Ninja Theory Explains Why Hellblade II Is Only Eight Hours Long

When Ninja Theory was acquired by Microsoft nearly six years ago, many gamers expected Hellblade II to become Microsoft's own answer to the rebooted God of War franchise. To do that, Ninja Theory would have had to greatly increase the scope of the sequel, but they decided to stick to a short eight-hour-long game instead.

Speaking to IGN, Ninja Theory studio head Dominic Matthews explained the unusual choice:

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I think what we always set out to do is to tell a story and for the game length to be appropriate for the story that we want to tell. So it's not really a case of setting out to make shorter experiences. I think it is... There is a story that we want to tell here with a beginning, middle, and end and what is the right shape and size of experience to tell that story? So that's kind of where we start.

What I would say as well though is that I think that since digital distribution has become a thing, it has opened the industry up to games of all shapes and sizes, which I think is really great. So I'm really pleased to see that there's a lot of people that actually enjoy a shorter experience, something that they can sit down on a whatever Friday night, stick their headphones on, turn the lights off and kind of sink into an experience and players who don't necessarily want something that is 50 hours long, a 100 hours long, so it's as long as it needs to be. And I'm one of those people, I like shorter games.

I think there's a lot of pressure on people's time these days and I think our fans, from what we hear from them, they enjoy a shorter game where our intention is that every step of that journey is meaningful… There's an audience of people that want games that are focused.

While it's definitely true that some people don't have the time for massive games, there's also plenty of space between eight-hour games and, say, the over 50 hours required for God of War: Ragnarok.