Casey Hudson, the director of the upcoming video game Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, has shared new insight into the title’s potential length. More so than perhaps any other genre, RPGs can be quite time-consuming. Games that belong to franchises like Persona or Dragon Quest can take over 100 hours on average to complete, while those that are part of a series such as The Witcher can still last up to 50 hours to see through to the end. With Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, though, Hudson has made clear that those within Arcanaut Studios are looking to make something a bit more condensed that will take up less time.
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Speaking to Bloomberg, Huson opened up a bit about his approach to creating Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic. Not only did he confirm that Arcanaut Studios is going to be a tighter team that won’t contain hundreds of employees, but this smaller scale will extend to the game itself. Hudson explained that, in his view, just because a game is enormous doesn’t automatically improve its quality. Beyond this, he also said that he thinks games that are too long also lead to players falling off, which is something that he doesn’t want to have happen with Fate of the Old Republic.
“Bigger isn’t necessarily better,” Hudson said. “If I’m excited about a game and then I find out that it’s 200 hours long — even if I have no ambition to actually finish it — I wonder, if I put 20 hours in, will I even be out of act one? A lot of players just want to play something and finish it.”
Assuming that Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic is similar in length to previous games that Hudson has worked on, then we have a pretty good idea of how long it should be. The original Knights of the Old Republic, for instance, was only around 30 hours in total. BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy also happened to be of a similar length, with the main campaigns of each entry only being between 20 and 30 hours at most. While all of these games could be longer depending on how much side content players would decide to engage with, it seems apparent that Hudson is trying to design Fate of the Old Republic to be comparable to his past projects.
Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic still doesn’t have a release window, nor have platforms been confirmed for the game. Hudson previously stated, however, that he wants the game to launch before 2030, which suggests that it could be closer than anticipated.
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