Some games are not fun until you’ve invested hours. The gaming industry could learn from the way fiction writers and the publishing industry prioritize the first few minutes of contact between audience and story.
Over the holidays, I’ve jumped back into several games that I previously tried and abandoned. I’m roughly 20 hours into Bethesda’s space exploration RPG Starfield (I tried playing it twice before) and I think it’s finally starting to feel sort of fun.
Games these days are notoriously long. AAA RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Persona 5, and The Witcher 3, can take players well over 100 hours to complete. Just finishing the main story arcs for these titles can take 20-50 hours.
This hasn’t always been the case, but in recent years, games have gotten longer. And as reviewers and players have noted, these games, even when great, can take forever to get to the fun part.
I found the first 15 hours of Starfield incredibly tedious. If I did not love Bethesda’s previous games (and if Starfield wasn’t available on Xbox Game Pass) I doubt I would have dived back in.
Some games are tough to get into because they are challenging. Learning a new set of mechanics and honing a new set of skills can be overwhelming.
For the most part though, I’ve found it difficult to jump into several recent RPGs, including Starfield and Dragon Age, because these games do not use storytelling strategies to hook me within the first hour.
This is a far cry from the way other storytelling mediums and genres work—in fiction writing, the opening sentence is key.
In their book on the publishing industry, The Bestseller Code, Matthew Jockers and Jodie Archer note that the first sentence of a bestseller is an important hook, “a mixture of voice and conflict” that needs to leave the reader craving more.
Take John Grisham’s opening sentence in The Rainmaker: “My decision to become a lawyer was irrevocably sealed when I realized my father hated the legal profession.” In under 20 words, Grisham establishes an authoritative voice, introduces the narrator, and hints at conflict between father and son, sparking curiosity. We want to know who this guy is.
This type of opening line might seem straightforward, but it’s hard to achieve. Packing character and intrigue into a few words without relying on explication is tough. These opening lines raise questions and don’t give away the answers.
Games can, and do, make similar moves. One of Bethesda’s previous games, Skyrim, takes several cues from the bestseller playbook: the first fifteen minutes are filled with conflict and raise questions the player wants to answer.
You wake up in a cart on the way to your execution. You watch other prisoners be decapitated. Then it’s your turn—you kneel, the ax is about to swing, and a dragon lands on a nearby building and begins to destroy everything. You escape and run for your life.
There is unresolved conflict not only between the player and the imperial soldiers, but also between the player and the dragon. The fact that you can’t yet defend yourself gives you a reason to hone your skills. You leave with questions about why you were imprisoned and how you fit into the world.
Conversely, Starfield opens when you join a space mining crew and find an alien artifact. Pirates show up and try to take the artifact. You defeat them, handily. You get a ship. Then you can pretty much do whatever you’d like. The game simultaneously gives you complete freedom, without doing much character-building to pique your interest.
Given that many games involve 50+ hours of playtime, it makes sense that opening moments are deprioritized—players will have hours and hours to get to know locations, characters, and mechanics. At the same time, without a solid opening, it’s hard for players to understand their characters’ motivations. Even massive RPGs like Starfield would benefit from paying more attention to the equivalent of their opening line—if they did, it might take less than 20 hours for these games to feel fun.
