Editorial - Long Games: Appealing or Intimidating?

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If a game has a long playtime, does it put you off? Or do you invest in games hoping for as much epic storyline and adventure as you can get? RPS examines the subject.

The Witcher 3 [official site] is the longest game I've played for years, or at least the longest game that I've actually come close to completing. There was a time when I'd be thrilled to hear about a new fifty or sixty hour epic adventure, very much subscribing to the policy "the more the better", but now I'm more likely to flinch away from the screen when a game's sprawl is revealed.

I've realised that my aversion to enormous games has been growing for a while, but the announcement of Red Dead Redemption 2 brought it into sharp focus. Do I really want yet another massive open world game? I'm not sure that I do.

I'd started to think that shying away from long games had a lot to do with working as a games critic, which does tend to make me hungry to get to the heart of a thing, understand it, and then move on. I'm the same way with books though - ten years ago, I didn't think a fictional world was worth investing any time into if it didn't exist across the span of at least six brick-sized volumes. These days, if a story takes more than three hundred pages to tell, I expect a lot from it. If an author or designer is going to make demands on my time, I demand quality and (preferably) variety in return.​