Quote Originally Posted by Vyk View Post

Taking a peek at The Last of Us on "How Long To Beat", it seems to average about 15 hours. And I remember being extremely surprised at how long that game took. It was so amazing, so beautiful, so well done, its hard to imagine them putting so much time and effort into making an entire 15 hour run feel fresh and unique at every turn. I wouldn't have batted an eye if that game were closer to the 10 hour mark. That's a lot of magic to store in just under a dozen hours. Its extremely rare to get something that great that breaks the dozen hour mark and keeps pace until the end
Two important points about The Last of Us in particular.

Firstly, a lot of that length came from stuff that is actually quite low intensity in terms of development effort. It has quite big, open levels, stealth heavy gameplay, exploration, and so on and so forth. So a single room with 5 enemies in can take five or ten minutes as you plan, move about, craft stuff. Obviously care and attention has to go into the level designs, enemy placement, AI and the game systems. But these are nowhere near the draw on resource as a detailed cutscene is. All that gorgeous animation, sound design and set piece special effects take ages. And while there are a large number of detailed cutscenes in The Last of Us, the ratio of gameplay:cutscene is much more in favour of gameplay compared to something like The Order. So I'm not sure the two can really be categorised together on those grounds, or if they can I definitely think Naughty Dog were much smarter in how they went about the design.

Secondly, because of the game systems allowing for multiple play styles, I think TLoU has much more replayability. You can do a stealth run, a run-and-gun run, explore the routes you didn't take the first time through. Even though it's a linear game, you can get a fairly substantially different experience with multiple playthroughs. Again, I think this sets it apart from something like The Order (and not just The Order, the same stuff sets TLoU apart from Uncharted as well. And I really like two of the Uncharted games).