Why were RPGs so much longer in the 80s? I don't even know of any RPG today that has an average playtime of 200 hours.

>>11811743 (OP)
no they weren't you faggot
modern RPG's are much longer

>>11811747
It says right there in the ad, 100-200 hours of playtime.

>>11811748
it also says
>a game that redefines the state of art...
but we all no video game can never be art

>WHY
>WHY
>WHY
Irrelevant garbage zoomer thread #4857294867289467
stop posting this trash

>>11811748
https://youtu.be/rJnAJxV4vLE
Apparently that was false advertising.

>>11811753
>Why was x like
>How was y like
>What was z like
Allowing gen 6 was a mistake

>>11811743 (OP)
bc nerds had nothing better to do back then. internet was a rarity. imagine locking yourself in a room by yourself with no one around. just your imagination running wild.

>>11811743 (OP)
>I don't even know of any RPG today that has an average playtime of 200 hours.
Then you don't know many games because people routinely drop 200+ hours in games like Elden Ring.

>>11811842
Sounds like paradise.

>>11811861
fantasize until sun burns out. yes. paradise.

>>11811748
Play it and find out how wrong you are.

I haven't played any 80s RPG that was 200 hours long.

That ridiculous range seems to be a pretty good clue that it isn't really that long. A lot of older games would pad out their length with difficulty leading to repeated deaths, puzzle or progression obscurity ("moonlogic" or "where the fuck do I go" games), repeated backtracking (either mandatory or because most players would have missed getting some item or whatever from an earlier area on their first time through), or repetitive things like random battles in RPGs. Some of these can make for a more legitimately long game, but others can amount to the player spending hours upon hours trying to figure out what to do, where to go, which dialogue options to choose, etc, but once they DO know what to do, they can go from start to finish in an hour or less.

How long was ultima 7? That game seemed huge, but I never really had a chance to sit down with it.

>>11811752
"State of the art" usually refers to new technology
Oh no that ruins my definition of art being pretty old good noooo

It would take 200 hours of randomly trying everything until you finally do what the game wants to progress forward.

>>11811861
Honestly, it's not the worst thing in the world. Reminder that these guys usually had friends to play D&D and other tabletops with and constantly read fantasy books too, so their imagination wasn't completely fried

>>11811743 (OP)
the ultima series always seemed kind of blasé to me
>you are da ULTIMATE HERO
>Explore BIG EMPTY MEDIEVAL WORLD

>>11812038
Actually I’ve been playing it for the last 2 months and I’m only now getting to the final dungeon. I even had to edit my save file to increase my valor score because I didn’t realize that running from battles tanks your score and I would’ve had to spend probably 20 hours grinding battles on the overworld to get it back up again after reading about how the mechanics actually work. And just yesterday I encountered the fucking room with 9 reapers in it that wiped my entire party after putting all my party members in a sleep lock I couldn’t recover from and slowly killing them over the course of the next 10 minutes. Apparently the DOS version lets you prevent sleep if you’re poisoned but I’m playing the Apple II version and that doesn’t work, so I have no idea how you’re supposed to be able to beat the game without spending like 20 attempts going through the dungeon and hoping you get lucky in that room. So I can easily see how the game could have taken 200 hours to beat in the 80s without walkthroughs and methods of cheating.

>>11811861
This, unironically

>>11811743 (OP)
They wanted to expand the market to girls and brown people. So that meant taking out the things that make RPGs fun.

>>11812805
And that's how Fallout and Baldurs Gate was born

Just spent another 5 hours today trying to get through the final dungeon again and I got to the next to last room before the actual final ending of the game and got sleep locked and party wiped by a room with 20 balrons that just kept casting sleep over and over again. This game absolutely is 200 hours long, but not because it actually has that much content, but because it's purposely designed to be as annoying and long as possible to waste your time and piss you off. It's a game for literal masochists and Richard Garriott is a literal sadist. There's no other explanation for it.

>>11811747
>modern RPG's are much longer
Only because you'll get a 45 minute cut scene to explain a paragraph of information

>>11812505
This. "Art" just means craft or skill, anything that is made is art

Ultima IV is definitely not 200 hours. Maybe 200 hours if you're completely blind and retarded, but the main quest isn't actually that long

>>11814360
And Ultima games were known for pushing limits and never using the same engine. It's why there's two Ultima 7's.

>>11814609
I'm probably at least 100 hour in now and that's after giving up and using a walkthrough towards the end.

>>11811793
Thought he was going to play through the entire game with a single person to avoid having to find everyone. Then the did recruit them … and killed them off. Realized it was to only have to navigate one person in the end.

shit, I last played the game 4 decades ago...

>>11811743 (OP)
No way Ultima 4 is on average 100 - 200 hours even without a guide
>>11813363
Fallout? Nah, Baldur's gate? Yeah, the focus on your companions being quirky and bringing up romance is totally woman/gay ass fuck

>>11812805
What's wrong with brown people.

Ultima IV taking 100-200 hours is pure advertising bullshit.

>>11811743 (OP)
They were longer because they were more tedious.

They were more tedious because people had less games to choose from and no internet for amusement so they had to squeeze more out of the games that they had.

It wasn't 100-200 hours of storytelling and fun, it was 100-200 hours of searching for hidden items that no person in their right mind would even know to look for given the "clues" left in NPC dialog.

>>11816683
Back then people didn't have Gamefaqs.

>>11817157
I thought the clue hunting in Ultima games was well designed and never really found myself getting stuck like I did in point and click adventure games. The problem Ultima games had was consistently broken combat and U4 in particular is a slog. People complain about the auto combat is U7 but it was a relief for me.

>>11812083
Neither have I. I could see sinking maybe 100 hours into a completionist run of Might and Magic II.