Fallout and RPG veteran Josh Sawyer says most players don't want games "6 times bigger than Skyrim or 8 times bigger than The Witcher 3"

gamesradar.com:

Folks, RPG veteran Josh Sawyer has made it official: games are too dang long these days... or, at the very least, games as big as Skyrim and The Witcher 3 don't really need to be any bigger.

I've been going on about games being too big for years now, so I've been glad to see several industry figures echo that sentiment. Last month, ex-PlayStation boss Shawn Layden argued 100-hour giants are unsustainable, and a "mismatch" for today's players anyway. Just a few days ago, former Bethesda veteran and Starfield lead quest designer Will Shen said "people are fatigued" with huge games, and now Sawyer is preaching the good word too.

Over on his YouTube channel (timestamped here), Sawyer answered a few fan questions he recently received and got on to the topic of the size and scope of his projects. Although his most recent release, 2022's Pentiment, is an outlier in this regard, Sawyer's name is synonymous with meaty RPGs like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity.

In Sawyer's view, it doesn't matter whether players actually finish games they start as long as they enjoy the time they do spend in those games. He pointed to RPG classics Skyrim and The Witcher 3 as examples of sprawling games that many players don't finish but still hold in high regard.

"Some players really need to finish the game but I would say most players, including myself, I'm not that concerned with finishing games," Sawyer said. "If I get very deep into them, I get 80% of the way through them, then I really want to see it through. But, if I have an enjoyable experience out of it, I don't need to finish it – that's not that important."

So, what Sawyer's saying is that developers should just keep making bigger and bigger games because it doesn't really matter if we finish them or not, right? No, quite the opposite, thank heavens. He made a plea for developers to have mercy on us all.

"We don't need to get bigger. Just stop," he said. "I don't think most players want games that are like six times