There’s often quite a big difference between the number of people who start a game versus the amount who actually finish it, but RPG veteran Josh Sawyer says that doesn’t matter – what does is making sure they’re satisfied with whatever they do play, and Bethesda’s timeless RPG Skyrim is a great example of that.
In a new video on his YouTube channel (below), Sawyer – the director of Fallout: New Vegas and the Pillars of Eternity games – responds to a question from a viewer asking if stats showing a proportionately low number of people actually finishing games has an impact on his approach to game development. To this, Sawyer says: “We want the player to play the game and, whatever amount that they play, we want them to come away and say, ‘I’m glad I bought the game. I enjoyed it.'”
Sawyer points to Skyrim, an RPG “where a lot of people never finish the crit path; they don’t get very far in the crit path at all.” He adds: “They restart the game over and over and over and they just wander and they never finish it, they never maybe even see more than a third of the map and its locations, but they love it. Great time, and if you were going by, ‘well they didn’t finish the game therefore they didn’t like it,’ that’s just not true.”
He certainly has a point. When I was a kid I sometimes used to purposely avoid rolling credits on games just because I didn’t want them to be ‘over,’ and would spend countless hours straying from their intended paths in order to do so. Perhaps a slightly unusual mindset, and maybe not the sort of thing Sawyer was specifically thinking of, but the point remains that those many, many hours spent in games I didn’t finish were far from unenjoyable.
With all that said, just because Sawyer doesn’t think it matters whether people reach the end of games, that doesn’t mean he thinks there’s nothing wrong with them getting endlessly bigger. In fact, he doesn’t think “most players want games that are like six times bigger than Skyrim or eight times bigger than The Witcher 3.” Ultimately, it’s about making sure players have “a fun experience and it doesn’t feel repetitive and like a grind,” he explains.