Game length

Wow, major thread necromancy there.

I actually think most Choice Of games are a little too short. CoB and CoD were short but satisfying because they resolved themselves pretty well at the end, and they were the first games to be published.

CoV is long, but it doesn’t feel long or satisfying because the vignettes are mostly self-contained. It feels like Dragon Age II, in that your actions in one vignette don’t affect the story very much in future vignettes. There’s also the fact that a large portion of the game can be ignored if you make certain choices, and that various plot threads are brought up and left hanging at the end rather than being resolved or even interacted with. I’m looking at you, President Jackson.

CoR and CoI are interesting when taken together, but CoI felt a lot shorter than CoR, possibly because the conflict in CoI is wrapped up all at once and without much active input by the player. There also weren’t as many characters to interact with, which left the game feeling a lot emptier and less “populated” than CoR. CoR was pretty satisfying in length, CoI was not.

CoKF is a game that I haven’t really appreciated. I keep comparing it to Jade Empire, and it feels too short for what it purports to be. It also suffers from the CoI lack of character interaction/development, and from CoV’s lack of a sense of player impact. There are numerous choices you can make that just feel like they don’t matter, and it feels like the game was rather badly padded out without much concern for the actual story and conflict.

Just to say, guys: this is exactly the kind of thread where Jason has said he doesn’t really mind thread necromancy.

It’s the WiPs which haven’t seen a post in ages (and are thus 99% likely to have been discontinued) where we’ll shut them down to avoid clutter.

But if someone wants to talk about e.g. game length, it’s no more clutter to respond to an old thread than to start a new one – and responding to the old one has the advantage of not forcing people who commented then to restate their viewpoints.