ampersandrew , 10 months ago

The problem with a 500 hour game is pacing, finding natural calls to action and conclusions to those story arcs. And the next game that comes out in a week offers a fulfilling experience in a different way, and it's nice to see a breadth of different great experiences rather than just one really long one. I say that as someone who's put 1500 hours into my favorite game. I'm not necessarily wishing for Baldur's Gate 3 to be shorter, only that Baldur's Gate 3's scope could have been scaled back without affecting how much I enjoy it or how much value I got out of it. I would really like to see a batch of D&D 5e games on this engine the way there was a batch of Infinity Engine games back in the late 90s and early 00s, and even those games were much shorter than BG3. In general, I'd say games over a certain budget threshold sacrifice a lot of enjoyment in order to make their games bigger and/or longer, and games like BG3 and Elden Ring are the exception, so in most cases, I'd rather big games like Halo Infinite or Assassin's Creed scale down to the smaller experiences they used to be.