Obsidian head honcho and all around RPG veteran Josh Sawyer did another Tumblr Q&A earlier this week (seen above), wherein he dispensed some more of his design wisdom. For the uninitiated, Sawyer is a seasoned developer—having worked on games like Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and the Pillars of Eternity series—as well as the upcoming RPG, Avowed.
When asked if the fact that most players who buy games don't finish them (guilty) impacted Sawyer's design philosophy, he seemed zen about the prospect: "We want the player to play the game, and whatever amount they play, we want them to come away and say 'I'm glad I bought the game, I enjoyed it, great, awesome' … Just having someone's money is not good enough—that's very short sighted."
He then recalls an anecdote where, while talking to a usability group, the issue of game size came up: "We were talking about the size of our games and how we like to make them pretty big and pretty long, even if a lot of the stuff is pretty optional. One of the researchers said 'we found two thirds of people don't finish the games that they start'—they went on to suggest, therefore, 'you should make shorter games'.
"I asked what I thought was just the obvious question, which was how did that correlate to the enjoyment of the player? And they said 'we never asked that'. And I'm like, I think that's really important."
Honestly, considering one of the best RPGs in recent memory was Baldur's Gate 3—a game explicitly designed to not give a crud whether you see all of its scenes or not—that tracks. Stumbling across something rare in a game feels special and, quite frankly, motivates me to give it some more playthroughs, just to see what would've happened if I'd been one of the 33% that banged a bear.
I mean, heck, just look at Skyrim. Sawyer says: "[Skyrim] is a game where a lot of people never finish the crit path … they restart the game over and over, and they just wander, and they never finish it, they never even see more than a third of a map and its locations, but they love it." Overall, he says that if he has "an enjoyable experience out of it, I don't need to finish it. It's not that important."
On the other hand, while player completion stats aren't a reason to shorten games, Sawyer says they aren't much of a reason to make them longer and bloated, either. "I don't think that anyone cares about [getting bigger]. Just stop, we don't. I don't think most players want games that're like 'six times bigger than Skyrim!' or like 'eight times bigger than Witcher 3!'
"Games got bigger and bigger and it became more and more impressive, and then at a certain point, supporting that volume of stuff—there's a quality dip … I don't think we need to go bigger anymore. We can kind of chill out." Hear, hear.
