Starfield lead quest designer says players getting “fatigued” by super long games, trumpets bitesize titles like Mouthwashing
Former Bethesda designer Will Shen, who worked on several high profile titles such as Starfield and Skyrim, has said he believes players are becoming “fatigued” with games that take hours upon hours upon hours to complete.
During an interview with Kiwi Talkz (via GameSpot), Shen was asked about game length and acknowledged that there are still plenty of people putting hours into Skyrim. But, do players want to invest the same amount of time into newer games coming to the market? Well, Shen feels we’re kind of over that idea when it comes to new releases.
“We’re reaching a point where people are fatigued, or a large section, a growing section of the audience, is becoming fatigued at investing 30-plus, 100-plus hours into a game,” explained Shen. “Because they already have that. They already have the games that they will continually come back to, and adding another one to that list is a tall order. It’s always a tall order.”
Shen said we are now seeing a “resurgence” of shorter games that are more easily digestible (at least in terms of playtime). He pointed to Mouthwashing – a game our Katharine called a “brilliantly refreshing and unflinching horror” in Eurogamer’s four star review – as an example of how shorter games can still deliver a winning result.
“[Mouthwashing is] only three hours long at most, it’s a very short experience,” Shen said, “but part of the benefit of that is the community engagement around the story of Mouthwashing is only possible because everyone who is a fan has actually played through it all the way to the end.”
Shen said he understood there were other factors that had contributed to Mouthwashing’s success, but that he firmly believed the game’s short length was one of the key reasons it was such a hit. “You can have a fan community conversation around a game that’s much shorter because the shortness allows everyone to engage fully with the entirety of the product,” Shen continued, adding games that go over the 10 hour mark are often left uncompleted by many players.
“I would say 75 percent of your players only play through the first five to 10 hours, so that’s a huge fragmenting of your overall fan community base.”
What are your thoughts on game length? Do you think shorter is sweeter, or are you still on the lookout for that one game that will become The Game you play?
As a quick aside, our Jim was also rather taken with Mouthwashing, so taken in fact he named it one of his games of 2024 in the Eurogamer video team’s roundup, which you can watch above.
Meanwhile, while Shen is no longer with Bethesda and working on Starfield, the studio itself still is. Last year, Todd Howard confirmed at least one more DLC for the space epic following 2024’s Shattered Space expansion. As for what that could be, fans believe a trademark for “Starborn” registered by Bethesda parent company Zenimax back in July could point to Starfield’s second expansion.
