There’s a tendency to equate game length with quality, or to measure a game’s worth by its hours of game time. While I can see why someone would do this — especially if you don’t have much money and want the best bang for your buck — I completely disagree. Obviously, a 60 hour game isn’t inherently better than a 10 hour game, but you still find many gamers awarding extra points for hitting the 20 hour mark, and knocking points for being sub-six.

The amount of people I’ve seen claim games like Mass Effect or Xenoblade Chronicles as their favorite games of all time, then follow up that they didn’t even finish them, is baffling. I think it’s fair to judge a game negatively if you spend a good amount of time in it and don’t want to continue. They say you only get one first impression; if your first four hours of impressions don’t leave the player wanting more gameplay or story, then it’s fair to say they won’t be interested in where the game goes, and that it was relatively unsuccessful in some ways. Even if the endgame of Fallout 76 was the finest ARPG ever created, I would agree with someone playing the first 10 hours and writing it off as trash. Alternatively, judging a game favorably and even endorsing it with the same amount of game time makes little sense to me. If long-form storytelling and gameplay progression are major selling points of a long game, then I don’t think it’s fair to call it a masterpiece when those two things haven’t been completely investigated. You can’t judge a book by its cover, nor can you put it on the Best Sellers list if you haven’t finished it.

You may think it’s unfair to judge a three hour game by the same metrics as a 30 hour one, but the fact of the matter is that both are finished products and should be evaluated as such. There’s an expectation for RPGs to be long, but they don’t have to be, and they certainly don’t have to eclipse 50 or even 100 hours. That was a conscious decision made by the design team, and that decision should be criticized as much as any other in the game.

I’m not at all saying that long games are inherently bad, nor that RPGs are. What I am saying is that the longer a game is, the more difficult it is to maintain a high level of quality throughout. A longer game means more content — more characters, animations, music, mechanics, spells, monsters, bosses, areas, everything. And if it doesn’t mean more of all those things, then it likely becomes stagnant, and bores the player through overexposure. If you know you’re going to make a long game before development even starts, then keeping players engaged for its entire runtime should be a high priority from day one.

This focus on keeping the player engaged for dozens of hours usually results not in creating a fulfilling overarching experience or story, but in creating an addictive, consistent gameplay loop. It’s best exemplified by MMORPGs — we can talk all we want about FFXIV or whichever WoW expansion winning award upon award for their narratives, but it’s clearly not the main story that’s keeping millions of players playing and paying every month.

And I know what you’re thinking - not creating a fulfilling overarching story? But I love [blank]’s character arc! The storyline in [blank] is one of the best stories in gaming, bar none! There are some good ones out there to be sure, but it’s nowhere near a 1:1 ratio. The level of storytelling in games, even at their height, is still miles behind other mediums. So: was it that well-written, or did you just spend a lot of time with it?

As subjective as the quality of a story can be, it’s more often than not personal investment that creates those long-lasting, positive memories. We’ve all seen big TV shows receive an outpouring of love from innumerable fans when it’s finally announced they’re on their last season and think, God, they were still going? People still care about Grey’s Anatomy? You put 50 hours into Persona 5, haven’t finished it, and bought Persona 5 Royal?

There does need to be a reason to keep coming back, to keep players soaking up this world and its characters for hours on end. Funnily enough, it works quite the same as television; those gameplay loops last roughly the same time as a primetime TV show. These 30-60 minute loops in TV are simply a story within a story; the narrative of the day, within the narrative of the month, within the narrative of the year. Games somewhat mimic this narrative-wise, where each story quest is an episode. But, they have to work a little harder than that due to their interactive nature.

The more recent, concerning trend of loot boxes have a direct ancestry within RPGs. Play game. Get loot. Fanfare, sparklies, items. Things that just feel good to the human brain, direct positive feedback as a result of your actions. Not that RPGs themselves are as manipulative as loot boxes, but they tap into the same part of the brain to keep you playing, even when things aren’t particularly interesting. The wheel of explore-fight-loot has to keep turning, and is much more important than any amount of storytelling. Even games focused entirely on story like Dragon Age end up this way, where the central “fight” of the equation is replaced with “talk”. It’s not the quality of the writing nor the combat that matters — what matters is that you feel rewarded for taking part in it. From there, you’ll ascribe quality to the cycle (and therefore the game overall) based on your enjoyment of the reward process.

The gameplay cycle is king in games, as the schedule is king in television. Consistency is what drives loyalty and obsession, and a certain level of obsession is outright required to spend 100 hours on anything. Making games this long successfully is about the art of creating an obsession. But… why? If games this long are so difficult to keep interesting, so expensive, and require so much development, then why even bother? Why not focus on making a handful of medium-sized games a year instead of pouring years of work into just one?

Because they’re the only ones that can. Recently, indie and “AA” developers have garnered more and more attention and accolades in the gaming industry, bringing us a host of talented, small developers, the likes of which we’ve never seen. They’ve proven time and time again that a clear vision is more important than resource access. Even if concepts didn’t become diluted and dissonant with hundreds of people working on them (and they do), AAA is AAA for a reason. These are multi-million dollar companies where the bottom line rules all. To paraphrase one of my favorite video reviewers, Joseph Anderson: it used to be “Wow, we made such a good game, and we’re making so much money!” but it’s become, “Wow, we’re gonna make so much money if we can just make a good game.” He was specifically referring to Activision-Blizzard when he said this, but it applies to every AAA studio. They have access to money and resources that are mathematically impossible for the human brain to comprehend. It’s the singular advantage they have over smaller developers, and therefore, the one they must leverage to maximize profits. The reason there are so few MMORPGs compared to other genres, the reason that indie games are short, and the reason densely interactive open-worlds are a relative rarity is because of the sheer amount of money and time they take to make. Money to pay managers, artists, writers, voice actors, animators, programmers, pay for the tools to build the games, run them, test them, pay the testers, pay for food and rent while the game is being developed and therefore making no profit, and the list goes on. It is the one type of game that is completely infeasible for smaller studios to make, meaning it’s the only space where AAA can still thrive. So it goes, every AAA studio is only concerned with one of two games, say them with me now: excessively long open-world RPG OR party-centric multiplayer game with limitless content.

We’ve seen within the past ten years or so how AAA has made this pseudo-genre a mainstay, often by inserting it haphazardly into existing franchises. The open-world-RPG-ification of Assassin’s Creed is probably the most well-known, not because of its stark departure from the gameplay of previous entries, but because Ubisoft’s much-maligned flagship franchise finally took a break. But it wouldn’t be a trend if it was just Ubisoft doing it, as much as they’d like to think it is — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild did the same thing, as did Jedi: Fallen Order, and even Square Enix with Final Fantasy XV (not to mention the artificial lengthening of Final Fantasy VII Remake). If you can’t beat em… don’t join them, just beat them with your wallet.

I’m positive that every individual employee of these monolithic companies is just as passionate as any solo developer, maybe even moreso, honored to be working on such large, iconic projects. But you’ll forgive me if I don’t feel the influence of the person who programmed the grass to flutter in the wind, or created the rigging for a spider. They did a great job! But, these games are not ones where individual contributors are considered impactful, or even human. Not by me, mind you, but by the big decision makers. These games are built to make money first, and everything else later.

It ties back into the conversation of crunch and exploitation that runs rampant within the gaming industry, one we’ve been having more and more lately. If AAA games could be made by robots, they would be. If they didn’t have to be (at least somewhat) fun to make money, they wouldn’t be. On an executive level, there is no concern for the humanity of the project, whether it be the players or the developers. It’s the very same passion instilled in fans that comes to drive developers; many of whom are fans themselves, people who dreamed about being in the gaming industry, who hustled their entire lives just for the chance to work on their favorite franchise. With extremely limited exception, they’re underpaid, overworked, and burnt out. There’s a reason the average age of game developers is so low compared to adjacent industries. The AAA machine is designed wholesale to chew them up, spit them out, and ask them to say thank you afterwards.

These games are not sustainable. Our invisible backbone of developers take the worst of it by a country mile, but that’s not to say that doesn’t also apply to players. How many of these games can you juggle at the same time? How many of them have you finished? How many breaks did you have to take? From start to finish, was it months, or years?

It’s commonly accepted that any long game (particularly RPGs) will have a section in the middle, sometimes as long as 20 or 30 hours, that has to be “powered through”. The explore-fight-loot cycle extends on a meta level, past the player character to the player themself. The honeymoon phase is over, and now you have to battle your brain and your screen-bleached retinas to finally receive your reward: the final boss and resulting grand finale. You have to eat your vegetables before you can have dessert. Unfortunately, the side you've been served is a Blue Ribbon carrot the size of a fucking skateboard.

While I think most people would balk at the thought of eating a carrot cake for dessert right after that, just as many would take it home and put it in the fridge. Personally, I don’t think I could even think about carrots for months after such an endeavour. In fact, I know that, because the last game with a 50+ hour main story I actually finished was Bravely Default, which I played almost 10 years ago, when I was 13. You likely have different tastes than I do. Recency bias is a hell of a drug, just not one that I find myself particularly fond of. If the last thing you experienced was this gourmet carrot cake, this wonderfully thought-out final boss with an equally genius design, followed by a 20-minute cutscene that gloriously depicts the culmination of all yours and the characters’ efforts… I could understand how you may forget or brush off that you didn’t really enjoy nearly a quarter of the game. The reward was excellent and the investment great, so the process must have been, too. I wonder how fondly Rockstar Games employees remember their overtime after Red Dead Redemption 2’s incredible sales allowed them not only extra pay, but also legendary accolades within the industry. Sometimes the results were worth the journey not because the journey was truly good, but because, on some level, it had to be.

There’s a lot about this topic that frustrates me, perhaps the most that creators should be allowed to make games as long or short as they see fit, with no corporate oversight. And, they should be fairly critiqued by fans and professionals alike for these decisions; evaluated on a whole instead of hour-of-content per dollar. It’s frustrating, too, that the experiences provided by the largest, richest, most resourceful companies on Earth are converging not only into the very same thing in general, but that that very same thing is so vapid and manipulative. I want shorter games that are less bloated and more measured; I want tight experiences that don’t kill the people who made them.

All things considered, I do believe in that eventual outcome. As the accessibility of game development and the industry itself grows, the AAA sphere, in a way, shrinks. The areas in which they can succeed only decrease as everyone else becomes more capable; and in those areas, even more casual players are getting burnt out — especially as the games grow more and more alike in an attempt to save time and follow trends. Conversely, the aforementioned indie renaissance is in full swing. More visible for players, more accessible for developers, and only improving as the medium advances. Even as the industry slowly and deliberately lies on its own sword, the people its structures excluded still exist. They’ll keep making games. I hope to play them someday.