"You want another ten hours of this, huh?"

There have been a whole host of reports regarding The Order: 1886 over the weekend. A handful of stories claimed that the game could be finished in three hours, before a full YouTube upload pegged it at a slightly more reasonable five-and-a-half hours. Speaking with Eurogamer.net, creative director Ru Weerasuriya refused to pin down the exact length of the title – but claimed that the industry is diverse enough to support campaigns of all different sizes.

"Every game has to take its own time to tell its story," he said. "Some games can be short. Some games can be long. I still remember the first time that I picked up Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare; I finished the campaign in about three-and-a-half or four hours. And it was fun because they made that campaign work for that because they had something else."

He continued: "Any of these games need to pack in what it needs to to deliver the experience that you were hoping it to deliver when you first tackled it. For us that meant, it's not going to be a short game, it's going to be something that rewards you as you play through, that there is a storyline, that you have information there, and then also it opens the door to a lot of questions that you might be able to answer either by what you find in the game, or hopefully by what you will find out in the future."

Weerasuriya concluded that there's no set template that a certain title should follow. "Our industry is diverse enough that we need different games. We have to allow for different genres and single player games like we do, multiplayer games, co-op games, and social games – whatever it is."

The comments do come across a little defensive, but we actually think that the developer's got a point: we shouldn't necessarily attach value to length. Alien: Isolation, for example, would have been a better experience if it was half its size, while Journey was absolutely perfectly paced at a couple of hours. The bigger question right now is whether The Order: 1886 will pack enough quality into its running time to make it worth your investment. We'll have the answer later this week.

[source eurogamer.net]