Are RPGs Too Long?

The question Jay “Rampant Coyote” Barnson asks himself in his latest blog post has certainly been debated before, but getting some new insight into the topic of the length of role-playing games is certainly appreciated.

Jay cites Din’s Curse, Legend of Grimrock, Knights of the Chalice and Bethesda titles as positive examples in handling length and will hopefully forgive me for the rather generous excerpt:

The real problem isn’t so much that the games are too long as a whole. But eventually any games (or stories of any other medium) will begin to drag in the middle. The beginning may be great, the ending may be fantastic, but at some point the middle will have simply gone on too long. This happens with RPGs more often than not, in my opinion.

But that’s just the story side of things. Some novels and movies have the same problem. The power of games is that they are much more than a storytelling medium. Solid, compelling gameplay will keep people (like me) playing with only the barest hint of an end-goal in sight, let alone an actual quality plot. Hey, some of my most recent indie favorites like Din’s Curse, Legend of Grimrock, and Knights of the Chalice are exactly like that. Story-wise, there’s really not a whole lot there in any of them. But there’s enough interesting things to do and challenges to face that I keep playing. Whether it’s the Diablo-style feeder bar of constant leveling and items that increase my power, or the need to constantly revise my tactics to react to interesting puzzles or tactical challenges, I can go for hours with the most threadbare of narratives.

And so in theory, you can combine these two factors to make a game that can have extremely long, playable (middles,) like those big, meaty RPGs I love to talk about, right?

Maybe. Sometimes.

I’m not sure those factors are multiplicative. Or even additive. A game’s enjoyability may only last until either the story or the gameplay start feeling stale, whichever comes first. Fun narrative advancement may help fill in the lags in advancement or any place where the gameplay might start to get a little repetitive. Solid, entertaining mechanics may happily fill hours of time when I couldn’t give a fig what’s happening in the storyline (and if you’ve ever skipped past a cut-scene because you want to get back to the action, you know what I mean). But if both start getting a little tired at the same point, I’m ready for the game to be done.

If everybody reached that point at the same time, game design would be an easy job.

One of the virtues of Bethesda’s RPGs is that the player is empowered to end the main storyline pretty much whenever he wants (realistically, I guess within about ten hours of play). Curiously enough, I tend to put more hours into those games than most other RPGs often ending in or close to triple digits. There’s just enough interesting subplots and advancement possibilities going on to keep me occupied for a while.