Newsletter Discussion: When is it too hard?

With reports of an 18-hour long boss fight in Final Fantasy XI making waves around the Interweb, we here at WarCry shake our heads, but also start wondering. This week, we'd like to know:

When do "challenges" in games cross the line to unreasonable and frustrating?

Share your thoughts with us and post in the comment thread!

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After reading that article, you just can't help yourself from chuckling. There's a point in your head when you know you should stop playing for a bit and take a break, but if people are getting hurt/sick from playing a game non-stop that means you might have an issue.

But when a Boss fight lasts "18" hours, that's just not even worth doing, even for maybe a "Title" or fame. You'll be remembered more for the people who passed out or threw up then taking down a boss. Game Designers always should have a couple things running in there mind when they're creating something new. Such as "Will player's be able to finish this is a reasonable amount of time?" or "Will this be ever completed by a player"?

Even though it looks fun/cool to do, will it be worth it in the long run? ( This goes for Real Life to ;) )
That's just my 2 Cents.

What the hell is square-enix on? Seriously.

Hah! 18 hour long? You remember the first raid on Antharas on Lineage2? On the Korean servers? How long did that last?

I have played the game now over 4 years and totaled some 650 days playtime in hours. When they talk about this fight on the chat I just have them changed the subject. It is bad enough that the gods in take from 30 minutes to 1 hour and 20 minutes. Yes Square has a few screws lose on this one and I live there....

There is simply NOTHING in this world that is worth 18 hours of my time in a -game-. NOTHING. To even create something like that that would potentially harm a person's health is irresponsible. Period.

"People were passing out and getting physically ill. We decided to end it before we risked turning into a horrible new story about how video games ruin people's lives," said Beyond the Limitation member Sylphet.

I think that ship has sailed.

but... wasnt there a way to save and continue later? Its crazy to spend 18 hours like that... I wouldnt have stayed that long.. so its also the players fault. But the makers of the game are crazy if they do things this way.

Generally not, in an MMO.

Man, I *wish* I could save :P

In wow there are instances that save your progress, because they are too long to finish in one day. Square-enix should do something like that instead of letting players get sick by playing.

Right, but this wasn't an 18-hour long instance. This was an 18-hour-long *boss fight*.

Throw him in at the end of BT or whatever, and you still have an 18-hour fight on your hands even AFTER clearing the instance :P

18 hours with the same boss... when i read it i couldt believe it.. Thats just...crazy

Jenkins says he can beat it in 17 hours... ALONE!

This happened on the escapist too, although to a lesser extent, what people aren't noticing is that they didn't actually -kill- the boss. They just fought him for 18 hours. Square-enix is on crackalinijuannaspeedocainecstacycohol for ever thinking up something like this

Actually, taking into consideration the Asian market and their insane competitiveness, I think SquareEnix just delivered something the players can brag about as another accomplishment.

Does anyone know what's the 2nd longest Boss before this 18-hour one? And if it was defeated?

If so, that might explain this insane scale-up.

The 2nd longest Boss before this one is called Pandemonium Warden, though I don't know anything about the game or how long it took them, that's it if you want to look it up. They did manage to kill it however.

That's ridiculous, but it's really no surprise with SE. They probably looked at how long boss battles can go on the single player games and tried scaling up.