An experienced developer is critical of the fact that game worlds tend to get bigger and bigger. He believes that there is a danger in this and that the players themselves are no longer interested in it.
Which developer is it about? Josh Sawyer has gained a lot of experience in his career as a game developer. He was involved in renowned projects such as Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity and the insider tip Pentiment. All come from developer Obsidian Entertainment, which is launching its new game Avowed in February 2025.
Sawyer criticized the size of game worlds in a video on his YouTube channel. He contradicts the misconception that bigger means better.
See the trailer for Obsidian’s new game, Avowed, which follows its own design philosophy when it comes to quests:
Avowed – The combat system in the trailer
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How big is too big?
What does Josh Sawyer say? A characteristic of large and long games is that they are completed by only a few players. The developer himself says that he only finishes such huge games when he is very deep into it and has already completed around 80%.
Whether you even finish a game isn’t that important. For Sawyer, the fun you have while gaming is also at the forefront of his own work. Nevertheless, he would like games to become smaller again.
We don’t have to get bigger. Just stop it. I don’t think most gamers want games that are six times bigger than Skyrim or eight times bigger than The Witcher 3.
Josh Sawyer via youtube.com
What’s the problem? Sawyer’s point isn’t that it takes a long time to play through huge titles. In his opinion, quality simply suffers when everything has to keep getting bigger.
The individual aspects in a game world would feel less unique and tailored, especially in an open world. A world doesn’t have to be huge to be impressive – so it’s more about the illusion it creates rather than the actual size.
Sawyer could be right: Successful role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate 3 seem larger than they actually are in terms of their game world. Nevertheless, you can spend countless hours doing it. According to Sawyer, exploring game worlds should always feel entertaining, not repetitive and tedious.
Obsidian Entertainment’s latest project, Avowed, does not have a classic open world and is likely to be a little smaller than other current game worlds. We’ll be curious to see how the title deals with the manageable areas. But Sawyer is not the only developer who criticizes the size of current games: A Starfield developer says: Many gamers are tired of having to invest over 30 or 100 hours in a single game