Folks, RPG veteran Josh Sawyer has made it official: games are too dang long these days... or, at the very least, games as big as Skyrim and The Witcher 3 don't really need to be any bigger.
I've been going on about games being too big for years now, so I've been glad to see several industry figures echo that sentiment. Last month, ex-PlayStation boss Shawn Layden argued 100-hour giants are unsustainable, and a "mismatch" for today's players anyway. Just a few days ago, former Bethesda veteran and Starfield lead quest designer Will Shen said "people are fatigued" with huge games, and now Sawyer is preaching the good word too.
Over on his YouTube channel (timestamped here), Sawyer answered a few fan questions he recently received and got on to the topic of the size and scope of his projects. Although his most recent release, 2022's Pentiment, is an outlier in this regard, Sawyer's name is synonymous with meaty RPGs like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity.
- Former Starfield lead says "people are fatigued" with huge games, and "I'm sorry" because "part of what happened is the success of games like Skyrim and Fallout 4"
- RPG veteran Josh Sawyer says Skyrim is the perfect example of why it doesn't matter if players finish games because "a lot of people never finish the crit path," but "they love it"
In Sawyer's view, it doesn't matter whether players actually finish games they start as long as they enjoy the time they do spend in those games. He pointed to RPG classics Skyrim and The Witcher 3 as examples of sprawling games that many players don't finish but still hold in high regard.
"Some players really need to finish the game but I would say most players, including myself, I'm not that concerned with finishing games," Sawyer said. "If I get very deep into them, I get 80% of the way through them, then I really want to see it through. But, if I have an enjoyable experience out of it, I don't need to finish it – that's not that important."
So, what Sawyer's saying is that developers should just keep making bigger and bigger games because it doesn't really matter if we finish them or not, right? No, quite the opposite, thank heavens. He made a plea for developers to have mercy on us all.
"We don't need to get bigger. Just stop," he said. "I don't think most players want games that are like six times bigger than Skyrim or eight times bigger than The Witcher 3.
"Games got bigger and bigger, and it became more and more impressive, and then at a certain point, one, supporting that volume of stuff, there's a quality dip – we're not employing eight times the number of contractors. You know, area designers and artists. And so, things start to feel less unique and bespoke."
With behemoths like Final Fantasy Rebirth, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Persona 3 Reload having eaten up the first half of my 2024, I'm definitely not hankering for even bigger games. I'm honestly hoping I can chew through more, more compact, but still memorable games in 2025... I say as I stare down the barrel of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Assassin's Creed Shadows, and GTA 6.
"I don't think we need to go bigger anymore," Sawyer concludes. "We can kind of chill out. Within a small margin we can make it a little bigger, a little smaller. Again, as long as the player feels like when they come out in the world that they have a big vast space to explore and that that is a fun experience and it doesn't feel repetitive and like a grind, I think that's good. I don't mind making big games like that. I think that's fun. I have fun in those worlds, I think a lot of players do too."
Our guide to the 50 most anticipated games coming in 2025 proves there's plenty on the way to keep you busy no matter how you like your games.
