The Cost of RPGs
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I am addicted to lengthy story-driven RPGs. I own nearly every Final Fantasy game ever released, including Final Fantasy XI, a great number of BioWare games, and even a fair collection of Black Isle Studios games. Heck, to top it all off, I have purchased both Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura from Troika Games on two separate occasions - once while the company was still in operation and again after it went under. I love these kinds of games and yet as time goes on I find myself playing fewer and fewer of them.I see this as a good problem to have. There's certainly no harm in picking up an RPG a year or two after its release when you find more time to devote to it.
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But the question remains: why have I stopped playing all these RPGs, then? Why have they all piled up into such a tremendous backlog? Why, as an example, can I just not manage to drag myself into continuing through Final Fantasy XIII after the first three hours? Even more disconcerting, why can I not manage to drum up the interest to continue playing Dragon Age: Awakening after just an hour when the original had me so absolutely enthralled?
The answer is actually far simpler than one might think. While all of these games have their own merits and each could arguably be considered stellar examples of writing in games, they are all horrendously long. And that may seem an obvious statement to make, but in reality it's one that's worth overstating.
