this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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The problem with a 500 hour game is pacing, finding natural calls to action and conclusions to those story arcs. And the next game that comes out in a week offers a fulfilling experience in a different way, and it's nice to see a breadth of different great experiences rather than just one really long one. I say that as someone who's put 1500 hours into my favorite game. I'm not necessarily wishing for Baldur's Gate 3 to be shorter, only that Baldur's Gate 3's scope could have been scaled back without affecting how much I enjoy it or how much value I got out of it. I would really like to see a batch of D&D 5e games on this engine the way there was a batch of Infinity Engine games back in the late 90s and early 00s, and even those games were much shorter than BG3. In general, I'd say games over a certain budget threshold sacrifice a lot of enjoyment in order to make their games bigger and/or longer, and games like BG3 and Elden Ring are the exception, so in most cases, I'd rather big games like Halo Infinite or Assassin's Creed scale down to the smaller experiences they used to be.
Now you're talking about the quality of a game. That's a completely different discussion. I obviously take a good, short game over a long, bad game as well. But given that the quality is equal in all aspects, I would always take the longer game over the shorter one.
I don't think it is a completely different discussion. The length of the game affects length of development time, the available budget that they can spend on a game, etc. There are all sorts of effects on development, which circles back to me not feeling the new Halos or the new Assassin's Creeds are as good anymore. I hardly consider length of a game at all in how I feel about it or prefer it, as long as feels like it should be that long, which comes back to pacing again.