Starfield - Quantity vs. Quality Debate

PC Gamer discusses quantity vs. quality in RPGs:

Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 have reignited the 'quantity vs quality' debate around RPGs that promise a billion hours of gameplay, but I think they can actually deliver

Stop me if you've heard this before: "Our game has more words than the Lord of the Rings and the Bible put together! It's a billion, kajillion hours long! You can't finish it! No one can finish it!"
 
There's an RPG liker's apocalypse looming on the horizon: Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield are launching within a month of each other, and each is looking like a whopper. 

Bethesda has a long history of long-ass games, with Starfield allegedly set to be the long-assest, while Baldur's Gate 3 dev Larian declared that BG3 will be a huge game, taking at least 75 hours to beat and having "174 hours of cinematics, making it more than twice the length of every season of Game of Thrones combined." In theory, that's what I want from a roleplaying epic, but games that promise to be unreasonably long often end up making a case for being, well, more reasonable.

This is the enduring struggle of the RPG player: we understandably idealize the notion of a "forever game," a sprawling world we can inhabit for months, but again and again we are disappointed by games that make this promise.

A very good commentator on this conundrum is former BioWare writer David Gaider, who mused on the subject on Twitter, and in response to a commenter questioning PC Gamer's occasionally-critical pre-launch coverage of Starfield, Gaider remarked, "The skepticism probably comes from the promises of endless content but also meaningful content… things which haven’t really been compatible to date. I guess we’ll see!"

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Thanks Couchpotato!