Abstract
Problem: RPGs tend to be longer than most other genres — but what are the actual trade-offs between a 100+ hour RPG and a 30–40 hour one?
Approach: Tim Cain draws on his experience shipping both Fallout (
20–40 hours) and Arcanum (80–120+ hours) to compare the benefits and costs of long RPGs from design, business, and player-experience perspectives.Findings: Long RPGs enable deeper stories, more reactivity, greater build diversity, and higher replayability — which drives community engagement and sales. However, they lose a larger share of potential players, suffer from low completion rates, risk wasting expensive content most players never see, introduce more bugs, require vastly more QA time, and cost dramatically more money.
Key insight: The longer your RPG, the more content you create that most players will never see — and you must ask honestly whether your story, setting, and mechanics are deep enough to justify that length, or if you're just padding with busywork.
1. Defining "Long"
Tim defines a "long RPG" as 100+ hours of play time. He draws a useful distinction between a game you can play for 100+ hours with a single character (like Arcanum with its enormous world and procedural content) versus a game where your total playtime exceeds 100 hours across multiple characters and playthroughs. Both count, but they have different implications for design.
His concrete comparison: Fallout was a three-act story designed for 20–40 hours. Arcanum had roughly 20 story acts, an enormous procedurally-generated world map with terrain-dependent random encounters, and could easily exceed 120 hours for completionists.
2. Pros of Long RPGs
2.1. Deep, Multi-Act Stories
More acts means more room for branching, both immediate reactivity (faction changes, NPC disposition shifts) and long-term consequences where early choices reshape later story paths. Arcanum's ~20-act structure allowed far more narrative branching than Fallout's three acts.
2.2. Greater Build Diversity and Support
A longer game gives design space to support more player builds meaningfully. Arcanum layered magic vs. technology on top of Fallout's skill system, creating radically different play experiences — a magic character, a gunslinger, or a pure melee fighter each had enough content to feel supported. In shorter games, some builds may simply lack enough content to feel worthwhile.
2.3. Replayability and Community Engagement
Diverse builds encourage replays, which increases total engagement time. Players who spend 100+ hours with a game tend to be deeply invested — they write reviews, post on forums, discuss strategies, and generate organic interest that drives further sales. Tim frames this as a major business upside: a big, engaging game creates its own marketing through community discussion.
3. Cons of Long RPGs
3.1. You Lose More of Your Audience
Some players won't even start a 120-hour game — they see the length in reviews and pass. Tim argues the audience loss is proportionally larger for long games than for short ones. Players who finish a short game may wish it were longer, but they still played it and enjoyed it. Players intimidated by length never engage at all.
3.2. Most Players Will Never Finish
Steam achievement data tells the story: some games show 1–2% completion rates for the main storyline. This means vast amounts of handcrafted content — high-level perks, late-game maps, deep NPC dialogues, alternate quest paths — goes unseen by the overwhelming majority of players. All that work, all that money, experienced by almost nobody.
3.3. Is Your Content Deep Enough?
Tim poses three critical self-assessment questions for developers considering a long RPG:
- Story: Is the narrative genuinely deep enough to sustain 100+ hours, or are you stretching it with busywork?
- Setting: Is the world varied and interesting enough to reward extended exploration, or is it "endless desert"?
- Mechanics: Are there aspirational perks, skill milestones, and meaningful progression rewards at higher levels that keep players motivated?
3.4. The Telegraphing Problem
Long-term reactivity — a key pro — creates a design challenge: if a choice made in hour 5 ruins the player's game in hour 85, and there was no way to anticipate that, the player is just annoyed. Nobody reloads an 80-hour-old save. Tim's advice: short-term consequences can be surprises (the player can reload a recent save), but long-term consequences need to be telegraphed so players can make informed decisions.
3.5. More Bugs, More QA, More Money
Bigger games accumulate more bugs — not just from code, but from scripts, design interactions, balance issues, and save-game bloat. QA suffers especially: a tester can play through a 40-hour game once per week, but a 100-hour game takes 2.5–3 weeks per playthrough, drastically reducing the number of build combinations and paths that get tested.
And then there's the raw cost: more maps, more creatures, more NPCs, more voice-over, more everything. Tim connects this directly to the industry trend of ballooning budgets — $150 million, $500 million, even $1 billion — driven in part by the ambition to make games longer and deeper.
4. References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlUQ4nc1qxs