In some circles of videogameland it’s common wisdom that more is better—I remember a quaint time when 30 hours was a “long” game, but today’s big budget releases have been pushing that boundary well into the triple digits. In a recent interview with IGN, though, two Star Wars Outlaws devs promise to buck that trend with a “dense” and “rich” game that doesn’t wear out its welcome.
Julian Gerighty and Navid Khaveri, the game’s creative and narrative director respectively, told IGN that they don’t want Outlaws to be “too big,” with Gerighty clarifying that the kind of game he’s referring to is one that “people don’t manage to play, enjoy, and finish.”
Gerighty went on to describe Outlaws as “a very dense, rich, open world adventure that [players] can explore at their own rhythm,” and asserted that the game “is absolutely not a 200 or 300 hour epic unfinishable RPG.” So it’s pretty clear that Ubisoft’s argument is that less can still very much be more.
You act like there isn’t a difference between quality content and 100s of hours of gathering collectables…
The only game I’ve played that actually has 100+ hours of quality content is Persona 5.
Every other single player game trying to give me more than ~30 hours of stuff to do ended up being a chore.
I think part of it is that there is an ideal time commitment for story driven games and it is between 5 and 30 hours. It’s similar for movies, where the ideal range is 90 t o150 minutes. There can be exceptions, made by particularly skilled people, but just because I enjoy the 4-hour cut of Return of the King does not mean I want the next Marvel or DC movie to be that long.
Probably because 90% of the games I’ve played, even the really good ones, would have been much better with some editing. But instead they tend to pad them out with unnecessary rubbish so they can put “100s of hours of gameplay” in the adverts.