>>48763876Unironically yes. Get your fucking consumerist head out of 90s product development.
Time spent on features nobody gives a shit about is wasted time that could've been spent elsewhere improving other aspects like performance, balance, gameplay etc.
Every one of these bullshit side things literally takes time away from improving the core game, which has been stagnant for 20 years.
Feature bloat is a problem because eventually you're just overloading the customer with features they'll never use, so why should they pay for them?
There's a reason agile development has essentially killed waterfall.
Longer game doesn't mean better. A 40 hour game with 20 hours of pointless tutorial and dialogue IS worse than a 20 hour game with minimal tutorials. Plus you're more likely to replay that 20 hour game since there isn't 20 hours of garbage you have to dredge through. This is the reason replaying and speedrunning the older games is more popular.
Games need to stop overstaying their welcome. Some games core gameplay loop just isn't interesting enough for an 80 hour epic, but make for a great 10-20 hour romp.
Plus it has a negative impact on writing. Shorter games actually have the liberty of flexing the interactive portion of the medium to allow for branching story paths.
