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Adding onto what I said earlier, and keeping in mind that it's more important to make every moment shine than to hit a certain amount of length, I think a good "sweet spot" to aim for in a story-based RPG is about ten to fifteen hours - enough time to let the story simmer in the player's head over multiple play sessions, but not so much time that it offers the player a chance to get bored with it or forces the player at some point to put it down for multiple days (and break immersion) due to real life obligations.
When you make a 20+ hour game, you opening yourself up to the risk of lukewarm players never seeing it through to the end. If you have a wide variety of unique and fun play mechanics, and puissant storytelling skills, you'll be able to pull it off. But that's so much tougher to do than it sounds.
Allowing players to keep playing the game after they've seen the ending will let the people who love your game keep enjoying it, while giving people who simply liked it enough to play through the plot a good point to jump off. Recettear, for example, is maybe a 20-hour game, but I've already logged over 100 on the same file, since I enjoyed unlocking new adventurers and dungeons, finding new items that I'd never seen, and overpowering boss monsters. For me, it let the game grow from "really good" to "one of the truly special games I'd take to a desert island", whereas for most people, 20 hours was probably a really good place to get the sense of completion before they got tired of it. So I think that was really smart design.
When you make a 20+ hour game, you opening yourself up to the risk of lukewarm players never seeing it through to the end. If you have a wide variety of unique and fun play mechanics, and puissant storytelling skills, you'll be able to pull it off. But that's so much tougher to do than it sounds.
Allowing players to keep playing the game after they've seen the ending will let the people who love your game keep enjoying it, while giving people who simply liked it enough to play through the plot a good point to jump off. Recettear, for example, is maybe a 20-hour game, but I've already logged over 100 on the same file, since I enjoyed unlocking new adventurers and dungeons, finding new items that I'd never seen, and overpowering boss monsters. For me, it let the game grow from "really good" to "one of the truly special games I'd take to a desert island", whereas for most people, 20 hours was probably a really good place to get the sense of completion before they got tired of it. So I think that was really smart design.
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