An RPG fan’s apocalypse looms: Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield launch within a month of each other, and each looks like a whopper.
Bethesda has a long history of long ass games, with Starfield believed to be the longtime asset, while Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian said BG3 would be a enormous game, taking at least 75 hours to beat and having “174 hours of cutscenes, more than double the length of every season of Game of Thrones combined”. In theory, that’s what I expect from an epic RPG, but games that promise to be unreasonably long often end up making the case for being, well, more reasonable.
It’s the RPG gamer’s ongoing struggle: we naturally idealize the notion of “game forever”, a sprawling world we can inhabit for months on end, but again and again we’re let down by games that make that promise.
A very good commentator on this conundrum is former BioWare writer David Gaider, who meditated on the subject on Twitter, and in response to a commenter questioning Starfield’s sometimes critical coverage ahead of PC Gamer’s launch, Gaider remarked, “The skepticism probably comes from the promises of endless content but also meaningful content …things that haven’t really been compatible with dating. I guess we’ll see!”
It’s just for the money, I think. Developers can seek quality and quantity, and achieving both requires trade-offs. We see the promises that Gaider talks about all the time from studios releasing their games bigger than ever, with the finished product leaving something to be desired. Really, Dying Light 2, 500 hours to see it all? Is it even worth seeing? The promise of game duration may seem like a threat at this point, a marketing arms race condemning us to dozens of hours of watchtower climbing, base scavenging and mini question mark hunting. -map. Arbitrary requests for size or duration can hurt games that would otherwise bring something new to the table.
Not all games need to be New Vegas, and not all teams have the ability to make New Vegas.
Last year’s Ghostwire Tokyo was a highly anticipated game for me, but it had five hours of unique enemies and stretched missions to a 10-20 hour runtime. I remember being briefly thrilled by its surreal, fantastical take on Tokyo only to get bogged down in endless repetition of battling the same enemies in identical arenas. After sprinting to the end at 12, I never wanted to touch it again.
A named artist Jordan Mallory once called for “shorter games with worse graphics made by people who get paid more for working less”, and it’s become a bit of a rallying cry in some game development and review circles. Even leaving aside pressing labor issues in the industry, there are plenty of games that would benefit from keeping it short – compromising on the quantity of their content rather than the quality. But what about my beloved role-playing games, one of the longest and most demanding genres?
In praise of mid-length RPG
One solution really is to not participate in the RPG-length arms race: RPGs don’t need to store more lines of dialogue than all the others to be any good, or even to be our game of the year. Granted, the genre rarely suits tight five-hour horror games like Scorn or Amnesia: The Bunker, but I was just replaying Knights of the Old Republic and System Shock 2 – two main courses, certified, cold classic RPGs. like stone – and my leisurely games lasted 28 and 12 hours respectively. Disco Elysium and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, two of the best RPGs ever made, are also 20-30 hour adventures.
Obsidian’s former RPG Statesmen seem to be deliberately leaning into this niche, bucking the marketing trend of “Our game is a million hours long and you will fucking die before finishing it.” First with The Outer Worlds, then again with Avowed, Obsidian pushed back on the expectation that these games should always be endless open worlds, and instead promise meaningful RPGs based on areas as large as they need to be, comparable to something like KotOR 2. That’s to say nothing of the RPG/adventure Pentiment—produced by a smaller team and clocked in at around 15 hours, it never exhausts its welcome.
I read it as a deliberate reaction to whatever expectations might have been set by Obsidian’s enormous Fallout: New Vegas, which, though now often (rightly) recognized as the pinnacle of the series, was absolutely castigated at launch for a preponderance of bugs and crashes. Quality versus quantity, there always has to be a trade-off, and New Vegas’ rapid 18-month development turned it into a raw gem in 2010. I had just reinstalled it for a review and immediately downloaded 14 mods from the Nexus – 11 of which were just stability, performance, or bug fixes. Not all games need to be New Vegas, and not all teams have the ability to make New Vegas.
But long games can also be radiant as hell
But I love New Vegas! And I’m so glad it was done. I often come back to an observation by video game reviewer Tim Rogers that games in the Dragon Quest series always seem “generous”. Dragon Quest 11’s potentially over 90 hour runtime is almost never a slog – in fact, you can roll credits at the 60 hour mark and continue for a hidden second ending.
At this point, I’m actually very optimistic that both Larian and Bethesda will succeed.
A great video game, most often an RPG, that feels “generous” in this way can feel like some kind of miracle. I’d bet a lot of people had that experience with Mass Effect 2, a game whose Seven Samurai-style non-linear stitching had the quality of a massive main quest – almost everything about this game is thrilling and essential. Two console generations earlier, Baldur’s Gate 2 set the standard for adapting high-level D&D into a video game, resembling a tabletop campaign that would never end (in a good way, not in a “Steve, Our Cleric , never responds to scheduling texts so that all of our sessions are months apart”).
Development teams with lots of people, even more time, rare leadership and more $200 millionas we recently discovered, can produce massive and bountiful games that earn their long runtimes like Elden Ring, Red Dead Redemption 2, Skyrim, or The Witcher 3. There are a few guys out there who have created their own Baldur’s Gate 2 style personal mondo RPGs with the Neverwinter Nights toolset, but Swordflight is an ongoing project that started in 2008, The Blades of Netheril is aiming for completion in 2027 or 28 at the earliest, and the Aielund saga appears to have taken around 11 years to complete – quality versus quantity, you have to compromise somewhere, and here is the time to development, not to mention the limited production values of the 2002 Aurora toolset.
At this point, I’m actually very optimistic that both Larian and Bethesda will pull it off, despite indulging in “You’re burying your own grandkids before throwing credits in this game!” marketing. Baldur’s Gate 3’s promise to have a total length of cutscenes “more than double the length of every season of Game of Thrones combined” made me wonder how they count – it seems to include not just pre-game cutscenes rendered but all examples of characters speaking in dialogue sequences – but otherwise I felt absolutely nothing. The promise passed through me unimpeded like X-rays or a particularly fibrous bran cereal.
Similarly, Starfield’s bold promise of 1000 Planets is just… fine. Yeah man, I see these mountains, I know I can explore them. Larian and Bethesda’s track record, however, gives me hope that Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield will earn their runtime. Makes me think of how CD Projekt quality RPG makers will often have overly edgy advertising that really underestimates the sensibility and In fact their games can be mature – the devs even mocked this in The Witcher 3.
Larian has already more than proven he can create meaty, substantial RPGs with Divinity: Original Sin 2 and the lengthy early access first act of Baldur’s Gate 3. I see in Baldur’s Gate 3 that promise of classic BioWare or CD Projekt, a game like Baldur’s Gate 2 or The Witcher 3 that’s just “oops, any main quest,” that long rollout of romance storytelling and well-designed combat to tax the characters you’ve created.
With Starfield, I was encouraged by Bethesda’s repeated insistence that the game will have more bespoke and handcrafted content than any of its previous games, in addition to a vast galaxy of generated worlds of procedural way. Fallout 4’s concession in the battle of quality versus quantity was a frustrating amount of procedurally-generated “radiant” quests that killed any enthusiasm I had left to visit a bombed East Coast again.
At their best, Bethesda games like Oblivion and Skyrim nail this combination of another immersive life sim with meaningful storytelling behind it – I’ve always struggled to get into stuff like Mount & Blade or Star Citizen, to find it Also open. Bethesda’s best games (and also, I’d say, Cyberpunk 2077 as well) introduce enough character storytelling and direction to contextualize and shape my roleplaying. With Starfield, I’m hoping for that Oblivion feeling, “I could be anyone in this world, and it’ll grow back just enough to make it feel real.”
So basically long games are bad except when they aren’t and if you want to make one you need to make sure you have about 10, infinite money and at least one quest where you do something harmless like sleeping on a houseboat or buying a guy a drink and then waking up somewhere crazy.