe
Member CommonPosts: 3,586
As I find myself currently unemployed, I'm gearing up to take on a free trial as a full time endeavor. Unless I get a call back or actually find a job, of course.
Anyway, in preperation for my MMORPG binge I've stumbled upone a rather interesting question. Just how long do you need to devote to a game to give it a fair shake? I kind of recall a conversation I had years ago regarding Final Fantasy VII. I had a friend that liked the game, but I just couldn't get into it. Then he asked how long I had played it. "Three Hours straight," I replied only to invoke mocking laughter spiked with nerd rage.
But If you're still not having fun with a single player game after three hours, why in the hell would you want to stay with it longer? You run into the same question when offering an opinion on MMORPGs. If you put in 20 hours, some douche will respond with "well, you didn't get to the end game and that's were it really shines!" My reply to that is then: "So why didn't they just make the whole game like the end game and call it a day?" The other douche response to play time is usually something snarky involving ADHD.
I have roughly 80 hours planned for this trial run. I have a feeling that many people would not consider that a fair assessment of an MMORPG even though that's two working weeks of game time. Or a month of game time if you only put in 20 hours a week. 80 hours is about the running length of most JRPGs. If I'm not having fun after that amount of time can I call it a bad game? Or am I just suffering from a "short" attention span? OR! are these kinds of arguments just lame, bullshit ways to defend MMORPGs from detractors that have reasonable points that most fanboys, and developers, don't want to address?
Comments
I play a game for an hour or so, if I'm not having fun in that hour I stop and uninstall.
I do this with almost any game, Aion and Eve, both uninstalled after the hour. It's not my job to make games fun, if they're boring, they're boring. I'm not going to keep playing an unfun game just to have a chance that they might be fun later on, well you should have put that fun part at the beginning then shouldn't you.
I think an hour of gameplay is fair to come to a conclusion for a player.
So.. what is your opinion of Morrowind? It is one of the best RPG ever, but for the first hour is somewhat "Meh", as you are a puny with almost defenless in a "alien" world.
The first hour in EVE don't ever cover the tutorial... There are complex games and easy games. If you stop after a hour, you will miss yourself these games that "open" after more than a hour. Games that have a strong "RvR" element will probably open after weeks of play. Games about Guild vs Guild... In a hour it will be hard for you to be in a fight Guild vs Guild. And these games are really fun. But he!... are your standars, so is ok to me.
i think an hour is a bit "meh" for most games, I would say at least 3 to 5 days. F2P 1 hour sounds about right but an over the counter game that has decent rateing deserves a bit more then a hour or 2. Thats just my honest opnion.
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I kinda like Morrowind, because in the first hour it gives atmosphere and I feel part of the world. I also like Gothic, even though it was a bit bugged.
You mention EVE, well I'm sorry but to even be able to play EVE you have to spend 3 hours+ reading a tutorial, I could have read the first book of Britannica's encyclopedia in that time. There's a limit to how long tutorials should take imo, EVE just doesn't cut it in that department for me.
For me, personally, it's not a matter of time but a matter of feeling. If the game fails to grasp me, I won't play it. It's different for all games. Sometimes I'll play for 10 minutes and realize that I will never be able to fully enjoy this game. Which is what happened when I tried Runes of Magic. Sometimes it may take a few days. Hell, it took me about a week, until I got to level 20 with my Ork Choppa to realize that WAR is not for me.
I don't agree with people who claim that you have to play an X amount of time before you can form a valid opinion about a game. For the most part, that is not true. Obviously there are exceptions but usually if the game doesn't feel right to me from the get go, I will never be able to enjoy it.
F2P - maybe a day to experience the lack of gameplay, or to at least verify that the game's real cash store isn't selling game breaking weapons/armor (cough* free realms*cough).
P2P - Maybe a few days to a week to at least get to lvl 10 with every toon choice.
I think there may be 2 different questions you are posing here. If a game is no fun to you, even from the first hour, then fine,don't play.
But if you want to tell everyone why game X is such a horrible game, you better put in more time. Because nobody wants to hear the opinion of someone who didn't review the whole product.
So, by all means, stop playing anything you don't like anytime you want. But please don't start bashing it on forums.
So you're saying that you need to play a game a certain amount of time before you can give an opinion?
But the opposite, namely overly positive 10 minute PREVIEWS (from this site in particular) of games, glorifying them like they're the next coming of Christ, is ok?
You can give an opinion about any game at any point you wish if you're a player, there's no conformity or predefined rule about how long you should or shouldn't play a game to do so.
And this leads to a new question: What is "the whole product" when it comes to MMORPGs? We're talking about a genre where less than one fourth of the population even gets to end game content. not to mention the fact that the content gets changed and updated constantly. If I had played the "whole" of World of Warcraft, for example, when it launched, would that be the same "whole" product after the last expansion?
14 hours a day for a year.
Then you can say you know what your talking about.
I would go with the whole "feel" thing also.
I got FFXI (my first MMO) and play'd it for around 2 weeks...but just couldn't get into it. so I put it down...about a month later a friend said I should try it again. and he'd help me out and what-not. And I did...and it is my most fav game ever. play'd for 2.5 years.
But then there is wizzard 101, installed it. liked the art...but once I realised that it was turn based, I uninstalled it.
Guildwars. play'd for about a month, maxed my dude. got some good gear. it was fun, but thats all I really wanted from that game. My bro has been playing it for around a year and a half now...
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So . . . you are asking for peoples' opinions on just how long you need to play a game in order to have an opinion about it . . .
If a game right of the bat bothers you, and you can't stand it, then don't play it. When people ask, say I just couldn't get into it. Otherwise you need to spend a decent chunk of time to learn the game. Kingdom Hearts II (not a MMO, but is an action RPG), has a 7 hour INTRO. That intro is rather amusing, but on the whole, also rather boring. I has ton of character and story development, but rather little action. Beyond that, the game is awesome. Sometimes there is a hump to get past and if you don't try to get over it, you won't see what is truly good nor bad about it.
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Im guessing this is aimed at the fans. It depends on what your final opinion on the game is.
If your opinion is:
positive - 10 minutes
negative - never
If your opinion is positive then you dont even need to play the game to have it be considered valid by fans. However, if your opinion is negative then there will always be another milestone that you have to reach to have a valid opinion.
If this is at aimed at the critics then reverse the above.
For me I give MMORPG's the first 10 levels... Yeah yeah everyone and their grandmother always asks, Did you even play past level 10, but my point is that if I'm not hooked by level 10 why should I continue.. And no, no I don't need top gear handed to me on a sliver platter level 10 and lower... But what I do need is to have fun, and if I'm not having fun by level 10, there's no point in NOT having fun for another 10+ levels, hell there's no point in NOT having fun for one more level.
it's pretty hard with mmos when they are based around shallow gameplay sort of measured out in stages. For instance, you can experience the start of mmo and already have a good idea what the rest of the game will be like, but you would not have say experienced say a particular aspect of it like the endgame.
How long does it take? It is inversely proportionality to the intelligence of the person.
Single player games = within a hour.
MMORPGames = within a few day's till a week. Often even more as I am into the community game and when I start I often start solo as the community has to settle down first and I like to get to know what I am doing, what my role is before I really enter the community game within a MMORPG. and can not base experiance on the community which is the heart of a MMORPG within a few hours, would only be able to get glimps of gameplay within a few hours, which is far to short to gain any experiance within a MMORPG as so many thing can or will change over time.
It's also due to the fact that often with most MMORPG the community feel starts to settle after the game has been out for some time, lets take a player driven economy, while some games offer them, all I see is ADHA or inpatient people complaining about how hte PRE is crap, while many simply do not understand something like that takes time, as I have seen countless of topics from just released games where people honostly where speaking about how crap the com. is, while we all know we can not judge a community in it's first month as often there are allot of freeloaders or people with minimal intrest to continue to the game.
Most of the time after 3/4 months you can get a good feel about a MMORPG, as by then the community is settled, meaning those who enjoy the game will continue playing, those who left will be out of your way.
MMORPG are just a very different beats when comparing experiance with the game, unfortunaly people think they can judge it the same as lets say a single player game, but when people do that it's pure because of their own playstyle, which shows they often not geared towards MMORPG playstyle's but pure solo play.
It takes a couple weeks to get in the swing of things for most MMOs in my experience. Unfortunately very few are able to hold interest these days beyond the first day or two because they're all so similar at the lower tutorial levels.
Really the only way to get into a MMO for me is if I read about it a lot first, get hyped up about reaching a certain point, and then work towards that. As opposed to just jumping into a MMO without any prior knowledge, which is almost always doomed to failure because all MMOs are boring tutorials to start with. If you don't have something to look forward to, and all you know is the lower levels, then you'll never move on.
Yeah, 10 levels might seem about right, but I didn't really enjoy WOW until after I had raised a Druid to 14 and still was "meh" and then switched to a Pally at launch and had a terrific time. (Eventually rolled a 60 Druid later). I had a Priest and I felt it was terrible until the late 20's, so if that had been my first character I'd have quit much sooner than I did. (Wait, that would have been a good thing)
DAOC, my first character was a Pally to level 6.... blah. 2nd character a Sorcerer to level 18, bleh. Then I rolled an infiltrator and found my niche, and played for 2.5 years. (and a lot of other characters).
EVE....saw people say they tried it for an hour and it sucked. Have seen posts by people who didn't get into it until after their 3rd or 4th trial. I think you have to give EVE a good long trial, and do lots of reading and research in the beginning to really enjoy the game.
I recall DDO online, I really tried to like that game, but pretty much as soon as I realized there was no game world, and I found myself standing outiside of a collection of dungeon instances LFG, I quit the game. Certainly didn't give it a fair shake at all.
Depends on each person, and I suspect I might have missed out on some fun game play (gave EQ about 15 mintues before quitting and playing Lineage 1 instead) by leaving the game too early, so now I try to research games first and give the a good shakedown
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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Frankly, if you don't like it in the first hour it's probably not that fun for you. As for the amount of time you should give a game, it really depends.
For Guild Wars, you really should give it to level 20, as the game's meat is the PvP, not the PvE. It's only fair to judge the game once you've played the entire selling point of the game :P
For Warhammer,playing to level 18 is sufficient enough I would think. By that time you've done keep takes and what not.
In the end, you want to play to the point where A) You're bored to tears,
You've the meat and main selling point of the game. Such as WAR's excellent PvP and GW's PvP. There are games like World of Warcraft where there is not real main selling point. I would give most games to about level 30.
As for something like EVE where it lacks levels and again, doesn't have one real main selling point that is advertised, just play until you think you hate it or love it. It's all personal opinion.
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For me personally its a matter of how the game plays or "feels". I have lower expectations of F2P games and have been pleasantly surprised by stuff like "Runes of Magic".
Other games, such as DDO I have tried to like (as an old skool AD&D pen and paper player) but was put off by the setting. Eberron just doesnt cut it for me.
WoW is where I started, till I hit the level cap and then moved on to Guild Wars and then LOTRO. Played most of the new stuff but by way of the trials, the only real game I hated was EVE, just couldnt really get into it. Have been told to re try and you need far more than the trial to get into it.
As for MMO's now, I thankfully have a lifetime subs package for LOTRO so can drop in and out at will. DDO IF it goes free in europe will no doubt re-install it. But these days spend more time playing online via console than PC.
As a final thought, dont let anyone tell you whats hor or whats not, use your own judgement. Opinions are like assholes, and as you can see on any MMO forum there are plenty of them 8)
Good luck finding a job too.
I have played a great deal of MMORPGs as well as a hell of a lot more solo computer RPGs, and I have owned a computer of one type or another (sometimes more than one at a time) for the last 30 years. With this amount of computer gaming experience, I can usually tell if I will like a game or not within 10 to 30 minutes. However, I often persevere with some of the ones I don't initially take to for maybe 2 to 3 hours, just in case I'm missing something. Invariably, my initial opinion was, at least for me and my purposes, correct.
I'll get a feeling about a MMO right from the update process to the splash screens on through character creation. If any of those particular things are done BADLY, it easily gives me a glimpse to the future and quality of the game. Lets face it, if you can't get those right, you've got some problems. I'll have a good or bad feeling about a MMO, just in how well my avatar controls; how the UI looks; where the buttons are placed; does it all make sense; whats the tutorial like if there is one; how well does the game run. Within the first couple of levels, the gameplay should reveal mostly all I need to know. If a game needs hours or days to give you a feel for it, thats a BADLY designed game. All the greatest games grip you almost instantly. Its like buying a house. You know from the minute you step into it, whether you're going to buy it or not.
There is no giving a game a chance anymore. I left that crap back in highschool 20 yrs ago;) If it doesn't grip me within the first few minutes, I rarely if ever ponder on hoping and waiting for it to get better. I don't have the time to waste. There is no "GETTING BETTER". Its either fun and interesting from the word go, or its not. I've played far too many games to need much time to know whats fun, whats well designed and whats lousy.
Basically if a MMO makes it past the first 10 minutes, I'll give it around an hour or so. If it doesn't grab me then... /uninstall. Seriously, if you can't make your MMO fun within an hour, you shouldn't be making games at all. If you expect me to read an instruction manual just to get started or to understand how to train a skill or use a map, you must be out of your flipping mind=)
I feel that your opinion is valid the second you load in.
A game should be fun right when you start playing it, and not months later.
Sure your opinion is on;y based on what you'd encountered, and when you share your opinion, you should include this infomation. I've played the game this long, I've got to this level, etc.
Honestly, if you play a game to lvl 50 and then say it sucks, that makes you a moron who keeps his hand on a hot stove, just to be sure its hot.
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