10 Cheap Ways of Extending a Game's Length
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2: Grinding#2 almost strictly applies to MMORPGs and action RPGs. In any well-made traditional role-playing game, character progression is simply an entertaining by-product of advancing the storyline.
Notable Offender: Most RPGs
Roleplaying games are famed for their length. Epic fifty-hour quests are boasted with glee on the back of many RPG packages, and players are sucked in by the promise of a game that will literally last them months. However, if you decide to discount the parts of an RPG where you are walking back and forth over a piece of map and randomly waiting to input the same commands until the number next to your name gets bigger, you'll find that many of those fifty hours are absolutely nothing.
Grinding is one of the oldest tricks in the book. So popular is the idea of gaining experience points and strengthening a character that genres outside of RPGs have cottoned on and exploited it. Tacking on a grinding leveling system to a generic action game suddenly creates the illusion of depth, and keeps players hooked for longer as they level up their heroes in endlessly repetitive battles.
I enjoy RPGs and typically dig acquisition-of-power gameplay, but let's not pretend that the idea of grinding is anything more than filler. It's not fifty hours of epic questing if most of that "journey" is spent walking around outside a town for thirty of those hours.
10. The Valkyrie
Only Offender: Too Human
One could argue that the entirety of Denis Dyack's magnum opus, Too Human, is a futile exercise in wasting time, but our friends at Silicon Knights chose to hammer that point home by introducing one of the most blatant, despicable and trashy little bits of false game longevity known to mankind -- The Valkyrie.
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It's great because it combined a number of things we've already discussed. The basic principals of trial and error gameplay, reincarnation, lots of walking and repeated animations all rolled into one antagonizing piece of pigshit. Without the Valkyrie, Too Human might have been a bearable game.
It wouldn't be very long, though.
