There's a particular statistic I've been thinking about recently. We first heard it earlier in the month, in a presentation from Fallout 4 lead producer Jeff Gardner, who said that he'd been playing the game for "400+" hours, and he still hadn't seen everything there was to see. It's a staggering number, one of those ultra-inflated ideas that might as well be 100 more or 100 less and it still wouldn't really compute. People used to more constrained experiences might wonder: how could a game possibly have that much content? But those familiar with Bethesda games might have a sightly clearer idea of what that stat means. And I wonder: is 400 hours enough?
I've been thinking of this in light of The Witcher 3, which I revisited a little bit in preparation for the glut of open world games we'll be getting in the coming months, starting with Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain and Mad Max on tuesday. I'm never going to play The Witcher 3 for 400 hours, or 200, or whatever they've said the upward limit is, just like I'm never going to play Fallout 4 for 400 hours. But it's the mere presence of that content that makes the world so engaging, whether or not you actually choose to engage with it. You see a town with a couple of questlines in it, and you maybe talk to an NPC or two to get some more info. Even if you choose not to go down that particular rabbit hole, the game benefits just from it being there. It's about making a world that appears to have a life without you: if you can't see where a thing ends, as far as you know, it doesn't. It's not the "400" hours that matter, it's the "+."
But we've seen open worlds crammed to the gills with content before, and that doesn't always make them compelling. The Witcher 3 succeeded and failed in terms of making that world live. The characters, big and small, were some of the best I've ever seen in a video game like this, and CD Projekt Red's ability to infuse even the smallest task with life and personality contribute to the sense of scope that the game accomplishes so well. But CD Projekt Red is also a much smaller developer than most of its competitors, and that shows through in just how much they had to rely on asset-reuse. Sure, that townsperson says he has his own story, but he looks just like that other townsperson and he lives in an identical house. You start to see where the limits of the world are, and it starts to become fake again.
And that makes me think about Fallout 4 again. Fallout 4 is, in many ways, the sequel to Skyrim, but if it's going to make those 400+ actually feel infinite, it's going to have to merge the eccentricities of Fallout with the scope and visuals of Skyrim. Skyrim was huge, but it had a way of feeling samey to a certain point: all the characters blended together, few plotlines ever really stuck out, and few towns really managed to distinguish themselves. Visually, it was a feast, however: Bethesda just needed to do a better job filling it with people. Both Fallout and Fallout: New Vegas, however, delivered on personality in spades, taking full advantage of their bizarre settings.
400 hours could be too much, or it could be not enough, or it could be the right suggestion of the infinite. The real key is that each one of those hours needs to feel exciting, and, in at least some way, new, in order for that to actually be enough. Every Bethesda game struggles with this balance, and I'm excited to see if they get closer to making it work this time around.
