With hardly a week passing without gamers working themselves into an uproar over games that offer what they perceive to be 'short' campaigns these days, Eidos Montreal decided to nip the rumors in the bud. The developers of Deus Ex: Human Revolution have clearly been putting their time to good use, claiming that their game's main campaign is already taking testers over 25 hours to complete, with some completionists taking even longer to accomplish the task.

As the major video game market expanded from a handful of blockbuster titles being released every year to a few dozen in the same time span, the tools used to measure them against one another were forced to change. Where graphics and smooth frame-rates were once the mark of a triple-A title, the generally standardized performance of modern game engines makes that comparison useless.

So now, fans are beginning to judge the quality of a game experience based on the amount of content packed into the title, and length it takes to complete the singleplayer campaign. Homefront's length disappointed those hoping for a deep, engrossing experience, and even now the 8 hour campaign of Portal 2 is under attack.

Those who've been keeping up to date with Deus Ex: Human Revolution know that players will be spoiled for choice when it comes to making their way through combat situations. The developer walkthrough video showed the different approaches that players could take, either running into the action headfirst, or maneuvering their way by undetected.

The latest Deus Ex gameplay trailer proved that each approach can result in a fast-paced game experience, but according to Eidos Montreal, those who choose to pick one path and stick with it still have more than 24 hours of game to look forward to. Speaking with Eurogamer, Human Revolution's art director Jonathan-Jacques Belletete explained that players who like to take their time with games could enjoy even more:

"Someone like me would probably spend 35 hours playing the game, because I'm really someone who likes to snoop around looking at all the possibilities an environment has for me — then choose which one I'm actually going to tackle..."

"In the playtests we've been doing at work we usually have people playing the game Monday morning to Friday night - they play from nine to five - and some of them don't even finish it. The ones who do play it in 25 hours or so — that's because they know that they're limited."

"They do a few side-quests and they snoop around a little bit, but they mostly want to finish it. So that gives us a good gauge that the main quest is about 25 hours long... so that's a hard number as we've seen it live. From that we can extrapolate that it can easily go up to 35 hours."

Considering the fact that the game implements three distinct approaches - agressive, stealth, or adaptive - players who chose to experiment a few times over could gain more than fifty hours of gameplay out of Human Revolution. That puts it more at home among open-world RPGs than modern shooters, which should come as a relief to old school fans of the original title.

Is this the kind of size you were hoping for from the game, or does a day-long campaign seem more like a marathon than a streamlined experience? Let us know your thoughts.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution will be keeping players busy for a few days, at least, when it launches on August 23 for the Xbox 360, PS3, PC, and OnLive.

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Source: Eurogamer