Video games are one of my favorite media to experience. I love the interactivity, allowing the player to put themselves into the media in better ways than others due to the fact the player is controlling the character instead of just seeing or reading about their actions.

Also, I enjoy the element of choice in video games. Do you want to go away from the main story for a couple hours and do side quests? Most games allow the player to do that. Role-playing games have been doing this for years. Now though, many games not in the RPG genre are doing this.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Side quests are sometimes the best parts of a game, allowing the world to be given character life where it otherwise wouldn’t have any. “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” has hours of side quests, and I’d say they are some of the best hours the game has to offer. It’s one of the best RPGs in the modern video game era.

However, something I have started to notice in the last few years is that a lot of video games are too long and don’t know when to end. Games like “Bloodborne” and “Xenoblade Chronicles 2” are great at the beginning. They introduce themselves well, especially “Bloodborne”, but they are long games. For reference, “Bloodborne” took me about 60 hours to beat and “Xenoblade Chronicles 2” took me just under 100 hours to finish, which I just beat over the weekend.

It might just be that I am terrible at video games, which I won’t deny, or that I enjoy doing a lot of side content before finishing the main story, but there is something to having a nice, small story. Naughty Dog makes some of my favorite games, not only because of their high quality storytelling and visuals, but also because their stories are excellently paced and aren’t that long.

The first four Uncharted games and “The Last of Us” all took me under 15 hours to beat, and that was a perfect length for a story-based game. The newest Uncharted game, “Uncharted: The Lost Legacy,” is even shorter, taking me less than 8 hours. It was my favorite Uncharted game because it took out all the fluff and only had the important points. I love games that take a while, because it allows the story to develop over a long time, but I feel sometimes too many aspects to a game are added.

The Ubisoft games are perfect examples of this. “Far Cry 4”, “Assassin’s Creed Origins” and “Watchdogs 2” all have so many things on the map that it feels cluttered, and the best aspects of the game are lost because there is too much for players to do. The infamous Ubisoft tower has been added to many games, such as “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild”. I am the type of gamer who immediately will go to each of these points and activate them.

The newest title in the God of War, titled just “God of War”, is Kratos’ newest adventure, putting the character in Norse mythology instead of Greek. The first three God of War titles all average around 10 to 12 hours of playtime in the main story, which I felt was perfect for the game series. This new game in the series will take 25 to 30 hours to beat, according to “God of War” Creative Director Cory Barlog. I don’t know what aspects have been added to the game, and maybe the game earns this playtime, but this kind perfectly shows the change in pacing from games in the early 2000s and games now.

I am a college student and don’t have as much time to play video games as I did when I was younger. The time I do have to play video games is sometimes taken up by homework, hanging out with my friends or writing articles for the paper or the blog for which I write. When I do play video games, sometimes I might now want to play the same game for dozens of hours straight. I get tired playing the same game after a while, which is probably why my backlog is so long, but when games take dozens of hours to beat, I need a break or a refresher.

I’m tired of games taking me weeks to beat. Games that take only 15 hours to beat, and then you can put them on the shelf for good, are undervalued in the industry, and they need to be made more often. Don’t feel the need to have 100 hours when 20 will do.