An analysis on episode lengths, across all seasons [Alternate title: I really need a hobby]
Deltino
Moderator
[Fair warning before you start reading: this shit's long, bro]
Alright, so about a month ago, my internet went out, I was bored, but then I got this little idea in my head. An experiment, if you will.
Quite simply put, this was my experiment: how long is each episode, of each season, if you forgo all hubs and puzzle sequences, focusing purely on the core narrative/plot? How long do they last individually, and what is the average length of a given season based off of those numbers?
And as a result of all this, what I'd consider to be the most intriguing question ends up being: Strictly in terms of story, are the episodes of seasons 2 and 3 really that shorter than the episodes of S1?
Before we begin, let me go over some of the specifics, just to clear things up. The parameters used for this experiment/playthrough are as follows:
Complete all puzzles sequences as fast as possible. To use the train puzzle as an example, this meant immediately picking up the pencil from the RV, grabbing a weapon, going to the cab, and so forth, all in quick succession.
Forgo hub sequences entirely, save for mandatory hubs. Most hub areas are entirely optional, but there are at least two that require you to talk to at least two different people in order to progress. These two would be Hershel's farm (where you have to talk to two of the three available people; Shawn, Kenny, Katjaa), and the drugstore (where you have to explore and talk to people until Glenn calls on the walkie). In the case of the mandatory hubs, only do the bare minimum required in order to progress.
Forgo exploration sequences, such as Clementine's house.
Pick options quickly, trying to go for conversation trees that lead to shorter dialogue exchanges.
The basic idea here is trimming the fat-- condensing episodes into what is more or less the mandatory narrative. The 'core' story, so to speak. So in a sense, the following statistics give you an idea how long an episode is purely in regards to the primary story. Keep this in mind.
Everyone talks about how long S1 episodes are. And I'll admit it, they can be long. Emphasis on can, because as a matter of fact, you can cut them down by way more than I expected. In fact, you might be shocked to find that, if you measure the S1 episodes purely based on the amount of mandatory story, they're not as lengthy as you might think.
Let's start with the premiere episode, A New Day. This episode, if you go through solving puzzle sequences as fast as possible, and only doing mission critical objectives, can be cut down to 86 minutes. Yep, your season opener can be completed in under 90 minutes.
Starved For Help is generally seen as a pretty long episode by people, right? Well, using the same process of going through doing only mission critical stuff in order to advance to the next scene, we can chop this episode down to 91 minutes.
Alright, so we have one episode that managed to break 90 minutes, what about the emotional meatgrinder known as Long Road Ahead? This episode ties with A New Day, at 86 minutes.
Fun fact: remember everyone's favorite train puzzle? You can literally that entire sequence in 5 minutes. From the second you arrive in the RV, to getting the train moving. That isn't hyperbole, either. You can finish the entire scene in 5 minutes.
And now we are at Around Every Corner. Following the tried and true method, this episode ends up being the longest episode of the first season, as well as the longest episode of the entire game series thus far, sitting at 107 minutes. However, even in spite of it boasting the longest playtime out of all episodes, it still doesn't quite reach two hours.
And from here on out, the numbers are probably more of what you'd expect.
No Time Left clocks in at 69 minutes, making it the shortest episode of season one...
...alongside 400 Days, which follows up in a tie, also managing only 69 minutes.
And with that, we have our full list of runtimes across the first season:
AND: 86 Minutes
SFH: 91 Minutes
LRA: 86 Minutes
AEC: 107 Minutes
NTL: 69 Minutes
400: 69 Minutes
AVERAGE: 88 Minutes (without 400 Days) / 85 Minutes (with 400 Days)
TOTAL: 439 Minutes (508 Minutes with 400 Days) / 7 Hours (8 Hours with 400 Days)
Alright, so that's Season 1 out of the way. Now let's move on to the next installment, Season Two. Now it's important to remember, I'm still using the same parameters as in S1-- no hubs, and so on. And surprisingly enough, there's not a huge difference in runtime without them, at least in comparison to S1, where you can shave off close to 30 minutes in some instances.
So without further ado: All That Remains, the opener of S2, comes very close to the runtime of the final two episodes of the first season, clocking in at 68 minutes. This is the shortest episode of the second season.
A fan favorite by quite a few, A House Divided manages to be the second longest episode of the season, at a relatively modest length of 80 minutes.
Now, In Harm's Way is where people felt the story took a bit of a wrong turn. However, it didn't skimp so much on episode length, managing to sustain 79 minutes.
And now we reach one of the most controversial episodes of the game, Amid The Ruins. This episode happens to tie with In Harm's Way, sitting at 79 minutes as well.
If you were paying attention earlier, you will remember how I mentioned A House Divided was the second longest episode. Well, as you can no doubt tell by the process of elimination, the longest episode of S2 would happen to be the finale, No Going Back. This episode clocks in at 82 minutes, not too shy from the average runtime for S1 episodes.
Now before we get to the list, I should mention one thing. I did break my own rules in one area; I chose the Kenny ending. But don't worry, I made sure to keep that separate from the rest of the playtime. This also applies for the S3 Kenny flashbacks. These numbers are in parentheses.
Our Season Two list:
ATR: 68 Minutes
AHD: 80 Minutes
IHW: 79 Minutes
AmTR: 79 Minutes
NGB: 82 Minutes (+7 minutes with Kenny Ending)
AVERAGE: 78 Minutes (without Kenny Ending) / 79 Minutes (with Kenny Ending)
TOTAL: 388 Minutes (395 Minutes with Kenny Ending) / 6 Hours
So with Season Two now under our belts, time to move on to A New Front-- oh wait, it seems I am forgetting something...
Oh right, the Michonne miniseries!
Now, as people probably already know, Michonne is pretty short as a whole, both in episode count, and runtime.
In Too Deep, the opener, is the longest episode of the miniseries, despite a rather short length of 69 minutes.
And things don't get better from there, folks. Give No Shelter, the second episode, clocks in at a measly 55 minutes. Not even a full hour long. But don't worry, it isn't alone...
What We Deserve, the finale, comes in at 51 minutes, managing to beat out Give No Shelter as the shortest episode of the miniseries, as well as the shortest episode of the entire series thus far.
So how does the miniseries stack up to the main series?
ITD: 69 Minutes
GNS: 55 Minutes
WWD: 51 Minutes
AVERAGE: 58 Minutes
TOTAL: 175 Minutes / 3 Hours
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. A New Frontier.
It's no secret that this season is relatively troubled, and people have a lot of choice words for it, but let's put that aside for now, and focus on lengths.
Ties That Bind - Part One, the first half of the season opener, is the second shortest episode of the season, managing 63 minutes. However, this can be slightly improved with the Kenny flashback, which adds an extra 5 minutes, giving us a grand total of 68 minutes.
Which leads us to the shortest episode of the season, Ties That Bind - Part Two, which unfortunately comes in at only 55 minutes, serving as the joint second shortest episode of the series, alongside Give No Shelter.
But on the bright side, the season picks up after these two episodes.
Above The Law manages to claw its way to the top, being the season's longest episode at 84 minutes... which interestingly enough makes it the fourth longest episode of the entire series, behind Around Every Corner, Starved For Help, and A New Day/Long Road Ahead.
Not too far behind Above The Law is Thicker Than Water, the penultimate episode that brings in a good 78 minutes of playtime. However, with the edition of the Kenny flashback (which gives the episode 4 extra minutes), this episode is bumped up to a total of 82 minutes, just behind Above The Law.
And so that leaves us with the most recent game episode, the finale of ANF, From The Gallows. This rather compact finale still manages to be longer than S1's finale, sitting at 74 minutes.
And so that concludes ANF:
TTB1: 63 Minutes (+5 minutes with Kenny Ending)
TTB2: 55 Minutes
ATL: 84 Minutes
TTW: 78 Minutes (+4 minutes with Kenny Ending)
FTG: 74 Minutes
AVERAGE: 71 Minutes (without Kenny Ending) / 73 Minutes (with Kenny Ending)
TOTAL: 354 Minutes (363 Minutes with Kenny Ending) / 6 Hours
So with all our data now compiled, let's take a look at the averages and totals for all seasons, side by side:
Season One: 88 (85) Minutes on average, 439 (508) Minutes in total. 7 (8) Hours worth of game.
Season Two: 78 (79) Minutes on average, 388 (395) Minutes in total. 6 Hours worth of game.
Season Three: 71 (73) Minutes on average, 354 (363) Minutes in total. 6 Hours worth of game.
Michonne: 58 Minutes on average, 175 Minutes in total. 3 Hours worth of game.
So indeed there is a decline in length as the series progresses... however, in terms of 'core' story length, all seasons have stayed within the same relative percentile, with only a ~10 minute difference in average length.
However, the total length is a bit more of a discrepancy, with a 51 minute difference between seasons 1 and 2, and an 85 minute difference between seasons 1 and 3.
Michonne is the outlier in both average and total playtime, and is not directly tied to the main three seasons in terms of narrative, so for all intents and purposes, comparisons between it and the other seasons isn't very necessary.
So there you have it. A run down of lengths for all the episodes... albeit on a specific set of parameters. But the thing to keep in mind is that these parameters were the same for all episodes, of all seasons. What this means is that story-wise, the individual episodes of season 2 (and to a somewhat lesser extent, season 3) are almost as long as S1. This also means that a sizable portion of S1's runtime comes from the extraneous gameplay elements, rather than the actual story/narrative itself.
Before I finish, let me stress one last thing: don't take this as a defense of the shorter episode lengths of the recent seasons. This isn't meant to be some "in your face" to everyone that likes S1, or a defense of seasons 2 or 3. It's simply meant to be a data point, a data point that I felt was worth sharing.
Make what you will of these results. Do you find it interesting? Boring? A bunch of crap? I'll leave that up to you.
Comments
But you know, even though there's not THAT much of a difference in episode lengths, TWDS1 is argueably better because of the presence of these gameplay elements that are not always present in current Telltale titles. They just lack this realistic atmosphere because of the absence of meaningful hubs that fleshes out a character or a group of characters.
I'd been meaning to do this for a while, with the exception of ANF (which I don't have).
I think I would've also added other stats (like runtime if you picked Jane instead or the max length of all hubs in terms of single-playthrough dialogue options) and listed what options would contribute to the shortest runtimes.
Btw, 78 + 4 = 82, not 72
In any case, this is neat, and thanks for researching!
Great job, thanks for doing this!
When you have too much time on your hands
Good job though.
I'd say a better parameter would have been clicking/doing absolutely everything in the fastest way possible.
Still, great job and definitely useful and interesting data.
Somebody needs a life
Well this was informative.
Just a few comments:
It would have been useful to time such elements, yes. The reason I didn't do that is quite simple: this took way too long to do in the first place, and even a month after doing this, I'm not too keen on going back to do it. Maybe at some later point in time I will, but for now, I think this suffices.
No doubt. Like I said, this isn't meant to be in defense of anything. This is purely an analysis of playtimes, nothing more. Discussion about how useful these gameplay areas are in regards to both runtime, character investment, and overall narrative/story? That's a whole different topic.
That's what I tried to do. But given that there's so many options in the game, it gets hard to remember what leads to the fastest outcomes. If I were to try to make a list of all the short options... christ almighty that would be one long list.
But yeah, that was the parameter I was trying to go by: get through a given episode in the fastest possible time, using the fastest possible methods I know of. That included clicking things as quick as possible, moving through freewalk sections as fast as possible, navigating conversation/dialogue trees as fast as possible, and so on.
It was essentially a speedrun... or the closest you can get to a speedrun in a game like this.
Look on the bright side, when you're on your death bed years from now, surrounded by your loved ones, you can say "At least I wasn't like that idiot Deltino that wasted all that time looking at video game lengths"
This was actually a case of taking out two birds with one stone. There were some different options I wanted to try in the Kenny flashbacks in S3, so I just decided to choose the Kenny ending so I wouldn't have to run through the game twice. That's also why I didn't account for the other flashback lengths; I'm not very keen on going through the game again at this time. But I suppose if you go look up videos of the flashbacks on youtube, you could get a fair estimate of how much time they add on.
Nah man, I aspire to be like you. If I'm sitting on my death bed years from now WITHOUT my video-game episode length collection, I'll be one pissed off ghost.
To be honest, the length of the core story in episodes never bothered me, it was the lack and decline of optional content. It's why I still prefer Season 1, each episode you had the option to get to know people, talk to them about the events that perspired and sometimes things you said or learned would be mentioned again. I think it was a great way for people to learn more about characters if they wanted to and added a more personal touch to the story.
I mean, whilst people do want longer episodes they also state that they want more hubs where they can do more things in, primarily get to know people similarly to Season 1 and they want puzzle solving game-play that takes time and requires you think, like the train in episode 3. The side content is why allot of people who play clock in 10-12 hours, even up to 14 including the DLC.
I know, I know.
This just shows that even if you skip all the optional stuff, Season 1 is still the longest. And usually most players don't skip most of the optional stuff, so for a regular player the Season is even longer. ANF, on the other hand, has very little optional puzzles and conversations, so it's play time remains very small for everyone.