Quality Over Quantity in RPGs

In a new entry to his personal blog, Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke weighs the pros and cons of making the world bigger versus making the world more polished during the development of Project E. Ultimately, a smaller environment with more polish wins out:

The gist of the argument is very simple given a fixed budget, the smaller the world in which the RPG takes place, the higher the quality and polish of that world. The corrolary of that is, the larger the gameworld, the more generic the mechanics that drive it.

We started working on something called Project E in 2010 at the same time as Dragon Commander. While Dragon Commander breaks new grounds for us, project E is very much what people expect from us, a big RPG with all the stuff that goes with it.

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Enthusiastically the designer told me yeah cool, it’s going to be really epic, really really epic. Sadly this was quickly followed by him being disappointed because I told him we should cut. This didn’t go down well and he argued quite strongly and well against it, but in my mind the decision was already taken every single alarm bell ringing very loud inside of me. Looking at that very long and high wall, I knew that without intervention this game was going to be way over budget and really late.

So I told him, cut about one third, rewrite the story in such a way that we can still add the one third (for the unlikely event that we’ll be ready with it ahead of time) and then we’ll see.

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Having read a lot of RPG reviews, we learnt that a lot of meta-critic reviewers in general only play a game for a couple of hours or so before making their final judgment, especially if the game doesn’t have a huge advertising budget. They also rarely reduce the score for a game being too short, which is actually one of the few consistent traits we observed Since their rating is ultra-important for the sales of a RPG, this is quite an important observation.

You can’t even blame them, because statistics obtained by monitoring how many achievements are unlocked in Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga on Xbox360, tell us that 40% of players finished the first part of the game, 18% the second part and a mere 7,5% the entire game. So in this sense, reviewers represent the audience, which in the end I guess is their job.

And there you have it: the mainstream press is driving the size of RPGs.