Will Shen says people already have huge, open-ended games they like, so it's tough for new ones to find room.
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 Mouthwashing is only possible because everyone who is a fan has actually played through it all the way to the end.”
“Mouthwashing is a huge hit because it’s short. There are other factors into that, the execution, you know, nice iconic keyart, all that kind of stuff. But that game doesn’t succeed nearly as well if it were longer and had a bunch of side quests and miscellaneous content. The shortness is the point and that level of engagement was so refreshing to see from a developer who’s done a lot of big games. It’s like, oh, 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.”
There are counterpoints to Shen’s argument, one obvious example being Baldur’s Gate 3, which remains amongst the most-played games on Steam despite being a very long (and, I think more notably, very tightly structured) game. But he also noted that it’s become tougher for big, open-ended games like Starfield to find their place because people are already committed to their never-ending games of choice—Call of Duty, Madden, Fifa, WoW, Fortnite, League of Legends—and it’s hard to peel them away.
“I think it’s going to be a long time before those games leave the market,” Shen said. “Who knows? How long will Fortnite go on? It could be another 20, 30 years. Maybe it’s forever.”
And maybe he’s right, but it doesn’t look like Shen is ready to start making sub-five hour games himself just yet. He left Bethesda in 2023 after a 15-year career to join Something Wicked Games, where he’s serving as lead content designer on the open world RPG Wyrdsong.
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