Just had to rant about this. All respect to Will, he seems like a guy I could have a beer with but we’d probably be stuck arguing about this for a while before we left the bar.

I have 185 DAYS playing Fallout 3, 996 hours in Baldur’s Gate 3, over 800 hours in Civilization. What people are tired of is so called AAA gaming companies releasing unfinished trash and claiming it’s great. Tired of those companies relying on paying customers to bug test their stuff. When games start being made for the love of gaming again people will notice. Overhyping the hell out of every game isn’t doing the industry any good whatsoever.

It’s the exact opposite for me it’s why i am looking forward to KCD2 being 80-100 hours. As someone who loved Witcher 3 i found Cyberpunk too short till it got it’s DLC. I hate when games come out and its 15-30 hours personally.

I have over 900 into BG3 – never bored.

I’m definitely fatigued of open world 100+ hour games

Couldn’t say it better. In a year and a half I have 700 hours in BG3. I’ve done so many runs including multiplayer runs and MULTIPLE honor mode runs (including some fails). There are a shocking number of clears according to steam achievements. It’s just fun playing different build and figuring out where to go first and what items help complete the puzzle. If I were to pick up starfield again there would be none of it. Long games aren’t the issue.

Hell look at cyberpunk, 70k daily users 5 years on.

Even while playing an engaging jrpg like persona 5 I am tiered at 80 hours in.

I am at a point where I drop a game if the main story is too long (red dead and Witcher 3 for example). I might love the game but I am not gonna stick through so many hours

You know…I can kinda see it because I currently stopped playing games like Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Dragon Age inquisition because I didn’t want to spend over 100 hours and just kept playing games like Cuphead and Gas Station simulator because I can beat them in less than a day

As I grow older I definitely agree with the developer. I think there is definitely a very substantial market for smaller, more streamlined high quality games. For example I love BG3 but it’s taken me 3 months at this point to be in the beginning of Act 3. I am enjoying it but I also would love equally a game that takes half the commitment

I’ve got to agree with him. I’m sick of it. It was fine when I was younger but there’s too much other stuff I’d like play as well and time is running short.

I know that the comment section is filled with sickos saying they spent 100000 hours in cookie clicker and have no regrets, but, I do think most gamers don’t finish games that are as long as BG3 (go ahead and check the achievement stats on your favorite platform and see what a small percentage of players even make it to act 2). BG3 is a great game, but it is also true that most people don’t want to spend 100+ hours on every game. Like y’all need to realize you’re not everyone and everyone doesn’t agree with your niche opinion. Most adults in this world don’t have enough time to accomplish their real life dreams much less play all the 100+ hour games that release each year. Yes, some of the issue is how repetitive and pointless most games with that much content are, but that’s not the whole issue and if you think it is I envy your free time (but probably not your social life).

Hello, I am 61 and have been playing video games in one form or another for almost 40 years. I have nearly 50 games in my Steam account and none of them are short games. I like to get value for my money, I have 500+ hours each on BG3 and Medieval Dynasty to date. I play MD every day as I did with BG3 for months (I now only play it every now and then as MD has completely grabbed my interest especially with all the new updates). I still play Emperor, Pharoah, and Zeus sometimes and I bought them decades ago. I think these game companies are worried about revenue so are trying to gaslight us into believing that we don’t want engaging games, however, just because I play hours and hours of one game doesn’t mean I wont buy another if it looks good enough. I am especially looking forward to losing many weeks to The Bustling World when it comes out. xxx

If the game has the content in it to do 100+ hours like in fall out 4 & dragon age: Inquisition. I just find some games very lack luster, unappealing & or bit too short despite the graphics being good like: Tales from the borderlands, new Tales from the borderlands & SpaceMarine 2 these game to me were too short for a single player game despite there also being multiplayer mode in at least 1 of these games while only extends its play-ability a wee bit if thats what your into

it depends on what mood I am in 🙂 Sometimes I just want something to pass time with (solitaire, bejeweled 3 etc), sometimes I want to immerse myself into a game and then a longer with good story is prefered.

If I drop $60+ on a game, I damn well better be able to play it for more than 100 hours.

Huh?? NO! Rogue Trader is fantastic now that Owlcat has rubbed the bugs out, BG3 is a clear statement that needs to explanation. Elden Ring is a blast and captivating, Xenoblade on the Switch is a masterpiece, etc…

He may have a point

Tbh, I’ve barely gotten past act 1 in bg3. I’ve only gone as far as just before Malus Thorm but I keep finding reasons to restart and try a different class or race. And honestly, I don’t mind it.

Over 1000 hours in BG3 so far. Still having fun, still finding new story elements.

Which way, gaming companies; BG3/KCD2 or Starfield/Veilguard?

Gimme a game I can lose myself in, and I’ll play for hundreds upon hundreds of hours.

No, people just don’t like shitty games.
If a game is done well, it could take 20 years to complete.

Give me my long games. If theres only enough content that it’d only take me a day to get through, its too short. Keep me busy for at least a week and a half to two weeks

Wow a lot of game developers must have sore backs… I mean I would too if my head was that far up my own arse like them

Cyberpunk was a game with a very short base game limit, hence phantom liberty’s popularity, BG3 and Elden ring can’t get boring, but AC Odyssey despite how open the world is, doesn’t have the same gravity, it’s not a bad game, it’s just not as fun as other big world games, maybe they should listen to more gamers or gamers who play different genres of games, because we are not tired of long games, we are tired of less than desirable games that are marketed as the new best thing, I am particularly uninterested in silent protagonists, pay VAs, record more than 50 lines and see how much people invest in them, write a complex and long story, we want to do quests that are not just “shoot and loot” but have lines, have stories, connect to the rest of the game, we don’t need an entire galaxy of emptiness, a few solar systems with interesting quests would do better

We’re sick of playing Skyrim remakes. Which itself are remakes of Oblivion. It’s been copies of copies for 20 years.

I won’t bother playing any more elder scrolls or fallout in that ancient, boring, hardly innovative and provably inferior Creation engine trash.

That dies or the franchises die. I couldn’t face another slog when better games have better engines and much more playability, now with better stories and acting as well!

Byethesda.

It should also be noted (generally), that blaming their consumers for their lack of success in an industry they once dominated: not a good look!

Better 500+ hours of Baldur’s Gate than 10 hours of Starfield for me 🤷

400hrs in BG3. Finished it on vanilla. My second play through ive downloaded 70+ mods that include races, classes, geat, spells etc etc. My favorite class is Death Knight. Im playing Durge now.
Truly an amazing game!!

I AM tired of 100+ games and would rathe rplay 35 hour games.

I have thousands of hours in BG 3…. does this answer your question?

ye i know im up on 300h on POE 2 …

I would put 1000 hrs into a good game
Starfield isnt good . Thats the bottom line.

I think Bethesda has somehow been transported into a parallel universe

There’s room for games of all different time investments, the point is , are they good ?

I am tired of dumping hours into games that aren’t good or games that just require obscene amounts of time like daily or weekly grinding. Tired of games having all this content locked off in DLC, season passes, timed events, etc. If a game is good/ enjoyable, I will spend time on it. It just feels like every game now days is either a time dump or a money dump. I played starfield for 30 hours and paid $30 to play it early on the gamepass and it wasn’t worth it. Then they have the balls to drop a creation where half of it is locked behind a paywall, and when you do buy it the weapon included doesn’t even work right. Everytime I brought up any criticism about the game, some bethesda soy boy would just say ” Oh you just need to put in (X amount of hours) then it gets fun/better” that’s not a good mentality to have either. Bethesda and many of these AAA studios have been lacking for years and it needs to be acknowledged, don’t get me wrong publishers make horrendous decisions but so do developers.

Some game dev: People don’t like this
Reactor: BG3 proves you wrong

It’s truly amazing how many myths about gamers BG3 destroys

I don’t think people are tired of 100 hours+ games. I think the issue is quality.

Personally I actually PREFER long games. The reason is I am a bit tired of having to adjust to new mechanics and gameplay each time I buy and start a new game. It is much more relaxing for me starting up the game when I am familiar with its mechanics and overall substance. Skyrim was one of these games, especially due to all the mods available letting me customize almost everything. I loved starting the game after a long day being able to get away from daily life.
But these long games simply have to offer me a high quality of both depth and dilemmas, goals and role play options. Otherwise I very quickly discover that I am utterly bored and to some extend feel cheated in spending my money on something unsatisfactory.

Regarding Starfield: I think Starfield’s general design is well made. It’s pretty easy to play and get around physically in the sense of controlling your character. What Starfield lack is the charm of the game world. There are no real interesting role play options. There are no memorable characters.
As a European I also don’t really think cowboys in space is a very attractive element. The entire game feels scraped and more or less unfinished. The main idea is good, but the reason for playing this parallel universe story forever doesn’t satisfy me at all. There are no good vs. evil in the game. It is too PG13 in order to have some real impact on a mature audience.
And I simply don’t understand why Bethesda didn’t look at what kind of mods were the most popular for both Skyrim and Fallout 4. I would have expected them to have at least one eye glued to those.

To me Starfield is a mediocre game based on a good design with lots of possible options that could have been implemented but never was. Skyrim and Fallout 4 are still three or four times better than Starfield.

But I also have to give credit to Bethesda for trying to get into the Sci-fi area. With games like Mass Effect and Star Wars already setting the parameters is was a brave thing to do, but it is also a reason Starfield fell to the ground. Starfield simply couldn’t offer the intense excitement these previous games did.

On a different note I am very annoyed with Bethesda trying to implement their paid mods. By updating and changing the games to fit in their mod store they ruined many people’s games (games which they probably have spend years to perfect) they made a lot of people frustrated and even mad. I used 3546 hours on Skyrim and 7142 on Fallout 4. I don’t play them anymore due to my mods being destroyed. And after Starfield arrived I am very hesitant to buy any Bethesda games in the future. I just can’t be sure they won’t ruin more games. Just like with Bioware I can’t be sure they will actually offer quality content anymore.

[EDIT]
PS. By saying I completely agree with MrHulthen on 99% he says I don’t have to write it.

WHAT DESTINY 2

i have 6 full 100-200 hours playthroughs for BG3, and i cannot agree more with you. BG3 makes me personally play it so so much from the begining again and again and again is simply this: the game is so vast you cannot experience every each opportunity in even 5 playthroughs! and add well written characters to it whom share users pains and traumas and MPCs that can be brought to our camp, saved for good, killed for good or redeemed too? lets go go go!

No I’m getting pretty tired of shitty half assed bethesda games

Hmmm…I played Starfield and I played Skyrim 😊 in Skyrim I have about 900 hours, in Starfield I have about 300 hours. Starfield is not a bad game, but I agree that it’s getting repetitive and kind of boring very quickly. Now let’s take Cyberpunk2077, I have 1000+ hours there, I have played the game 5 times from the start to the ending doing everything and the game is still interesting to me. Why, because it’s engaging even if it’s repetitive.

I also agree if you make a compelling game play loop, people will play for a lot of hours. Three of my most played games last year were over 100hrs and right now in the Nioh 2 I have over 500hrs and counting.

Baldur’s gate 3 says hi!

I’m a grown ass man soon hitting 40 with a grown ass job, a grown ass family and two grown ass TTRPG campaigns I’m GMing. My free time is too valuable to spend it on trash games, especially 100 hours of trash games. I however had 425 hours of fun with multiple BG3 playthroughs over the timespan of about a year and I gladly spend hundreds of hours in any game that respects my time by actually serving up compelling gameplay and/or narrative. Starfield ain’t that.

Yes, Metaphor, Elden Ring Baldurs Gate 3. All Game of the Year material known for their short playtime.

This is so out of touch it make me mad lol

The fact that bethesda doesnt see a diference in quality with extra content in a game like baldurs gate makes me lose complete hope for TES6

Only took them a dozen or so years to figure out that 100hrs of playtime isn’t the same as 100hrs or *fun* playtime

If I have to grind for 100+ hours to just get gear, deal with crafting, etc. – no thanks – I’ll pass, over that. However, give me a good compelling story, some action and fun and 100 hours is nothing. The problem is most games don’t fall into this category.

I have almost 1600 hrs in Bg3, and God only knows how much in the Mass Effect universe, and Witcher 3. I didn’t even finish Starfield. I tried. Over and over and over again, but I couldn’t find anything engaging in Starfield. The story felt, to me, pointless and boring. Add in the endless loading screens, the empty planets. And the empty characters. Nothing made me care. And the thousands of procedurally generated planets, don’t get me started.

Maybe I’m an oddball, but give me a world that’s purposefully crafted to be a part of the story, a story that feels genuine and characters who feel like real people, flaws and all, and I’m in. For hundreds of hours.

That’s one out of touch dev I just got bg3 for Christmas and I can’t put it down there is so much to do in comparison to Starfield and I’m not running into a loading screen every 3 minutes I liked starfield for a time but mad without mods it’s a lackluster experience.

Its completely misleading. We are tired of 100 hour boring fetch quest games that have little to no story one that is so insulting to the players intelligence (Looking at you Veilguard!) that we have little desire to continue playing to the end. I still love going back into the ME trilogy, Dragon Age Origins and DA2, Oblivion and Skyrim, Fallout 3 and New Vegas and even Fallout 4. Ive spent thousands of hours in those games because they are fun and immersive. Baldurs Gate 3 is a rare current gen version of those and it has been persecuted as something games should not expect nor actually enjoy.

From his perspective he is probably right but that is because he cannot design a game that captivates the audience by having exciting good content. Doing chores and repetitive grinding is not fun but I put like 150 hours into my first playthrough of BG3 and a similar the second time. I have not ever been bored. I did 20 hours of Starfield (and have played the older Bethesda a lot like Fallout 4) and it was not engaging but lots of issues that constantly took me out of the immersion. I guess the proverb “As you know yourself you know others” is apt here.

I’m retired, so have a lot of free time. Four games, 1200+ hours each. A dozen or so, 250 to 450 hours each. That’s just on Steam. Thousands more hours on older games before I discovered Steam in 2012. A good game, like a good book, draws a person back eventually.

“A large section of growing section of the audience is becoming fatigued at investing 30-plus, 100-plus hours into a game.”
*Literally everyone disapproves*

So that’s the dude that gave us crappy quests? 100hrs of it?
Get the ropes!

We yell at them that we want quality, and they yell back about quantity.we around the world speak many different languages, which one is it going to take for devs to understand what we want?!

People are tired of 100 hour schlock. Games like BG3, Elden Ring and even shorter games like Astro Bot have shown us that when you prioritise quality over quantity, the length of the game ultimately doesn’t matter. I can invest hundreds and hundreds of hours into BG3 and still feel like I have only scratched the surface of the rich content it offers, and games like Astro Bot show that even shorter 20-30 hour investments that are so polished and creative incentivise replayability up the wahzoo. I would gladly replay Astro Bot over and over with the amount of joy that game brings vs the next Ubisoft drivel

Right… just like that Sony CEO said that singleplayer games were dead; and then Cyberpunk 2077 sold over 30 million copies. Baldur’s Gate 3 also comes to mind…

But sure, I guess their elusive ‘modern audience’ has the attention span of a goldfish and as such they need short simple games for their simple minds.

Now I’ll be the first to state that I am fully against 100hr games if the majority of the time spent is wasted on meaningless nonsense. However, I’ve spent over 700 hours in Cyberpunk and still love going back in and starting it from level 1 again. Same thing with Baldur’s Gate 3. I love big games where I can just spend my time as long as it is enjoyable. Games with 100hrs of pointless bloat is not what I’m looking for however (like we see in Starfield for example).

edit: What matters is the *quality* of the content, not the quantity. If there’s 100+ hours of quality content then I’m very happy.

On the 4 plays of BG3 I’ve done I have a total of 983 hours. Because it’s engaging. Because every new play I find things I did not find before whether it’s dialogues, areas, side quests. Content is engaging, and consuming. Writing matters, pacing matters, exploration for the sole purpose of enjoying the world matters.
Bethesda, or so I thought, used to know this. Now they are in group denial. No wonder when BG3 dropped so many of the AAA studios crapped their collective pants and warned gamers not to expect the same kind of production from them. 25 years in the making, it said. Larian had a fair few less years involved in dev for BG3. Pull up your big boy pants, AAA studios, and get down to real work if you want to win gamers back.

If a game has 1000 hours of engaging content, I’ll spend as long as needed to engage with it. A year or three? Sure. Almost 500 hours with Witcher 3 with NG+. Yup, no problem. Something like 450 hours for Mass Effect Legendary to run through with both of my Best Girls? Did that, too. 400+ on BG3 and still finding new things, you betcha! Almost 1000 hours in CP’77? Man, I love mods!

I think I can say I disagree with the sentiment.

Bethesda is cooked. TES6 is doomed.

They better start shortening that price tag along with it then cause I’m not dropping $70+ on a short 10 to 15 hour game.

I am trying a solo run of No Mans Sky. I am enjoying it much better than Starfield.

i might be starting to agree with that Dev While i love a lot of thses huge games like Skyrim/ Witcher 3 BOTW/TOTK/ Dragon age I notice the Achievements where only 25% of players get passed the half way point.

Ive put over 100 hours into a LOT of games, Even Linear ones. If the game is good, I will continue to return to it many times over.

100hr of BG3 is a slice of time on an entirely different plane of quality compared to 100hr of Starfield.

They put their game, head to head with BG3 and were found lacking. Now in Larian’s case Swen is just based so he wanted to give them some space to cook. Which is why he pushed the date up. They are still mad about that to this day. Look at the concurrent players, the modding scene, etc… Both BG3 and Skyrim beat Starfield everyday. Starfield released the creation kit, no one cared. Skyrim fills a page of new mods everyday without fail and that game is going on 14 years old. To be fair even BG3’s modding scene gets dwarfed by Skyrim’s but again it’s had 14 years of people just straight cooking.

My 900+ hours in Elden Ring says differently.

Agree with you, I never planned how many hours to play any game. Some games just make it hard for you to put down the controller and stop playing if after 300 hour of gameplay. Some game makes you question your life’s decision after just 1 hour of playing it.

This makes me remember when some company said “people are tired of single player games so we’ll only make live service multiplayers” 😂

Personally, I’m perfectly fine with shorter games as well. Some of my favorite games are bite sized. It all depends on how long the content can keep my interest. The problem is with long games that are boring.

i put like 1300 hours into 7 days to die that a game that worth it but rpg or games that require 100 hours it has to be fun and engaging no matter what if you put stuff in that boring and just like silly stuff all the time it be wearing you down

Well… I am in my fifth run of BG3. And I am already planning my sixth. The probability I will do an eighth run is around 99%.

And yes I know i just jumped over the number 7. Because, you know, there *will* be a seventh run!

100 hours games that are GOOD, feel like no time has passed at all, the number of times I’ve sat down for a game of Rimworld and suddenly realised that it’s now 4am, or the first time I played thought Baldurs gate 3.

They really don’t get it, we will happily play Long games… but only if it’s worth it, if it’s good quality and if the effort is there.

Not a fan of that dev. He’s also the dev that made factions pointless by having people join them all with no consequences. So, yeah, he’s WRONG.

I’m tired of 100 hour games.

Absolutely. I don’t ‘consume’ a great game. It consumes me.

a game should offer at minimum 1 hour of content per dollar the game is sold for, good games get a 5:1 hour:dollar ratio or better.

I put over 100 hours into Skyrim and into FO4. As others have mentioned, we as gamers don’t mind 100+ hour games, but they need to be good 100+ hours, not 100+ hours of the same fetch quest, or do nothing missions. Maybe the subtext here is Will saying they don’t to write 100+ hour games or 100+ hours of story, which is fair enough, just say that instead of speaking for the gaming community.

I get people’s feelings that if a game is good people won’t mind spending hundreds of hours but I personally agree with him, in the sense that modern AAA keeps following this trend of going bigger and longer and it’s becoming ridiculous and unsustainable and it does turn people like me away from playing or finishing many games because of how overwhelmingly long they are. With my limited playtime I don’t want to spend hundreds of hours or a good part of a year in just one game no matter how good it is, but maybe it’s just a me thing. Even my favorite games like Mass Effect I have only replayed a couple of times and taking long breaks between games otherwise I’ll burn out no matter how much I love them.

Him using Mouthwash is such a false equivalency because Mouthwash has a tight and very specific story and themes it trying to tell, of course if you added in side quests that had nothing to do with that it wouldn’t work.

I csn definitely vouch for that. BG3, Witcher 3 & CP2077…..I have hundreds of hours logged in each of these games, due largely to the fact that, as soon as I finish a playthrough, I find myself wanting to play again almost immediately-despite my efforts to try and play other games in the interim.

Just one word to that:
Persona.
Smh.

It not really either or, I take a long time to finish longer games, plus if they dumb a lot of the side quests then sure I will just roll through it. I will play both long and short games, can take ages and ages to finish long games and exploring, honestly need to step up my finishing off them, but I am a fan of both types of games and what I play is in response to my mood. If the world, side quests are interesting, people will play them but I also make time to play games but cus I am an adult life stuff can take up times.

100 hrs in BG#, easily done. The stories and lore are engaging….i’ll happily lose way more time (and have).
100 hrs in ESO…been there, i have thousands at this point. Still haven’t seen and done everything.
100 hrs in Enshrouded – easy done
100 hrs in New World – sure – if you don’t mind the crafting level grind (seriously the last 50 levels suck) and if you happen to be a solo player, you miss a load of content because it’s locked behind group instances ( i refuse to pug…..i hate it in ESO too).
That said, i know some younger players who skip thru quests, and story – like never read it – then don’t understand what they are supposed to do, or what if anything they missed. I don’t think it’s the games in many cases, but the players themselves. Older players seem to be more happy to ‘get lost’ in the stories, where younger ones just want to ‘get thru’. It’s almost as if everyone has ADHD – got to move to the next, next, next thing……
Yes loading screens are a pain (bethesda!) but i think a lost of my personal issue there comes from my connectivity to servers on the other side of the planet…..Seriously, living Down Under has it’s disadvantages – ESO EU server 383ping baseline and US server is 180 up – i won’t go into others….

Invest 100+ hours in a game?

That’s only an issue if there’s not enough actual game, otherwise I’m getting 100+ hours of game, rather than 10 hours.

I’m sure there are some people who would prefer a good 30 hour game to a good 100 hour game. If Will thinks that’s a growing segment of the audience then he should provide evidence, not just vibes.
A big factor with how long people play a game is what is mainly driving the source of enjoyment of the game. If the main source of enjoyment is the story then few people are going to replay that game over and over. A tight, shorter game is often better in this case. But if it’s the gameplay itself that is driving enjoyment then people will play for hundreds or thousands of hours, and they’ll still want more.
One of the dangers of Will’s sentiment is that it won’t just be used as an excuse to explain the poor performance of some games, it could also be used by AAA studios to justify shorter games. They’d love to make shorter, cheaper games they can still charge full price for (a form of shrinkflation).

I’m tired of costly games that either do not respect my intelligence or that are unable to give me at least 1 hour of play time for each 1$ they cost.
They want 30 hours long games? Sure, at a 29.99$ price tag. Don’t try to sell me that game at 79.99$.

“Bg3 proves otherwise” yeah cool, question is how many people actually PLAYED 100 hours of BG3, cause that game is kinda infamous for people not even leaving act 1

700+ hours in baldurs gate and I loved and still love every last second

Starfield extremely boring game,fallout 4 I got over 2.5k hour gameplay done already. starfield 0 hour it just looks and feels empty uninteresting by watching someone else playing..

kinna tired of Dev’s blaming the player base for their creations being crap at story or enjoyable content.

People are tired of having padded out 100 hours games where the content is just there to make you play for longer, look at games like KCD you don’t see people complaining about the length there

I love a main story to take 50ish hours and the rest adding up to 100-150… If im not fully feeling a game after 50ish hour Ill set it down and come back in a few weeks when Im ready. I mean I also never rush the main story and try to explore everything in an area before moving to the next.

I strongly disagree

I beg to differ with the argument that Bethesda’s design is “outdated.” In the fact, the opposite is true: Bethesda’s problems stem from the fact that they keep trying to venture outside of their traditional style and try something different and innovative, falling flat on their face in the process. Fallout 76 was an attempt to update Fallout series by making it into an always-online MMO, ignoring the fact that they had no expertise in making such a game and that, in any event, that particular game genre was antithetical to what the vast majority of Fallout players wanted: a traditional single player game. Then they made Starfield, which was them trying their hand at a game with an entirely different map than the one in their previous games. Instead of one vast, entirely hand-crafted world, it would be a thousand procedurally-generated ones… all of them bland and uninteresting. If Bethesda had simply made the games that their fans actually wanted, i.e., another single-player Fallout game and a new single-player Elder Scrolls game, then they would have been enormously successful and pleased their fans even if they still had the jankiness and bugs people have come to expect from Bethesda. That’s just part and parcel of those games.

Wow, what a stupid thing to said. The problem is not that the game is 100+ hours long, the problem, is how you fill this 100+ hours.

There’s something to be said for the gamer that picked up Morrowind all those years ago and thought it was pretty awesome (because it was back then) who now has two kids – and about one or two hours a week to game. And while he didn’t reference this demographic specifically, it is growing as we all age.

Your point easily taken, though. It’s myopic for someone coming from Bethesda to say that, generally speaking, we don’t want long adventures any more. It’s just not true.

I would happily put 100 hours or more into a game if it was quality content. I played over 2300 hours of Skyrim.

I dislike spending $80 on a license to play a game that takes 8 hours to beat. These devs keep trying to gaslight us.

…
I’m about to reinstall Morrowind, and I still have Skyrim installed.
These Starfield devs don’t play their own game. PERIOD. If they did, they’d know how mid it is.

Umm… I’m not a big gamer and I don’t play much these days but like I have around 95 hours in bg3 for just one of my characters and I’m still in act 2 …
Idk maybe people are just tired of long games which feel like a waste of time with nothing new happening??? Not just long games in general??? Idk man :I

I think players want 100 hour games (or at least some of them do), but done right. Games with CONSEQUENCES. Bethesda kind of sucks at consequences in a lot of their games. They seem to want to let you do everything in only one play through. Give players games that have alternate questlines depending on what they do, and they will happily play a 100 hour game even if it leads them to the same basic ending. Give them different ways to solve puzzles like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, which is 25 years old, I think, and people still want to play it because there’s 7 vampires clans and they all play differently even though all of the quests are basically the same.

If people want to make the same choice every time, let them. But give them significant things to do differently. As a kid, I played the Quest for Glory series. It was the first game that I played with a choice between warrior, mage, and rogue. Each of those classes play differently and have some different strategies available for solving the same puzzles. Do that. Do more of that.

And stop making games where I can do everything all on one character spec.

When you play for five hours and it feels like an hour, that’s when you know you’re invested in a game. When you play for an hour and it feels like five, that’s when you know you need to move on. It has nothing to do with the amount of content, but more to do with the quality of the experience.

Every game I play is pretty much a 100 hour plus game. In the last decade, they just haven’t been Bethesda games.

I think that all us collectively hate on Bethesda because of reasons beyond Starfield, loading screens and bugs. I think we all can recall a point were we found ourselves insanely bored while playing a Bethesda game but kept playing anyway hoping something fun-that-never-came was around the corner and wish never to be trapped in that feeling again.

No, people are sick of bloated 100 hour games of which 50 hours or more are just grindy filler content.
I’d gladly play a 50, 30 or even 10 hour game with a limited scope setting and a tight and snappy story with a satisfying ending over an 100 hour epic full of needless, repetitive grind which runs out of steam halfway and just becomes another drudging slog to play through.
People just don’t like playing through artificially stretched out lackluster and generic content.
But if they can feel the passion of the developer in every bit of quality content, they’ll gladly sit through it all and demand seconds anyday!

I am not paying $60 for a 15 hour game from a triple A studio that seems too struggle with their own identity as a studio. Seems like as mentioned another excuse for having a game that would exceed 100-hours but lack gravitation(get it space) to pull in an audience they thought they did. I will be gonest I thougbt Starfield was going to be Fallout in space but with aliens and interstellar conflict. That flare wasn’t there for me.

I know what Larian can do, I know what Arkane(much hope for the fired devs) can do, I know what Capcom with the RE engine can do. But I don’t know what Bioware can do. I don’t know what Bethesda can do.

I’ve been playing bg3 into Act three and saying all the different decisions that you can make as well as being able to miss out on recruiting some extra companions can you play bg3 multiple times and get many different results as well as playing with multiple classes even without mods I still see it as something that is going to take a while to get bored of

I am playing baldursgate still with my boyfriend, my niece and sometimes my nephews and I am still seeing new scenes. We have easily 1000 hours in.
Like did you know that as a durge, when Alfira comes to your camp and you do not have Astarion in your group he will hit on her as soon as she starts playing with “So…want me to give you a tour of the camp? We could start with my tent” but then he gets shut down friendly cause Alfira is already in a relationship with Larrisa. So Astarion insults Alfiras tastes…which makes what happens afterwards a)even sadder b) gives you a reason why the rest of the group will believe you about a certain thing that happens and blaming Astarion for it.
That game is insane when it comes to possibilities and hidden stuff.
No quest is mandatory, a bunch of stuff is missable and you’ll only notice it in your next playthrough. It’s how in game exploring and questing should be and there is no wrong way to play.
It still blows my mind, that depending on what you said 30 hours ago or how you handled something can completely change your dialogue options even with smaller npcs.

It’s honestly weird to see the level of tone-deafness many game devs have, not just about this aspect, but about everything. To see all these super popular long run games gaining more and more popularity, and somehow have the takeaway of “These long games are huge right now. People surely must be tired of them and want shorter lazier games!” is genuinely insane.

The way I look at it, games are getting so expensive that if I can’t get at least 100 hours out of one I can’t justify paying full price. For me, the difference between Starfield and Fallout 4 or Skyrim is that I don’t feel like I get my 100 hours of enjoyable play out of 100 hours of Starfield, the way I do with the previous games. Not only is Starfield’s content less compelling, but the game is less mod-friendly so it’s harder for modders to add more in a way that really draws you in.

I didn’t play Starfield but I watched some gameplay. It looked really boring and shallow with copy paste assets. I do play Skyrim and the non questing has interesting dungeons, good loot and good fights and the quests are varied and interesting even on repeat play through. That’s the difference.

Yeah, I gave it 80hrs but I was just grinding mats and got bored of the main quest. Space combat was ok, ship building was fun, but once I heard the ending was just do it all again I was done.

We’re also tired of Skyrim like graphics 2025! I mean Mass effect legendary edition had better graphics than Starfield. Bethesda bought way too many gaming IPs and forgot their passion for games. It shows. Todd Howards comments about not having a strong enough PC also doesn’t help. Drop the arrogance and get back to creating legendary games. We all want long episodic open world games with replay value! You don’t need a data set to figure that out. You better hurry the next 4years are going to suck and I need a get away! Preferably a 10000 hour legendary journey!

Not me. I like long games. I want my money’s worth.

I’m tired of 100 + hour mediocre games, there is the difference.

It does seem like Bethesda’s recent games, which normally are giants, have been declining in popularity. And you can expand that out to some other giant games like Ubisoft products. But, yeah, it seems to be more a case of those particular studios not really meeting expectations in ways that have nothing to do with the amount of content. Clearly some of the biggest sellers each year are giant games (And, yes, some are short as well but that has always been the case – It’s no new trend).

I have no idea why he thinks Souls-likes are on the decline though. Even beyond Elden Ring continuing to get engagement, there’s a reason why developers keep releasing Souls-likes.

Its a damn shame this is the lesson they are learning from starfield’s reception, this blaming the audience thing was old news 5 years ago, but seems theyre never gonna stop

The fuck we are… I want 200+ hour games.

My perfect example to epitomize why Willian Shen is wrong comes from FFXIV’s Dawntrail expansion. This is a MMO I’ve happily invested thousands of hours into but the aforementioned expansion had a very sharp drop in writing, lazy class updates and on the whole was very disappointing–to the point I barely log in outside of raid nowadays. Instead, I’ve been replaying BG3, plan to start Cyberpunk and considering a Witcher playthrough since I’ve never played it before.

The point here is a bad product is what people are upset over. Not the length of said product. If Starfield was actually worth 100+ hours, nobody would complain about it.

Yeah when it’s a boring ass repetitive game 😂

Nope didnt play starfield cause idc and looked like shit. I asked for es6 in 2012

I have over 10000 hours in Skyrim and am still playing it. This is because it’s a beautiful, handcrafted and engaging experience and with mods I never have to play the exact same game twice. The same goes for Fallout 4 with over 4500 hours. I have only 95 hours into Starfield because it is only a mix of the former 2 games with a bit of space themed gameplay. The never ending load screens kick the crap out of any immersion and the gameplay is just bland. Starfield was sold as a game but is in fact a framework so they can milk the player for more money by selling them separately the bits and pieces that make up an actual game. My Skyrim has over 750 mods installed at a cost of zero extra dollars. To do the same with Starfield with the mods locked behind a paywall would cost a couple of thousand dollars. No game is worth that kind of money. I think that for most players it’s not the length of the game but the amount of content contained within it that keeps players interested. We are not fatigued by larger games, we in fact eagerly embrace them. We are fatigued by the hype surrounding a games launch only to purchase it and find that it’s a buggy mess and a hollow shell of what was promised. To all the developers out there, if you want to sell a game make a game worth buying and playing. It’s as simple as that.

He’s tired of it therefore people are . He’s logic.

Meanwhile I have 1k hours on bg3

And yet games like Overwatch, No Mans Sky and Palworld are popular games that people have put hundred if not thousands of hours into!
I had over 200 hours in BG3 and over 3000 hours in No Mans Sky and over 1000 hours in Fallen Enchantress!

Skyrim / Morrowind in the future. Kind of like Warhammer and 40k. Same races, gods but a glimpse of what the distant future would do to the sometimes feuding factions and their superstitions.
Finished game idea…easy.

The worst thing is they don’t have to make 100 hour games. Make 30-40 hour games with the option of future expansions that are also 30-40 hours long If they are good, people will buy them, if they are bad, you haven’t spent so much money on development, just make sure that the cost of buying the game is commensurate with the entertainment, say a dollar an hour, same for the Expansion.

I think Starfield might have been OK if the content had been compressed into maybe 10-20 systems with a min-game for interstellar flight. Then gave expansions adding 10-20 more systems. Particularly since my biggest grievance for Starfield is how it’s purely an American Culture, implying that only Americans “left” Earth, for which my response is “F you!”.

I don’t mind a short game if it comes with a short game price (< $30). And I love a good 100 hour game with legitimate content. I just don't want a 30 hour game padded into a 100 hour game with tedious grinding and repetitive task-based sidequests. The quests need to tell a story, not just "Take item X to person Y at location Z." Or, "Go to --- and kill all the things."

Apols MrHulthen I did a big ranty rant. Have deleted. Completely agree with your points and most of the comments here.

if it a good story that is immersive then i definitely do not mind but if its 10 hours of story and 90 hours running around yeah im here for the experience not to run around like in at work add some cool side story’s instead of generic quests and please for the love of everything make it multiple choice that fact that i couldn’t save the starfield dlc people or have multiple choices ruined the already terrible dlc for me

I’m kind of with him on this. ME2 is one of my favorite games of all time and a person can do a completionist run in under 50 hours. I’ve put thousands of hours into both Bethesda and BioWare games. It comes down to a balance of quality and quantity. If the quality is good enough, companies don’t need to pad with quantity. It seems as if companies have found it cheaper/easier to stretch gameplay out rather than make gameplay meaningful. It’s kind of like choosing between a 4-hour film where little happens or a 1.5-hour film where it’s intriguing from start to finish.

I have 2000+ hours in Monster Hunter World. If you make it they will come. If you make it good, they will stay.

Starfield was an attempt to create an Elder Scrolls game in a space setting instead of fantasy. That would perfectly work in 2010s but not today. It’s simply outdated and if they use the same formula in Elder Scrolls 6 again it will be a failure too. It’s like making quests where you have to collect 10 flowers or to kill 5 wolves, this shit just doesn’t belong into our time.

I also want to add that there is a high quantity in 100 hour games, but the quality for a lot of them is mediocre or ok. we dont have time to take a leap of faith every new game that comes out, that’s why we are so critical these days. Especially when we are busy still playing a 100 hour game we started playing a 2 months ago.

I think we do need to start making more shorter games in the AAA space and slow down on producing long ass games because we have enough of them for now. That does not mean we should stop making them all together as if “no one wants them”.

We all still want them.

We are still excited for the new Witcher and Monster Hunter game, but if we have 40 other games just as long coming out but are not as good, Im sorry, those sales are gonna tank because we are already spending our time and money on better games.

It’s not long games. It’s bloat and poor quest design. It’s treating your customers like idiots. I don’t care about the length. I want quality.

lol irony… 100 hours of nothing burgers is what we don’t want. The best games I own I’ve clocked 200-300 hours in. If I’m charged $70 it’s not going to be a one and done.

I’ve played great games that were 7 hours long and great games that were 150 hours long. It wasn’t the length that made them great, it was the quality of the game itself that made it great. It’s just as easy to make a terrible short game that no one wants to play as it is to make a long game. It takes real effort, care, and proper direction to craft a game that people will want to play and replay.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is simply the most recent example of when effort, care, and direction come together perfectly. Is this game everyone’s cup of tea, no, but will it be continued to be talked about and used as an example of quality for years to come? Certainly. And it’s length has nothing to do with what’s made it great.

I’ll say this: I definitely appreciate games on the shorter side (~30 hours) as I get less and less free time nowadays with uni and life. Though if a 100+ hours of game is JUST THAT GOOD then I’ll find the time to play the shit out of it, like with Baldur’s Gate 3. Can’t say the same about Elden Ring as combat hour 1 is the same as hour 100 + the loot is underwhelming 99% of the time. The reused bosses wouldn’t be a problem if the combat was more fun, like Nioh 2. Also saying ER has “quests” is funny. It’s technically not wrong, but souls “quests” have always been the worst and most obtuse. At best you’re getting a invasion/reverse invasion and at worst you’ll get a few dialogue lines before the NPC moves to the next dialogue spot.

Honestly, I am sick of most games being 50-100 hours because most of the time they feature empty worlds full of repetitive side quests and padding. On top of that, because of their size, they’re usually less polished and have more bugs and robotic animations. I’m also sick of games cramming an open world in where there shouldn’t me (looking at you Mass Effect Andromeda). Some of the best games of all time are hundreds of hours long, but they were successful because they were good games *first* and justified their length.

I actually do want to see more 10-30 hour games with consistent quality throughout. Astro Bot is the game I’m most excited to play right now because it focuses on quality over quantity.

👀

As someone who’s about to reach their first 100 hours in BG3, I’m always happy to put 100’s of hours into a game that’s worth the time to sit and enjoy.

The problem is that most developers these days have gotten so out of touch from reality, that they would say things like this.
If a game has great content, where the side quests feel almost if not as important as the main quests, where gameplay and exploration felt great, then it wouldn’t matter if it’s 10 or 100 hours.
Bread taste nice when you’re very hungry, but be offered 100 slices of that and you’ll get sick of it very quickly.
Give me 100 slices in total of variety of bread, donuts, pie, cake, cookies, cheese cake, sweet potato fries etc, and i’ll eat it all even when i’m stuffed. (I’m writing this while i’m hungry btw).

Also. Har levt i sverige i över 30 år. Har aldrig hört talas om de där med badkaret. 😅

I have 2100 hours in Cyberpunk 2077, 2900 hours in Monster Hunter World & 1600 hours in Need For Speed Unbound and I’m still playing those games because they’re good. Unlike Starfield which is just bad and not worth 5 hours.

bros never heard of the praise baldurs gate 3 got

im not tired of 100 hour games, I just want good games whether theyre 20, 40, or 200 hours. Starfield just kinda… sucks. It’s a soulless time sink. What I dont want is generic boring repetitive content that extends a game to countless hours when none of those hours are really special or memorable or well-written.

Yesterday i finish my first play trough of BG3, it took me 260.1 hours. Finishing it i felt, happy and sad.. i had the best ending, i was happy to see everyone reunite, for the last time in the camp. And i was sad it was over. To me they all became friends, so 5 hours ago i did start the game all over as Dark Urge, solo run. And died .. so have to start again. I love this game.

Cyberpunk 2077 is super short in my opinion.
Especially when looking only at the main story.

I am right now on my 13 playthrough of BG 3, 3 more already planned, just because i love the story, the interactions, the different outcomes and the freedom i have. Even if i replayed my favourite arcs again and again, i can try different class combinations, and they all have so much to offer. If a game feels empty, i will not do this. Bethesda needs to get better at so much different levels and i feel like they are just sad that they are not everyones favourite anymore

So, I respect the rant, but I actually watched the interview, and that answer wasn’t even about Starfield, it was in direct response to a question the interviewer asked about how he (the interviewer) had been hearing from a lot of devs that very long games are very difficult to make and not necessarily performing well. I don’t agree with a lot of what William Shen said, but I think there is a salient point in it to understand. I love long games, I have hundreds of hours in many, many games and as a long time rpg fan and MMORPG player I love long form games, but the reality of production for those kinds of projects also needs to be taken into consideration. BG3 was in production for six years, and three of those years it was in early access; that is a huge amount of time to be developing a single game. It’s also a huge risk for a studio to put all their eggs in a six year basket; if that game fails to find a market, the studio almost certainly closes. Unless you have a publisher or parent company that can absorb that loss, but that comes with a lot of strings too and can cause huge issues in actually making the game your studio wants to make and not just what the people holding the purse strings is the latest and greatest thing at the moment. Larian took a huge gamble making BG3, and it deservedly paid off, but their studio most likely would have closed if BG3 hadn’t succeeded, and the amount of time they could spend on niche variants and outcomes was almost certainly because they had no publisher demanding they cut or diminish focus on parts of the game that a tiny minority of players would ever see.

I think there’s an argument to be made that smaller more realized and fleshed out (rather than bursting with 40+ hours of mostly filler content that has little narrative or gameplay value for the player) is a more sustainable way forward in the current ecosystem of game development. Not that we should have no 100+ hour games, just that most games should maybe try to hit 30-40 hours of really good content instead of 80+ hours of mostly middling content.

As someone with a save that has 13days 8hours on Starfield i call bull💩on that one. Im guessing this guy is making a short game right now and that’s why he said that.

Starfield have 10 hours content, and 100 hours of copy paste planets.

If I don’t get 100 hours out of a game. I’m pissed.

No way, wish Larian would bring out the next 200 hour role playing game tomorrow.

You maybe call me a filthy casual, but I am part of this crowd that likes shorter games now.
But I totally understand some people aren’t like this, and the market is probably big enough for the 2 types of gamers to coexist, with different studios catering to different target demographics.

If a game is 100+ hours, I want the content in the game to be fun for that time. I’ll GLADLY play the game til there’s nothing left if it’s fun!

If you fill a massive game with chores, boring stuff and inconsequential busy work, I won’t want to stick around 10 hours, much less 100.

I have almost 900 hours on BG3, and half of that amount on all three Mass Effect games combined. The problem isn’t long games, the problem is having long games with no meaningful content and repetitive quests no one likes.
Larian put a lot of love and care into BG3, a lot of content and options to explore, which makes it very replayable. What’s crazy is that I’m still finding new things despite being in my 6th playthrough. And I’ll continue to play it again once patch 8 comes out.

I love 100 + hour games I put in 160 hours in my first Stalker 2 playthrough and have another 41 in on my second. I also have 2400 hours in CP 2077 and twice that in Skyrim and Fallout 4(Yes I have no life LOL)

I play a lot of short games….I also have over 120hrs on my main save of BG3. I will say I am hoping Elder Scrolls 6 doesn’t flop. I was hoping for something more drop in/out style for ESO and while I did enjoy ESO/FO76 at first I just can’t get myself to jump back in for more than a day or two. One of my favorite games after high school was was Temple of Elemental Evil another D&D based game, I have been wanting something similar for a long time….BG3 did not disappoint me. I would love to see another Larian produced D&D based game. Side note about Starfield: I feel it had potential but was missing a lot…I can’t say what really but the feeling is there. I did find it awesome that I could visit the St Louis Arch though.

That’s a nice excuse for laziness.

No no no, I WANT MORE of such long games. BG3, Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, Minecraft and more are amazing, I want more of that! What I don’t want is shamelessly bland, badly written, buggy, repetitive, generic, copy-pasted garbage like Starfield.

So… as a loner 34 year old – i dont want to play 100hr games – on weekdays. I play roguelikes and cardgames like hearthstone. But ibalso play Elden ring, final fantasy, world of warcraft etc.

It’s actually the opposite for me. I’m always disappointed when I look up the run time for a game I’m playing and it’s anything under 40 hours. The only games that can pull off being like 20 hours long, is stuff like resident evil and other survival horrors. If it’s anything like an RPG, it’s gotta be at least 80 hours for me. My first bg3 playthrough was 179 hours and I loved every bit of it.

BG3 I spend 900h and more Will come with update 8.

Gamer of 47 years experience here, and I agree with you 100%.

Dev of a game that did not sell well tells people that they don’t want games that do is what I got out of this.

Same thing over and over …
I belive its about time to leave this topic behind, and let natural selection pick wich studios wont survive.

I beat bg3 in 80 while messing around and compelting the companion side quests. And bsing -minthera
So 50-90 is under 100. If it was longer though i wouldnt mind up to 120-150 hours.

Some games are too long regardless of how good they are. Starfield is too simulation heavy though to much feel like a chore

No, I’m good with 100 hours of gameplay as long as the game has good stories and plots, fulled out worlds that are full of content, and proper characters and choice of character via ineffectively creating your own character. Games that I would invest my time are games like Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption 2 or Ghost of Tsushima.
I dislike games that, in effect, are empty worlds/games filled with fetch quests and collectible feature characters that are flat. or nothing more than a girlboss or hero that is nothing but a Mary Sue or Gary Sue, and as for games that feature the message, I game to escape, not told he/him, they/them, etc. This is not part of a fantasy game. and break forth wall.

I disagree, and would agree with devs. BG 3 and a few others are exceptions. I would like my average game be shorter. And on sone occasions play a really big game. This mania to make everything bigger, longer, open world, adding another ‘A’ and another price point to the budget is not good for anybody.

Developer with a bad take. Shocking. Of course this idea also goes in their favor. What a coincidence

So does Kingdom Come Deliverance. Both games. I played at least 1500 hours of the first one, and some people already have 30+ hours on a review version.

Hold on 3000hrs in Conan Exiles, 2000+hrs in Skyrim, 2000hrs in Bannerlord, 200hrs in BG3 (1 and a bit plays only just got it really). Sod that I want a game i can enjoy and get my monies worth and not get bored.
Enjoyed Starfield for a bit but got bored after 30hrs. alot of run here, loading screen, run there, loading screen, talk to him, voice glitch and long loading screen

He is just a shill for BGS to support BGS doing as little as possible to extract money.

As long as the content is good, the game can be as long as you want. I aint paying $60-$70 for a 3 hour game, though. If it doesn’t make 20 hours, then it should be below $40. 10 hours or less below $30. 5 hours or less will get at most $20 from me.

We just say he’s talking shite but I like yours better seems more polished

It’s total nonsense.

I played Ghost of Tsushima for 100 hours over like 1 week without even trying. I was so immersed that when I had reached 100 hours and beat the game, I couldn’t believe it.

He is gaslighting people.
Playtime or length is not the problem; developers lacking the creative drive and talent to make an engaging game that can capture the attention of the player is.

I’m fine with playing a 1000 hour game. What I am tired of, are; cheap time sinks like preschool puzzles, lazy writing, real life politics ingame, bullet sponges, unfinished and mechanically broken products (unless its a crowd funding thing), cut content to double dip in my wallet and stuff like this. Make a good game and people will buy it. It is that simple.

I would be inclined to agree. As a father I would love a game that I can finish in three weekday evenings and a weekend afternoon, but I would expect to pay not more than a fiver for the experience. If I am paying north of 40 quid/euro/dollars I expect to have significant amount of content and a high level of replayability. I call this the 90’s approach to gaming.

Bull cacao! Don’t want to play short game

Actually I agree with him people are making up a different statement and replying to it his statement was this people don’t want to play games just because they’re long he used war of the Warcraft as the example it’s not very good game that is really long so people can get invested into it.

He did not say people don’t like quality he did not say people don’t like long quality games he just said that people will not play games anymore just because they are long and that is 100% right I think people need to stop trying to make up a response and then extrapolate from it they just need to listen to the original response

Rant on, Commander. You are telling the truth!

No no we are not. We are tired of horrible written games. Let’s be honest Starfield was poorly written and boring to play. I have over 1500 hours on Skyrim, The Long Dark, Farm Together 2, and No Man’s Sky, just to name of a few games.

Maybe when homeboy makes a fun game he’ll have a point.
Length isn’t the issue, Starflop is just ass

I think the problem might be that Will Shen (and others with similar opinions) isn’t asking himself “why” this phenomenon he claims is happening might be happening.

Is there a rise in shorter games? Maybe, but are those games being made by AAA studios or by indie studios with possibly less resources and more incentive to standout? Are gamers looking for shorter experiences? Maybe, but what is it about 40 to 100-hour games that are supposedly no longer appealing to gamers? What about Starfield made it less successful in comparison to successful long-running games, if the only meaningful criteria is game length?

These are some questions that probably should have been asked before making a bold, public claim (especially when BG3 exists).

even 10 hours in Starfield is too much,considering how boring and shit that game is

You can enjoy short and long games…. if they are good games

Would gladly put the time in. Just not in BGS’ current day slop.

People will spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on a good game. Close to 500 on bg3 close to 900 on rdr2. Mass effect i got in the thousands.

Baldur’s gate 3, Skyrim, fallout, red dead redemption (1 & 2), Minecraft, literally ANY GTA game. Games full of quests and content, need I say more???

Lol I have 400hrs on bg3 and 120 hrs on metaphor refantazio. He couldn’t be more wrong they just need to make games enjoyable.

Those people don‘t Understand the difference between correlation and causality.
Yes, people offen are tired of Games with More than 100 Hours of Game time. Because those Games in the past few years had a tendency to be complete garbage.
The Same People will Gladly Play 100 Hour Games of pure Entertainment.

Larian: Hold my 150-hours a Playthrough Game

I’m not surprised by another out-of-touch dev blaming their problems on the players. first off, i dont consider 100 hours a long game. to me, if ur gonna charge $80, thats getting ur money’s worth. a long game is BG3, that took me 350+ hours to complete. what sux is charging the same amount for something like diablo that only has about 30-50 hours of story gameplay, then they want u to buy “season passes” or subs. this trend has even moved into casual games like disney dreamlight and sims. thats the BS i’m sick of. i’m not an endless ATM. i want to buy a complete and finished game, and choose if I want to buy DLCs or not. i dont want to be forced into a sub to play the game, or to buy DLCs in order to get an ending, or things that should have been included in the base game. their problem isnt my lack of attention, its their blatant and boundless greed.

Under 100 is the noob number in simulation games.
Good simulation games are at 1k+ hrs of enjoyment.

Is he braindead or something? How is he in such a high position and says such nonsense? I can not believe they actually meet their targets. Somebody must be financing them anyway in the background

He is wrong, and Bethesda sucks… so meh..

Not necessarily tired of long games, just tired of boring stories, bad gameplay and the stupid dei crap of course

Honestly the “you don’t want to put 100 hours in it, you just do” is the reason I’ve waited 1 year to try out BG3. I knew it was a game I would’ve liked, but I knew its length. It really felt like I *had* to put that many hours in it. And it took me a while to want to invest the time.

Those 100 hours have to be filled with meaningful content with effort put into it rather than ai or random generation. Key point: Mass Effect Andromeda’s procedurally generated quests vs Mass Effect 1’s side quests from NPCs like Nassana or Kahoku. Give quests some story and choices to get players invested. Taking away agency just has the negative effect of going on rails and busy work.

100 hours doesn’t get you out of Act 3 in an Owlcat game. And each one seems to do better than the one before. And yes, there’s BG3, Elden Ring, Witcher 3.

The problem is you actually have to make a world worth exploring. A story worth telling. And Bethesda hasn’t done that in a LONG time. Just like Bioware has forgotten how to do so,

Im about to cross 450 hours in bg3 because its just that damn good.

Bethesda just keeps demonstrating that their games are not good enough anymore. If they tried to release Skyrim today, they’d be laughed out of the room.

Once again, major top level developers learn entirely the long lessons.

The fact that they cant see the forest for the trees is concerning. Clearly this person has personal insecurity about his ability to write for long times because otherwise he would know that people like long games and short games–as long as they are good. People are happy to play longer games so long as the devs have the time to complete them and make them good all the way through. Most devs dont have the time nor budget to make a long game, so make a short game! That’s not fans being tired of good quality, lengthy games!!!!!

what we’re tired of is hundred- *gig* games, not hundred-hour games. BG3 is awesome, but being able to make out Astarion’s individual pores doesn’t add to the experience at all.

I have 7000+ hours in just 3 games. I am retired, master of my time but also on a fixed income. I want my games to last.

Yeah yeah, good and all but.
Most importantly, what travel does the bike have, front and back susp, and what tracks/trails do you ride? What terrain do you like?

The attitude behind this devs statement is a huge red flag. Bethesda is cooked

This video seems very ignorant of other viewpoints. Just because it doesn’t apply to you doesn’t mean that those people don’t exist. Not everyone has time to spend hours a day every day on a single game, so I can absolutely understand how more and more people might be getting frustrated with single-player games getting longer and longer.

I bout bg3 in September and since then I’ve spent almost 1k hours on it and also bought a steam deck to mod it. I want my games to be long lasting.

This feels a bit like you’re focusing on that one comment instead of the greater context. Which isn’t to say I disagree with you, not in a general sense, but what he said had nothing to do with Starfield’s staying power or lack thereof, it’s about the fact that a lot of people *don’t* have time for 100+ hour games. Most players never finish them–BG3 is no exception since last I checked less than half of all players make it out of Act 2 and another sizeable chunk quit early in Act 3–or it takes them months, maybe years, to do so because they burnout and move on to other things.

Nothing he said was a negative about 100+ hour games, he was just making a valid, data-proven point that shorter games will appeal to a higher number of people and there’s plenty of room for them, too. And even if there wasn’t actual data to support that statement, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence. I’ve come across so many posts about how people have abandoned games like The Witcher and BG3 because they just didn’t have the time or the level of investment required was burning them out

There’s nothing wrong with recognizing that there’s room to appeal to more than one type of gamer. And I say that as someone who is approaching like 700hrs of BG3 (and only one completed playthrough lol, I quit Act 3 early the first time too). That’s nearly a month of my life and while I have no plans of putting that game to the side anytime soon, I also know I can’t do that with every game. Which is true for most people with jobs/families/hobbies/friends/etc.

Yes, it’s a quality thing, but it’s also very much a time thing. *Some* people will absolutely be able to dedicate months, maybe years, of their life to a game. But they’re an anomaly.

I gladly put 100 hours and more into interesting games with great stories and characters or have other engaging game mechanics. I will not do so if they are bloated bubbles of nothing or monetized to hell. I have to say though that now, that I am over 30, a lot of my friends are not willing to invest that much hours into a game anymore. Most of them love games and gladly sink time in games like BG3 or POE 2. But they have kids and jobs and sometimes they really struggle with finding the time for their dearest hobby. For a company that wants them dollars from working class dads you can clearly see why they now come up with that “Our games should be shorter” – less work, less pay of devs, growing money flow for less dollars thanks to casual Andies.

Tbh I’d like RPG games to be a bit shorter by focusing on quality over quantity.

I have 600h in KCD1 and I have just started a new playthrough… no, I am not tired of good long games.

I would love more games that only last for 10-20hrs of gaming with a really good story. I haven’t finished a game in forever because I lose interest over time and don’t feel like I have enough time in the day to play a game I know is going to end up taking 80+ hours. Don’t get me wrong I have loved some of the games like bg3 that are long but even those I haven’t finished

Starfield was not too long, just trash.

Well that’s one dev that is clueless. Give me a 500 hour game as long as it’s a GOOD game not this modern day trash.

No. The game could easily be slowly played over 1 year. Starfield was attacked because sony playstation users were so upset they turned literally into terrorists & hijackers and trojan ponies review bombing the game making the community expect that shattered space was going to change the game into a fp64 or fp128 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 with 1600 planets offline, or online with minecraft styled servers people could host, with space flight simulation and seamless loading on a series s with the havoks physics engine managing all those assets, and massive space fights, quested pois etc etc which not even Star Citizen has managed to begun to bring in 2023 let alone delayed but ready to roll in 2021. Had it been on the ps5 but delayed by a few weeks, we might have had less bad review bombing.

100% in agreement with you Mr. Hulthen. Happy to put in 100 hours if it’s high quality.

Great take. Keep up the good work. I have 100% Starfield and really would not recommend it to anyone. I appreciate it for what it is, but it is not up there with the great games.

I don’t care how long a game is. As long as the game is GOOD. This is pure Bethesda nonsense most likely propagated thanks to Todd…who can’t seem to understand what this community wants.

People are tired of BAD 100-hours games. But they’re also tired of bad 10-hour games. People are tired of bad games! I really wish developers on failed projects and corpos would stop trying to explain away their failed endeavors by blaming the audience for not liking something that was supposedly “objectively good” according to the statistics drawn up by the suits down in marketing. Refusing to own up to the fact that your product just wasn’t as good as you’d hoped is almost as annoying as insisting the Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring have made gamers expect too much by deliberately being “too good”.

Stop making focus-tested, paint-by-numbers, superficial and aggressively mediocre slop and maybe your audience will come back and reward you. But as long as your products are platforms for additional purchases before they are artistic experiences with heart and soul, don’t act surprised when people shrug and pass them by. And stop acting like it isn’t your fault. Not this guy specifically, but the industry titans who prioritize maximizing profits above the creative process.

we are tired of BAD 100hrs games. Here almost at 2000hrs in BG3, so no, we are not tired of long games, just bad ones

I’ve never played any mods for any games but still, my bg3 is over 1500 hrs, ER is about 200hrs, Zomboid is 300hrs, Wartales is almost 300hrs, I dont think players are easy to fatigue after 100hrs playing, it’s just the game don’t provide anything anymore or its formular are too boring

2200+ hrs in BG3 and im still finding new conversations and endings I’ve never seen before.

Length isn’t an issue as long as the content is good.

We’re tired of boring over expensive games that have no respect or care for the gamers not long games l my self spend 630 hours on few games just this past year

Nah im just tried of paying 30+ dollars for shitting games.

I spent over 100 hours on Persona 5 Royale, The Witcher 3, Skyrim, Fallout (NV & 4), BG3 and many more, i sit through that time because even when Ive seen it all, im still invested in the world building, the lore, the combat

I have gone from Helgen to Whiterun hundreds of times, I have romanced Tali in Mass Effect in almost every playthrough, i have fought hundreds of thousands of enemies no matter how simple they may be, I do that because I love everything about what those games do that brings me to them and happily spend loads of them dedicated to enjoying that

While Starfield is fun at a surface level, there isnt as much below the surface the really kept me playing, i liked the shipbuilding and the UNC Vanguard questline because it went into depth on those Terrormorphs, the questline was cool but way too short and i honestly wouldnt mind if it had more priority over the bland “go here, get that, bring it back and repeat” style main story

The only 100 hour game people are tired of is Starfield. One of the worst games I’ve ever bought at full price.

People like having fun. As such, people will play whatever’s fun. “Fun” is certainly subjective, but it’s also possible to give something to everybody without alienating entire swaths of players. As an example: let’s say you make a porn game and everybody in the game is a female with huge boobs. You have nothing to offer for people who aren’t attracted to females and you have nothing to offer to people who don’t like huge boobs. Back to normal videogames, it’s very easy to narrow your focus to an audience so small that it can’t become a shared experience, which is the thing you’re aiming for.

Have over 1000 hours in bg3, over 100 hours in witcher 3 and elden ring. If the game is enjoyable will gladly sink in over 100 hours.

He’s a little right.
The Mass Effect games were long enough.
Games can lose replay value when you know they are going to take too long.

Says who?!?!? lol 😂 if your game is boring as shit. I don’t want to sit doing something low key boring for 100+ hours

why would i listen to anything a starfield developer says? they clearly have zero idea of what gamers want.

Dunno, a good game always feels you wanting for more, a bad one makes you tired after of it after not even seeing everything it can offer. And i even replay games like Persona 5 or Metaphor, games that easly go in the high 2 digit hour count per playthrough. Wont be replaying Starfield tho, wich is funny cause the one interessting gimmick the game had is based on replaying this shit

take the mass effect franchise, or the metal gear franchise. very different games but people loves those tittles and will play and finish multiple times either to get better score with their experience or to see what ending/what interaction with their favorite characters get. its not about playing for more than 100 hours but about living in those 100 hours, you feel like you really are commander Sheppard and playing for 100 hours is just part of the experience.

That’s why nobody bought Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. Oh wait 😬

I have 600+ hours in BG3. I also have an unused Starfield code that came bundled with my GPU.

Maybe if you’re a piece of garbage casual trash from cod used to 70 dollar 3 hour campaigns but for actual gamers that wanna get their moneys worth that’s definitely false. If the the time is too short I never buy it at full price.

I miss getting lost/immersed into a game for days on end. I love Bethesda because their games have the most established history of me spending MONTHS in the worlds they create. ES: Oblivion/Fallout3/ES: Skyrim/ Fallout 4 ands yeah even Starfield had me for a good while… it just didn’t have the love the previous games had. The slow mobility, unbalanced skilltree progress with some perks being mandatory and others useless waste of points, the endless loading screens, the empty feeling of some locations and also silly layout of pirate hideouts being the first encounter when walking outside a major outpost… broke the magic formula that Bethesda themselves had created.

Hopefully these companies will listen, however I suspect more are going to have to go under before they get the message. My favorite games I’ve got over 1000 hours, over the years, in each of them. so clearly a game with an engaging story, characters, and interesting side content will hold my attention, always seems to be a new thing is discover. My most recent new game was bloated with boring combat, little story, poor writing, poor character interaction, and I had to force myself to finish it as it was the conclusion of an arc, but it sure was pretty and ran well. Will I ever be back to it? No. So I hope the companies listen as I do hate wasting my time on a substandard product, and, believe it or not, am willing to buy and play a good product.

Of course 100 hours. It’s the most bang for your buck. 70 dollars for a game that I’ll play and be done with in 20-40 hours seems like a waste. Replayability, creative freedoms, and engaging gameplay are what make games like Mass Effect, Minecraft, and Skyrim so good.

More Bethesda BS. They love excuses.

Meanwhile me with 1k hours in Rimworld.

Look at Buldars gate 3 a fantastic game with lots to do! Never heard of such garbage spoken by penny pinching incompetence!

A game be long isn’t the problem. .
I love games that I loses myself into.
The quest and storyline to be a lot better. No direction in narrative.
Walking around in starfield killed it in a bad way. Then they added bugys. There are way too many stones. The bugys you can’t tell there was no thought in design.

Playing Baldur’s Gate is like spending a day at the amusement park, there is always the next ride to enjoy.

Starfield is spending the same day walking down the street, you might see a robbery or a house fire but the excitement is few and far between and the whole thing feels more like a chore than an adventure.

My guy, I’d love to put 100 hrs on a game that deserves it I’m 31 with a 4 year old… my gaming time is very selective nowdays so if I’m buying a game it better last me for 100 hrs of FUN mind you, like the SMT series, Persona, Mass Effect… like nowdays I only buy a few games a year so shit’s gotta go right

I love these type of games, for me what I am tired of in some of them like games from Ubisoft I am just really getting tired of meaningless filler side quest

I am on my umpteeth playthrough of BG3, and will probably start over when patch 8 comes along (and breaks all my mods).
I have a total of 3 hours in Starfield. I started it, felt like I was in 2008, hated it, and left it.
I am all for biiiig games, and I am looking forward to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and GTA6 (maybe) this year.
But I also love smaller games that have a good story/characters.
It just seems like AAA companies, not just Bethesda, can’t accept that they FUBAR’ed. Instead it is the gamers, the shifting trends from when they started, etc.
If Bethesda believes that we don’t want big games, great. Then start making smaller ones. Maybe you can figure out how to make a fun game that only lasts 8-12 hours.

I mean the recent epic failures of BG3 and Elden Ring sure were exemplary

The dev is wrong. They learn nothing. WoW devs famously said, “You think you want it, but you don’t.” He was wrong beyond any reasonable chance of simply making a misstatement. I enjoy a game that goes on and on, as long the content is interesting.

I love long open world games like horizon. It gives me a world I can fall into. I just want a game I can immerse myself in. I’m really hoping exodus is my next one. Starfield looks like it just can’t face that it made a poorly built game. I want my next game to let me play for months on end and then replay will a different experience

Quality.
If you build it, they will come.

You expressed it perfectly, “nobody planned on spending hundreds of hours into game X”. I did not plan to spend hundreds of hours to CP2077, Baldurs Gate 1-3. I did not plan to replay Half-Life 2 and Thief 1&2 every few years. They are just so damn good games, that I feel like immersing myself in these games over and over again.

There’s a serious lack of story telling in RPGs. Even halo reach had a better story than so many newer games and thats a FPS. I love long games with depth. But the trend of pushing out buggy games before they are adequately tested, poor writing, poor voice acting, and making your character nothing but a go-fer with no impact of choices on the main story or impact with other main NPCs… Well it quickly becomes nothing but a grind. I’m a mom, my daily responsibilities are often a grind. I don’t want my limited recreational time to also be a grind. The game companies need to take a hard look at the mid products they are pushing out, invest in their teams, and do better.

Different genre entirely but, I have over 4000 hours in Rimworld and that game doesn’t even have a story written by the actual devs. People will play what they like for hundreds or thousands of hours, if the game is good. I can respect Will for the work he’s put into his games but, goddamn that was a shit take. I really don’t think devs should be looking at numbers and asking “do gamers want THIS?” when they should just be making the game that THEY want to make. If the game is good, then people will play it. Don’t chase trends, because then you end up with trash like Concord.

I do not think at all that Starfield “failed” because of this, but I definitely agree with Mr. Shen, I see this all around me. Especially when trying to get commitment from my friends for playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I have literally heard “I don’t want to spend hundreds of hours on a single game, I’d rather play a bit of Barotrauma with you guys that start a BG3 campaign” from my friends. It’s simply easier to commit to an hour of “episodic” gaming than an hour of “serialized” gaming. But of course, if the game is good enough, there is enough incentive. We did get to complete BG3 after all. But it literally took half a year 😀

As a single father of 2 I don’t have a lot of time for video games but when I do I will gladly spend them playing a game that is worth spending time on. Over the past 5 years I’ve been able to play Elden Ring, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Balders Gate 3, Space Marine 2, Starfield, and my daughter got me back into Final Fantasy 14. I completed all the games except FF14 (of course it’s an MMO) and Starfield. Of The games I completed I absolutely loved them and Space Marine 2 was the shortest of all, at maybe 25 hours total, but it’s still a fantastic game. FF14 is one of my favorite games of all time (Ive been playing video games since the Atari 2600) and I will never complete it cause I’m gonna at it till it’s dead :). I have maybe 20 hours in Starfield and I haven’t played it in 7 months and probably won’t for some time because unfortunately it is very boring to me. As one Redditor you mentioned in the video put it ” Go to ship, loading screen, go to planet, loading screen, run 1000 meters, loading screen, get item loading screen, repeat…” There just wasn’t anything there it make me feel like I was supposed to connect and enjoy Starfield. The bones of a possible great game are there but it’s not close to complete in Starfield. So yeah I’d gladly lose 100+ hours in any game if the story is there and the game is fun. Casual games are great for waiting at a doctors office but they will never take the spot of quality story or character driven games that last 10 to 100+ hours and nor should they as most people can and will play both

ex starfield dev? bwahahahahahaha get lost.

I played Monster Hunter World somewhere between 1000 to 2000 hours. Players will gladly give their money and a shit ton of their time for a quality game. We are tired of mediocre writing, boring fetch/ kill quests and subpar mechanics. In my opinion games have 3 major aspects graphics, writing and game mechanics. Make your writing or your game mechanics stand out and you will at least have a decent game.

Okay, so my two cents is that Bethesda think this way because they make shallow games with profit as their priority. They’re always designing their games to appeal to as many people as possible. Todd Howard is not Sven Vincke or Hidetaka Miyazaki. He’s a businessman first, a gamer second, and honestly, even that’s debatable.

I’ve played (and am playing) ME trilogy, DA:Origins, and others for fourth and fifth times, and still surpassing 100 hours in all of those… that are 11-17 years old. And don’t get me started on KOTOR.

I’m OK with short games.
That is, if it isn’t sold for full AAA price.
Full price simply isn’t worth it for a game I can 100% within 48h play time.

The length of a game will not change whether that is a good game or a bad game. If bethesda makes a 20 hour tops game (not publish btw), its still going to be slop.
Bethesda has been pure dog turdslop since oblivion/fallout 3 and its only just now that people are waking up to that fact.

“Mouthwashing is good because its short”, for starters, its, a different genre, with a precise narrative goal it wants to throw at you, and it actually is just a bit TOO long (that last quarter drags as we really go crazy via jimmy), but calling games good because they’re short is massively misunderstanding why that ones good and why long games are good too, also, take into account Roguelikes, even games that ARENT long, will get played for over 100 hours due to pure replayability.

Idiots learning the wrong lesson. Gamers don’t like long winded games that are not immersive.

Nope. I play rpgs a lot and play them for LONG. That is the best cuz i can have memories and fun about how much i put into these games. Examples: Persona series, KCD, Baldurs Gate 1-3, Suikoden series, Eiyuden Chronicles etc pp. Have put hundreds of Hours into KCD for example.

That article reads like this to me:
“Nobody likes Alfred Hitchcock style movies anymore” states VFX lead of Birdemic:Shock and awe.

I actually bought Starfield during the Steam sale. I so wanted it to be good.

But it is SO boring. !!
100 hours?
I think I have 5 in so far, and finding it really hard to mentally want to play more.
The controls are not intuitive.
The mission is uninspired.
The mission goals are confusing.
The mission markers are confusing.

It’s like all the bad parts on No Man’s Sky + a very dull plot.

And the graphics are horrible. It’s super dark most of the time. Hard to see anything.

Argh.
Ok – rant over. Thank you.

Gamers are tired of Bethesda Games for reasons obvious to everyone but the devs.

They think their sh*t don’t stink because they refuse to accept any constructive criticism whatsoever.

Spend more time arguing with reviews than fixing their outdated games.

I’m already up to 1,500 hours in CP2077 with no signs of stopping. That guy is full of BS.

there’s some truth to it, imo – with only so long in our lifespans we can only play so many games and as time is a resource we MUST spend even if we (legally) acquire the game, a 2 hour game that’s absolutely dogshit is actually better than a 100+ hour game that just makes you feel nothing the whole way through, just because the time investment was loads shorter.

I am more than willing to sink 100+ hours into a game; but that game needs to be worthy of my time and the effort I put in (so: engaging story, incredible and well written characters, meaningful quests and side quests, enjoyable gameplay and music that’s memorable and is ear candy). Starfield does NOT meet those requirements and that is not my fault, I didn’t make nor did I direct or was involved in any of its conception or development. I’m glad gamers are speaking up and being like, “don’t blame us for not liking nor wanting to spend our hard earned money and time on such a lackluster and disappointment of a game; that’s all on you (the people who created it).

It’s like the same mentality when people blame a child for being born, that is solely on the shoulders of both parents not the child’s.

That is not quite correct. A game that entertains me can be even longer than 100 hours. The problem is that a number of games artificially inflate game time with busy work that inflates game time while not improving the experience. Some games make this even artifically worse, only to sell XP boosts to skip this content.

Suddenly they will make Elder Scrolls 6 a 10 hour game….

Can’t wait for KCD 2 to prove this argument wrong again.

16 times the bullsh!t

There is a grain of truth that hides a mistake. I want games that appeal to me enough to sink 1000s of hours. However the longer a playthrough is, the less likely I am to start up another playthough. I have played Dark Souls 3 many more times than I played Elden Ring. However each is at around 600h total playtime and I expect to play them more in the future. We don’t want every game to have 100h long playthroughs. Each game should be good, have a playthrough length that fits the game itself. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good example of a good game with 100h playthroughs.

Although even the total playtime metric should not be unquestioned. Outer Wilds and Tunic are some of my favorite games despite having less than 100 hours of total playtime.

If the game is good, we will play. I’m getting close to 1000 hours in BG3, because I find myself still enjoying after completing it.

I don’t want 100 hours of fetch quest

Yea, I don’t know what user feedback they are using to reach this line of thinking. I mean it’s really not that hard to get “gamers” feedback it’s literal posted everywhere. And I don’t mean just looking at the Twitter trash.

i think bethesda is depending too much on their modder community to, fill out there games and make them better. Starfield seems that way to me. They created this skeleton of a game, input a story and a some quests. then threw it out there in hopes that the modders would do the rest of the work for them and keep the game profitable and alive.

I’d easily play a 300 hour single run BG3 game. It’s all about consistent quality of gameplay and stories. So many games have shitty quests and objectives. I am mainly a single player story player and the problem I see the most is that I end up not caring about any of the characters that I meet. It’s usually an NPC that says “Oh brave soldier can you help me? My daughter is missing. She got lost when we walked through the creepy forest.” Then you walk to the forest and kill a few mobs and bring her back and never see any of them again and doesn’t impact the rest of the story at all. BG3 did the right thing. All your companions have so much depth and their arcs are amazing to experience. Then there are so many great NPCs all around the world that you meet multiple times throughout the acts like Arabella, Mol, Roland, Voss, Omeluum, Mayrina, Alfira etc. Another game that does this incredibly well is Metaphor: ReFantazio.

Tired of 100s of hours of low-effort content almost as much as I’m tired of endless excuses that miss the mark – excuses born from an inability among certain elites to handle self-criticism.

The ex-Playstation CEO Shawn Layden recently said something similar as well. Then tried to pass of Veilguard as good game, later admitting to not having played the other Dragon Age games. He thinks that ‘gamers don’t have 90 hours’, shortly after BG3 hit over 100hr AVERAGE with a permanent 30k plus active players.

** Gamers will make the time to play, when a studio makes it worth their while. **

I will play 100h+ if the game is fun and good like No mans sky for example, we shouldn’t feel like it’s a job

It’s not the amount of time it’s the content. Is it good or is it filler.

bro i have over 1200h i cyberpunk!!

Well, I am one of those players – ever since I began working full-time, I do get fatigued by long games, even great games and rarely finish them. I do prefer shorter, story-rich games.. But even without story, it’s true for me.. I was fatigued by Elden Ring and had to force myself to continue despite loving the gameplay. It was just too big. Haven’t had any such issues with Dark Souls or the new Lords of the Fallen, which is about 30 hours – and near the end I was beginning to feel sated and if it were longer, I’d get fatigued too.

I guess it’s because I only have so much time in a week, I do not play just one game at a time and when game takes several months to finish, it’s just too much.

When SMT 5 came out the devs talked about how the game was about 100 hours long, just with that statement I got fatigued, bought it, played but still haven’t finished it, I was thinking that I was tired of these 100 hours games and wanted something shorter, maybe I was getting old, who knows, then comes Elden Ring, a game I have about 200 hours with just one character and around 20 to 30 with each subsequent character, testing different builds, different challenges, same with Baldur’s Gate 3, I don’t know how many hours I have into that game but boy oh boy I’m still playing it

TL:DR the problem is not the length, is the pacing, the artificial padding, the bloat, the 100 hours of gameplay for the sake of the 100 hours with no substance, and sadly, that’s what Bethesda has become

The only game i will put in 100+ hours of mindless, soul crushing grinding is an MMORPG. Cause usually there is some sort of rare reward for you at the end, like a rare mount or something that you can then parade around on to show off to other players. But that is the only exception. Otherwise, i prefer my video games to be engaging and filled with things to do. Doesn’t matter if its a long 100+ game (Baldur’s Gate) or a short game that can 100% be completed in under six hours (like Stray).

I wouldnt buy a game unless i could feel like it has hundreds of hours of content

people dont hate long games, they hate, generic ass repeat stupid content, 100 hours of unique content is a blast.

What he means is that he, along with a small handful of no name developers, are tired of the pressure to design a game that the audience wants. We want full games, they just want to charge us a hundred dollars, to pump out QTE garbage.

I have over 7,600 hours on Team Fortress 2. The reason why? It’s because the characters are fun and while the main story for the game is in comic form and doesn’t really affect the game itself, the story was interesting.
Most of the gameplay mechanics are solid enough to enjoy (except random crits, those can die from pyro’s flamethrower).
It will always be quality over quantity.
Same can be said with Chrono Trigger, a game of only 15 hours or 17 if you do everything, and yet it’s considered one of the greatest games of all time.

Will, Bethesda just needs to get their head out of their ass and start polishing their shit into gold.

My first run of Baldur’s Gate was way over 100 hours, and I’d gladly spent even 10 times more than that. The game is just that amazing

He was a starfield dev… what to expect? they showed that they don’t know what people want

Sorry Mr , but i think this dev is right .
Watch the acvments of those games , bg3 , kindoms watch who actualy finished the game in front of a metro redux 10h ish experience for example . The difference is giant . I think kindoms come have the 20% of people that buyed the game , while bg3 have the 25% ? While redux over 50%.

I bought BD3 in the beginning of the year and am almost at 100h so yeh if it’s a good game I will want to continue playing it

I hate short games! I can finish a 30 hr game in a weekend

100 hours is too short for me, i want to be able to play and replay a game for years and years. If i like a game but it doesnt have good replay value, it’s just depressing.

Its not the hours, its the content. If the content is good, you do not care if it is 30, 60 or 100 hours. And you come back to it more and more and for longer and longer however much new trills it can give you (in the case of RPGs – replayability…). Its so simple, why are people in positions acting stupid like they do not understand it… (Edit: 280.3 hours in BG3, first playthrough, I am in middle of act 3, just life happens and it takes me longer… Will I hurry up or complain? Never! Will I replay it at least 3 x 280-300 hours? Probably)

As gamers age, the time available to sink countless hours into games dwindles. That much is true. In my case, it simply means I’m not willing to grind repetitive experiences much like I did in my teens. JRPGs that take forever to level up in? Pass. Games that are mostly filler? Nope. That doesn’t mean I haven’t put in hundreds of hours into certain games, it just means that I’m more exacting now in what I’m willing to play extensively or even start playing at all. Immersive, fun, high-quality games like the ME trilogy? I’ll keep coming back. Shoot, I still play some ME3 multiplayer at times.

I think the problem with longer open-world games is that they aren’t as good as they used to be. The time isn’t invested to make the world unique, or to offer variety in quests and possible guilds to join, etc. They are cut and paste, filled with busy work and item collection and other garbage. If someone put out a game now that was as good as Skyrim was, all the sudden the length becomes a benefit, not a liability. If a game is quality, I WANT it to be long.

I completely agree, if the quality of content is good then I want hundreds of hours.
I’ve got 400 hrs in KCD, 900 in RDR2 and fallout 4, 600 hrs in Elden ring and 300 in BG3

Yes we do But judging by your opening line I think We agree here 😅

I don’t want any more 100+ hour games filled with Emil and team’s bland af writing, find better writers who still have something creatively left to give, and I’ll gladly lose days to it.

There could be a grain of truth to his statements here… but the reasoning is almost certainly off.

A “100 hours of content” is no longer a selling point for a game, largely thanks to multiple examples of that being handled poorly and all those AAA games with 100+ hours of generic content that feels dull and uninspired. That could depress the appetite for massive games across the industry as a whole, causing players to seek out smaller and more focused experiences. Probably from indie studios, as they’re more inclined to take risks; the smaller games are just a consequence of the limitations that come from being indie developers in general.

That doesn’t mean players dislike “big games”, it means they’ve been burned by those who pad the length of the game with boring content.
As such, they may be wary even trying out the good games with 100+ hours of content, fearing they could get burned again by a long chore list.

… at the end of the day, nothing hurts the reputation for games as a whole more than games which fail to deliver.

It’s true for me at least. Unless it’s an RPG, I dont want every game to be 100s of hours long. Im not talking about action games with RPG elements. I mean full RPGs. Your Final Fantasies, etc.

In an RPG. Im expecting to play for 100s of hours. But RPG’s are built to be able to keep a player engaged for that long with complex stories and evolving battle mechanics, etc.

Shit like Assassins Creed doesn’t need to be longer than 25 hours at most imo

Sure – cannot wait how he will explain it after KC:D 2 cames out. Probably SF rpg are overrated… just to change it after ME4… or not.

Agree with you. That said, I’d rather they release a good 20-30 hr game every 2 years, then a good 100 hr game every 5+. Games are taking way too long to make, and sequels are far too far apart.

Look at the gaps we see for mass effect, dragon age, Witcher, GTA, etc. These gaps between titles are absurd.

Clearly we see what’s wrong with Bethesda. We are tired of empty open world games or horrible story/gameplay with bad protags we’re stuck with for 100+ hrs.

The problem is that they dont employ writers that can create decent content for 30+ hours. I desperately wanted to love Starfield, but it just is not good.

I played Starfield and most of the time in the game was spent customizing my ship. Hundreds of hours of switching hubs, engines, weapons, colors, adding or removing decorative stuff only for the same ship to be just another loading screen with minimal quality combat and interstellar travel. It had some fun and engaging quests also but those were the exception, not the norm.
Whoever said the game was a mile wide and an inch deep described it perfectly.

To be fair, I think most single player games shouldn’t have 100 hours of estimated playtime for a single playthrough. It feels somewhat unrealistic to have that much GOOD content and expect most people to actually complete it.

For Baldurs Gate 3 I took around 60 to 70 hours into the game and I felt as though the last act of the game was somewhat rushed in development compared to the other parts. Still good, but I think it was just reaching the edge of having it feel stretched out too much.

I put 97 hours into my first mass effect play though (via legendary edition) and when it ended I wanted more, I started a new save the next day and played through again on Insanity, then again with mods and only then did I want to take a break. And after a small break I did a femshep playthrough before actually taking a break. I’m not tired of 100 hour games, they just need to be good games with content and characters that make me want to keep playing.

I do have to admit that I’m not fond of 100+ hour games. I find most of them can’t hold my interest for that long because they have a tendency to add a lot of filler. And the filler is usually quite boring, repetitive and/or low quality. I’d rather have a tight narrative of 20-40 hours as long as it’s high quality content. I’ve felt this way about “open world” games for a while now. I can’t wait for more games to dial that back.

Not true,tired of short games.,Tired of companies making short games cause they want to sell addons.

Bro what. Baldur’s Gate 3 was literally just over an year ago… what a dumb take. People want their money’s worth of content.

Almost 700 hours in BG3 and I will enthusiasticly put another 700 into it. There is just so much to explore. I’m on my fourth playthrough and I’m STILL. FINDING. NEW. THINGS!!
What a game…

They have to make better games. Hope you are doing well Mr h

I’m so sick of my 1000+hrs of Bg3…the agony!!

Peope are tired of 100+ hour games with next to nothing of interest going on.

Just tired of Bethesda. I would pay $100 for a really good game. I spent 200 hours in Elden Ring on my first play through. Way to duck responsibility, Will. I would put 500 hours into a really good game. Get better and stop blaming other people for your failures.

I’ve never been a “gamer”… I have a large-ish Steam library and most of my games have 1-2 hours of play time. And then I tried Baldur’s Gate 3… in less than 2 months I’m now at 188 hours and I have no plans on slowing down… the game is just that good. “If you build it they will come”… Build a good game, players will come… and they’ll stay.

Nah i am just tired of mediocre bugthesda games

I’m no tired of 100 hour games, I am tired of Bethesda, Ubisoft etc open worlds, with Starfield Bethesda needed to up their game an they failed, with the success of Skyrim all Beth has done is try an copy/paste that into every other OW game they do much like Ubisoft does an it noticeable an tiresome, the loading screens wouldn’t have bothered me if the content was worth it but it wasn’t so the loading screens became more than an annoyance.

The economy is a copy/paste of FO4’s which is a copy/paste of Skyrim’s which is a copy/paste of FO3’s which is a copy/paste of Oblivions, Starfield needed a much better economy, one that engaged the player, incorporated Outpost manufacturing, shipbuilding etc, instead we got one were half the vendors couldn’t afford to buy 1 high level common weapon until a update.

The most engaging feature in SF is Shipbuilding an the content for it is sparse, i can think of 2 good engagements, end of Crimson Fleet questline and a random one with Spacers when you help farmers, how the managed to make Outposts worse than FO4’s settlements in terms of construction an build diversity I’ll never know, how they managed to go from a diverse cast of differently alligned companions in FO4 to “everyone’s thd same an will bitch at you for bumping into someone” again i don’t know.

The problem ain’t 100hour games it’s just theirs an it a shame hearing it from Will Shen, thd guy that gave us arguably the best content in a Beth game in a very long while with Far Harbour, a DLC with a Voiced Protagonist with more RP init than the whole of SF an a voiced PC done better than anything BioWare gave us reently.

Sorry for the rant, i got a settlement that needs my help

I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I played Kingdom Come Deliverance for the first time last week.
After 13 years, 5 versions, and 3000+ hours in Skyrim, and a quarter century in the Elder Scrolls… within 1 hour, I felt cheated.
I no longer care about TESVI at all, and KCDII comes out in a few weeks.
Todd and Emil, need to step up their game.

Well he works for Bethesda… So if we talking about games with very outdated engine, boring writing filled with generic fetch quests, he’s probably right.

But just look at RDR2 or Witcher3. Gamers love long games. IF they are good.

As many have said, I don’t care in the slightest how long or short a game is, only that it entertains me throughout the playthrough by giving me interesting, non-repetitive things to do and ideally an engaging storyline. Same with books. It’s not the length of the novel, it’s the quality of the writing. Ditto with music. I don’t care how long the song is, I just want something that’s pleasing to my ear.

We’re TIRED OF 100 hour games filled with meaningless fetch-quests and pointless side missions. Get it right

I think it’s a mix where people are sick of bloat or long games that are just bad, and the fact that you have limited playtime. If metaphor was a 30-hour experience, i probably would have picked it up, so i can’t say the dev is completely wrong.

And gamers are tired of shitty, political, buggy games that cost 70€ and of expansion packs that in total cost the same amount, too!

That’s his opinion and far from mine. I want even bigger games!

No we aren’t, we are tired of 100 hours off nothingness. Simple as that. People have spent 100 of hours in recent games like bg3 or Elden Ring, nobody complained about these games.

What a load of shit, just pure and utter dishonest cope.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve played through the ME trilogy. Fully completing each game. . . . . . There’s a difference between a good 100 hr game and something like starfield. Enjoyment for one. Personally i still hope someone else gets to use their shipbuilding program. Was the best part of the game.

Seeing the shallow result that is Starfield it makes perfect sense that people like this guy built it. No imagination. No vision. No passion. They got lucky that the modding scene grew with those early Bethesda games. Most of us want what the modding scene provided for those games and what FromSoft and Larian understand: games that respect the players.

Nope, not fatigued by long games, (I’m) fatigued from sub-par titles. When modern ideology is forced into an escapist form of entertainment, it becomes uninteresting.

I play specific games for specific reasons. To escape the mundane, to live the fantastic, to do and be more than I can ever be…
I expect titles to respect history, to appreicate setting and thematics, to properly set themselves within that and do the best they can, not tick box their way through it.
I dont need or want to be preached to about how calling a dude that looks like a dude, acts like a dude, sounds like a dude “a dude” and how that may make that dude feel bad in a damned video game.
I dont want or need wheelchair bound combatants in a battle royal game, or a world war 2 themed game.
I do want characters that feel real, have agendas, objectives, mean something and not be lied about being in the game instead of just get their heads caved in by a androgenous character with a golf club.

FYI, never played Last of Us… so the last is solely from discussions with people who actually did.

Even raid has poor graphics for many characters while others have lots of good graphics it’s garbage

Tired of 100h garbage games.
I’d gladly take 100 games as good as bg3.

Starfield. The game with a diegetic replay mechanic and barely any character choice. There are so many other problems, with the lore, worldspace, loot, progression, immersion, etc.

Maybe we are sick of empty feeling world that are packed out with collectables or a stupid amount of loading screens or a wish no man sky/fallout. People love bg3 because it’s fun has had great support fun mods and you can attempt different fights many different ways due to build and with elden ring it’s the same way

William Shen is clearly under a rock we clearly had countless games these recent years that are still enjoyable for more than 30+ hrs like POE2, Fields of Misteria, Marvel rivals, Balatro, palworld and even Black Myth Wukong

100 hour game isn’t an issue, the issue is 20 hour game stretched to 100 hours

man the copium is hilarious xD