Former Starfield lead quest designer says we're seeing a 'resurgence of short games' because people are 'becoming fatigued' with 100-hour monsters
Starfield lead quest designer Will Shen says «a growing section of the audience is becoming fatigued» with huge games that require dozens or hundreds of hours to properly play through, and—tongue in cheek—that he's sorry for the role he played in helping popularize that trend.
«I'm sorry. I'll say that,» Shen said, laughing, in a recent Kiwi Talkz interview. "[I'm] not personally responsible, but part of what happened was the success of games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, these really big titles that you can play pretty much forever. There's still a lot of people who play Skyrim, even after all these years, and the idea of these evergreen games that you could just sink thousands of hours into that hit the industry.
«Before, it was MMOs for that. World of Warcraft, there are World of Warcraft super-fans who will never leave that game. And then all of a sudden games like Skyrim and other open world games really hit their stride with enough content to get past the tipping point of, you can play it almost forever. And so that became the big trend that hit the game industry.»
Shen also cited a «secondary trend» of extremely difficult third-person combat driven by games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, as well as the inclusion of survival-crafting mechanics inspired by Minecraft, which pile on more to do without adding much in the way of meaningful content. The net result is that «a large section or growing section of the audience is becoming fatigued at investing 30-plus, 100-plus hours into a game.»
Presumably as a result of that growing sense of fatigue, Shen said we're seeing a «resurgence of short games.» Most people don't finish games that are 10-plus hours in length, he reckons, and that splits a game's community between those who've finished it and those who played the first five hours or so and moved on to other things. Citing the example of Mouthwashing, an indie horror game that clocks in at just a few hours, he said «the community engagement around the story of
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