See, RPG players? Chrono Trigger is quite possibly the most revered game in the genre, and it doesn't need 50-odd hours and a stupid amounts of sidequests and time-wasters to be that way. Stop asking for shitty games and you'll actually see a game as good as this one more than once every couple years or so.
Quoted for so very much truth.
I'm not saying, per se, that there's anything wrong with long games, some games in particular-Such as, say, Morrowind style exploration games, or Xenogears with it's story that it wants to tell-are perfectly fine as longer games.
But stop shoehorning long into everything in a pitiful attempt to justify your price tags. No one gives a shit anyways, so long as the base game's good, and you're making the base games not good sometimes doing it. Ahem. Don't add sidequests that have little to no impact, sure, but that's secondary, they don't detract(This is why FFX is still okay.).
But try to avoid as much as possible adding filler areas, grind points, superfluous animations without a way to turn them off or speed them(Bonus negative if they're things like walking to an enemy before attacking once, normally, with a sword, and somehow take a lot of time.), loading times before moves(especially this, and hilariously this is fixable with animation skip), loading times before battle(Sometimes less fixable), retreading a single area constantly, and especially, especially,
especially the pointless interlude. When you fetch quest for a fetch quest is when I start getting pissed. Fetch quests are okay. They are a foundation of RPGs to a degree, and in many cases your entire main quest is getting a mcguffin of some kind. Just try to keep it down to a feeling of doing something you need to do to get on your way, okay?
At least really bad examples of it aren't common. Still, sometimes they're glaringly big(Diamond/Pearl, Sonic Chronicles, Legend of Dragoon, WA1/3/ACF) and even the minor examples that make you see a three-five second animation every time you go to do something that you can't skip get old.
It doesn't ruin things. But it definitely detracts. As near as I can tell, it does even if you don't think it matters...try to think about how many times a game has felt "fluid" or "fast paced", or how many of your favorite games ever don't strongly justify their length, if they have it. Glancing at the games rated 10 in the RPG ratings list gives a pretty good idea here; Probably the slowest 10 game I see is Suikoden 3, and Suikoden 3 might arguably be an example of getting every single thing right *but* being fast paced.
(For reference to what I'm thinking here, I was thinking FF6 had a surprisingly fast battle system, so I tried to figure out why... and realized it was because it has single/few second animations...and you can queue up actions while those short animations are going off. Why is a...what, 17? year old game more streamlined than anything in ages?)
Yeah I like to rant about this what of it. >_> My default mode of playing RPGs is with four times frameskip on! I like 'em fast. <_<
