There was a time when everybody demanded that games be longer to justify the price. We equated quantity to quality, and the games industry followed that demand. So many AAA RPGs are, at a minimum, up to 50 to 60 hours long. And that’s on the more “generous” end of the spectrum! Former Starfield quest designer, Will Shen, spoke to KIWI TALKZ about the continued viability of longer games. His assessment overall? That players are becoming fatigued by games demanding so much of their time.
“Part of what happened was the success of games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, these really big titles that you can play pretty much forever. There’s still a lot of people who play Skyrim, even after all these years. And the idea of these evergreen games that you could just sink thousands of hours into that hit the industry,” Shen says. Truthfully, as we saw with the likes of Starfield, the mentality of “evergreen games” extended to the live-service “boom.” As well as genres it didn’t quite make sense to elongate past what’s essential for the experience.
Then, the indie people’s champion, Mouthwashing, eventually entered the conversation! “Mouthwashing is a huge hit because it’s short. There are other factors into that, the execution, you know, nice iconic keyart, all that kind of stuff. But that game doesn’t succeed nearly as well if it were longer and had a bunch of side quests and miscellaneous content. The shortness is the point, and that level of engagement was so refreshing to see from a developer who’s done a lot of big games. It’s like, oh, you can have a fan community conversation around a game that’s much shorter because the shortness allows everyone to engage fully with the entirety of the product.”
former ‘starfield’ designer tells it like it is when discussing longer games
As someone who recently experienced the entirety of Mouthwashing, I can honestly say it was one of the most refreshing adventures (despite the subject matter) in recent memory. Mouthwashing gets the flowers it deserves for a multitude of reasons. For starters, It’s a stellar game. It packs all of these deep, rich, relatable themes into a captivating sub-two-hour runtime. Additionally, as Shen said, it didn’t need 15 hours to tell a two-hour story. Mouthwashing is lean and impactful. It knew what it wanted to say, and it valued players’ time.
How many modern-day RPGs can you earnestly say value your time? Baldur’s Gate 3 is a rare example of a game that can be hundreds of hours long. But, each one of those hours means something. You aren’t fetching flowers, and you aren’t prevented from advancing the game until you find five ancient artifacts. Player agency rules the experience over any busywork for the sake of needless padding.
I’m not going to dunk on Starfield. I’ll simply leave it here: you’re likely an adult reading this (if you aren’t, you’ll learn this lesson eventually). You have bills, a job — maybe even a whole family to worry about. Wouldn’t you rather twenty two-hour Mouthwashings you can easily digest over one 100+-hour nightmare that doesn’t know when to wrap it up?
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