vagabond it’s a bit like showing that cats will conquer the world, but in this case, the world is the world of video games. The title, developed by the small French team BlueTwelve Studio, is a huge success, but there is a lot of controversy about it. duration her countryside.
is it short? is it long? As written in Stray’s review, we less than five hours to finish the credits, but without a sense of rush: the collection list shows that along the way we stopped collecting various things and neglected others.
Judging by the sites that collect this type of information to provide average game time, we are in good company – most users about four and a half hours Those who want to stay longer like us to complete the campaign reached six or seven hours.
And so we in Annapurna (eventually unsuccessfully) tried to dodge enough provocations from those who reported in the editorial offices that there was a fearsome industry giant to compel them to issue a memo. Aside from the absurdity of those who talk about an eight-hour playtime and claim that if you take less than seven/eight hours to complete Stray you’ll have to go horse-racing after a psychiatric consultation, approve of a very simple concept.
The duration of a game is one of the many ways it goes. contextualized, as well as games, art direction and technical realization. There are certainly objective indicators: An open world that sells for full price and ends in eight hours is perceived as short, while a world that takes almost a hundred hours to get to the end of the main story is perceived as long, very long. But the real issue is how these clocks are used.
In the case of Stray, we are dealing with a title sold to a title. budget price€29.99 on PlayStation Store and even less on Steam with a focuspurely narrative experience, so it tells a story. And stories are often designed in a certain way, so much so that diluting them too much is obvious and unproductive for purposes of rhythm and engagement.
We talked about it live on the first day: it could be game developers”pass the water“somehow, by adding more fetch missions or some backtracking for example, but this artificial attempt to prolong the campaign would have been noticed and would instead have ruined the balance achieved.
It’s worth repeating: In terms of gameplay, Stray doesn’t do anything extraordinary and on the contrary takes a very relaxed path, taking very few risks in a context where we imagine a small development team to have a clear awareness of its limitations. . An admirable exercise in self-control, but also quite a lot. unexpressed potential.
However, the duration of the play is difficult to criticize: after determining the resources available to the writers, the type of story they wanted to tell and the setting created for the event, as well as the selling price, it seemed like an average of five hours. it was enough and we didn’t need more, “is it done?” We couldn’t reach the last credits by muttering.
In the end, between an RPG and an open world, such shorter but no less important experiences make perfect sense. And if there are cats in the middle, much better. What do you think? Let’s talk about.
Parliamon is a daily opinion column that offers a starting point for discussion around the day’s news, a small editorial written by a member of the editorial team but not representing the Multiplayer.it editorial line.
Source: Multiplayer
