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Comment by dwroberts | Hacker News Reader

This is the first of Blow’s games that I’m just not very interested in playing, and the fixation on its length and size is why. Being really long or having a huge completion time for the sake of it seems like a big step backwards compared to Braid and The Witness, and also philosophically literally the opposite of what he claimed made his games interesting. So I find this game and how it’s being marketed etc pretty odd

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Another poster here said the first thirty hours were great, but after 40 it started feeling repetitive.

If you change your perspective from “I’m not gonna spend 500 hours on this” to “30 hours of great gameplay for 30 bucks” maybe it isn’t so bad.

Makes sense to me…

I tend to "graze" on games by regularly(ish) playing for usually not more than an hour. I often swap between games and don't finish many of them. That's never really seemed like the point[0] any more than the idea of "completing" chess or skiing[1]. A tedious, unskippable tutorial level or spending hours early on grinding or subsisting with basic tools/weapons/mechanics before you get the good stuff is what kills a game for me.

So the question for me is how much boredom before it gets fun rather than whether I will eventually lose interest before I finish it. That's a given (I predictably didn't finish Braid or The Witness, I like both).

[0] And besides, like TV series, it just seems like such a lot of time! A game has to be very short or _really_ good, which means both engaging and fun mechanics and a great story, for me to make it to the end.

[1] Ok that's a lie, I definitely intend to complete skiing

I assume it’s in part a consequence of Blow’s newer self-definition as a game-programming iron man: after all the work on the custom engine you probably feel the need to get as much mileage as you can out of it. But as others have said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115215 , presumably they could have applied some razzle-dazzle like staged releases in “seasons” to make the large amount of content feel more like ongoing fun than a huge homework assignment.

Short games can be the best experiences. There are a lot of horror titles that barely crack 1 hour and still feel worth the purchase.

There is also an argument that this is why PvP multiplayer is so compelling. The game is adaptive in its complexity, and every round of play is a relatively brief, self-contained experience not quite like the others. If you are going for bang-for-buck, it's really hard to beat the emergent properties of a MOBA, BR or RTS.

I think those who reject multiplayer games on principle are missing the forest for the dead tree. There is an incredible amount of upside if you can tolerate the occasional bad mood. The dream is when the entire team comes together without any explicit communication and executes perfectly. Nothing beats that sensation. Especially when you can tell that the enemy team is also executing well. I have to seek it out in video games because I can't find it in a real business anymore. Games like League of Legends and CS2 are eternal experiences. I fired up LoL classic the other day and I could easily see myself putting another 5k hours into lux. WoW forever is also looking compelling with its PvP ruleset and unified realm architecture.

On short horror titles: iron lung was just a great little gaming snack

Well... it's more about how many interesting permutations there are, not really just about length or quantity for the sake of big numbers. In other words: it's not about "look how many puzzles there are" it's "look how many INTERESTING puzzles there are"... which may seem like a small distinction, but when the claim of the puzzles being "interesting" is true, and being said in a genuine non-marketing way, it means a lot.

> a big step backwards compared to Braid and The Witness

It was already there in the Witness. One secret challenge involves you watching a movie and slowly tracing a light for 56min straight.

I realized there was a puzzle about halfway through the movie. But there is no way I'm spending another 56min just to complete the challenge.

It's a good movie, though. For anyone who's interested: https://maraoz.com/the-secret-of-psalm-46-transcript/

At least your game didn't crash forcing you to redo the section.

The point I'm making the game doesn't respect my time. Why should I respect it back?

The question this puzzle is asking you is "why do you feel the need to complete this game?" In this sense it is a sand mandala. If you don't have time to make one, that's totally fine, but saying that "sand mandalas don't respect my time" misses the point entirely.

Tbe sand mandala is free. I (presumably) paid money for The Witness.

You don’t have to complete that puzzle to get a satisfying ending to the game

Long and complex games are good if you can choose how much of them you want to play. Crimson Desert is the most extreme version, but Skyrim and Elden Ring are better examples because you can do a couple boss fights and get straight to the end without exploits skipping most of the story.

Haven't played this one so I don't know if it's like that too. If it forces you to get through the whole 500 hours then it's really bad.

I didn’t either until i started playing but its length and size isn’t just for the sake of it. It’s that size because it’s that complex. It’s like The Witness dialed up to 11

> The Witness dialed up to 11

Can't wait for 11hr unskippable cutscene that contains a hidden puzzle. And if game dies during that time... Restart from the beginning.

See, that's not a good puzzle. It's not good game design. It's antagonistic to the player in the worst possible way.

The moments of player-antagonism are the most interesting parts of Braid/Witness, imo.

For the most part, most games are antagonistic. And that's fine, that's the fun. Goombas are player-antagonism. Dark Souls is antagonistic. But they are engaging you and testing your ability to execute game mechanics with increasing amounts of precision.

Having to sit through a full hour of video to slowly trace a line is pointlessly antagonistic. It only tests a player's desire to sit through your bullshit. Being able to do it does not make you better at any other part of the game. It doesn't even make you better at that part of the game.

You don’t have to sit through it. It just asks the player to slow down and listen for just an hour. If something, it makes you better in general by just listening to a fantastic talk by Brian Moriarty, that’s the achievement.

You don't have to do it though. There is no reward, no achievement, nothing unlocks. It's functionally equivalent to "if you stand in one spot for an hour a special sound effect plays and some lights flash for 2 seconds." I think it's psychologically interesting how many people get angry that this sound effect is programmed into the game.

I consider the witness one of my favorite games, and I fully completed it, but I did not do that because it's dumb. The existence of the thing really has nothing to do with the game.

You realize you’re agreeing with me, right?

I said that bit was bad puzzle/game design. You say it’s dumb. Which is another way of saying you didn’t think it was a good design.

I think it’s psychologically interesting how many people feel the need to defend Blow and his games to the hilt when he’s produced so very little.

It's bad game design if it were the game, but it's not the game. You said "that's not a good puzzle. It's not good game design. It's antagonistic to the player in the worst possible way."

But it's not really a puzzle, or the game, or antagonizing you, because there's no purpose in doing it. Like I said, it's just something that exists in the game. It's not the game; it doesn't reflect upon the puzzle design or the game design because it's irrelevant to the actual puzzles and the actual game.

I'll repeat myself: if you stand in one spot for an hour a special sound effect plays and some lights flash for 2 seconds. If that happened in Call of Duty, it would be strange, but it also would have nothing to do with the game design quality of Call of Duty. It would not make sense to say Call of Duty has bad game design due to the presence of this thing.

I'm defending the witness because it's a good game, and this comment thread implies that doing that dumb thing is required to play or finish the game, when it is not. It is a misleading comment that gives an uninformed reader an incorrect impression of the product.

Technically, there's no purpose in any of it. Playing the game and not playing it are the same.

It's a puzzle in that it's a line you have to draw to complete all the puzzles. What's that worth to anyone is what it is. There are lots of games with post-game content that's not technically required to "finish" the game.

But the goal of the Witness is to find and draw these lines. If you didn't find and draw that line, Blow would say you didn't find and draw all the lines.

So, it is a puzzle in the game. It is. It's a puzzle. It's in the game. You don't know whether it's pointless or not until after you complete it. So you can't look at it and say, "Well, this is not needed, I can skip it".

And the overall product is kind of bad. It's overly tedious and mistakes hiding necessary information with being clever.

Haven't played it yet, but from what I know my impression was that this game was as much a test bed for his new programming language as it is an artistic expression. I wouldn't be surprised if some puzzles made it in because they were a good test of some novel comp time feature (i.e. the real puzzle game was making the language, not playing the game).

And I bought it day one without reading reviews. Whether or not the game is good, personally I'm happy to support someone who's completely self-funded working on PL design. Not that many people are in position to do that kind of work, and even fewer with a documented history of finishing things.

I played the demo and it blew my mind how cool the puzzles felt. I'll definitely get the full game later, though I doubt I'll invest 500 hours into it.

I sort of feel the same. I also don't understand why - it seems quite natural to make it smaller and cool and they for example release new level packs, maybe free even (or for a small price). I've also never understood why he didn't make a sequel for Braid. Such a cool game. You're not milking it if you make a sequel it deserves.

> I've also never understood why he didn't make a sequel for Braid. Such a cool game.

Perhaps it's such a cool game because it doesn't need milking or sequels? Perhaps he never made a sequel because he doesn't want to repeat the same things ad infinitum?

I'm with you on this boat, but I believe I see the point in the way it's marketed. An average person who makes regular game purchases likes long games. They want value for their money, and the number of hours is a big factor. This game has a big piblisher behind it, and I believe they know exactly what they're doing with the marketing!

The regular game buyer has more games than they can possibly play. Some people are focused on maximizing enjoyment-dollars/hour, but I would posit that an excessively long playtime is a detriment to most gamers.

I have been turned off from a few JRPGs with such high playtimes that they have no respect for the player.

Exactly, until my 20s I enjoyed long games. Now, I have a family, I have other things competing with my time, I want something that is tight with barely any fillers that deliver a good story. My most memorable recent games all delivered on that: Forgotten City (8 hours to finish it completely), Carto, A Juggler's Tale, There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, ...

While I do enjoy longer games like Yakuza, etc, I really enjoy being able to play through a game in 1 to 2 evenings.

I don't mind longer games at all, even though I juggle dayjob, university, family, and quite time-consuming woodworking hobby at once.

Currently I'm playing through Cyberpunk 2077 and as usually I do almost all side content. I play it for months already, just an hour here and there. I don't mind it at all.

What's important for me the game doesn't waste my time on senseless, boring, repetitive activities. That way, even 30min of playthrough scratches the itch and feels fulfilling.

Oh yes, didn't try cyberpunk yet but Witcher was great because even if long, it was rather tight. Problem is that when I stop playing for 2-3 months due to work, it's hard to remember where I was.

> An average person who makes regular game purchases likes long games. They want value for their money, and the number of hours is a big factor.

Is that the case? Or do they want short games, so they can complete it and move on to the next game. If you’re buying games regularly, either they’re shorter games, or you’re not completing them all—in which case, the length doesn’t really matter. Or looking at it the other way, if you like long games, and you’re completing them, you’re not buying games regularly.

Regular buyers are gamers who spend a lot of time playing games. That's who you want to target, since that's the group who are actively looking for new games, and they also want their games to last. It's not about completionism, it's about spending hours and hours playing games.

> Regular buyers are gamers who spend a lot of time playing games.

Sadly, like most things, Buying Games and Playing Games are 2 different hobbies.

It's not for the sake of it; they cut hundreds of puzzles. It just has that many unique ideas!

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