Summary
Tim Cain, best known as the creator of the originalFalloutgame, regularly gives wonderfully insightful anecdotes about game development onhis YouTube channel.
The subject of one of Cain’s recent videos was thepros and cons of creating very long games, i.e. RPGs that take over a hundred hours to complete.
To illustrate his point, Cain compared Fallout, which is a 20-30-hour game, to one of his later games, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which could take around 85 hours for completionists.
Double-Edged Sword
A pro of a longer RPG is that “you can tell a very, very deep story,” with a lot of reactivity. If you can cultivate a long experience that stays compelling throughout, and there’s a lot of different systems in the game, then you may be rewarded with more engagement, more discussion, more press, and ultimately, more sales.
However, there are also very obvious drawbacks to creating a long game. “First of all, I’m immediately going to point out, you’re going to lose some of your audience,” Cain explains. “There are people who won’t play really long games, they don’t have that time, ‘I’m not a teenager anymore; I have kids; there are too many games I want to play, I can’t devote 100 hours to one’.”
Cain explains that some people play shorter games and wish they were longer, but they still enjoy the game. However, “A lot of people, they read a review, they go ‘Oh, this game is 120 hours long’ and they don’t even start.”
Even if people do ultimately buy the game, “some players will never finish it,” Cain goes on. “You all know what we’re talking about — you people with Steam and GOG and Epic libraries full of games, I won’t even get into the ones that don’t install them. The longer the game is, the less people are likely to finish.”
Tim Cain is a creative consultant on Obsidian’s upcoming sequel, The Outer Worlds 2. Cain hasn’t been employed by Obsidian since 2020, but he worked on the sequel as a contractor, as he directed the original.
