I think not mentioning genre in this does miss quite a large part of things. RPGs should be long, because the point is an immersive world that you can explore and play around in as a character. many games are very different on subsiquent runs; rouge likes and strategy games get thousands of hours out of me, but no 2 instances of the game are the same as say RPG quests can sometimes be. action adventure games have been getting too long imo. this is because they’re a genre that lends itself to a simple gameplay loop, combat, set peices, and a linear story that is the driving factor for playing. sometimes, after a few years, I will go back to say portal 2, but I would not find it that weird if somebody had only ever played it once. the RPG-lite aspects being tacked on to what really should just be a straight forward action adventure game, are something that bloats these games imo. like he said in the video, if disco elysium had added a combat system it would bloat the game beyond the core that it should be.

basically, many modern games have scope creep that turns into bloat, and this happens due to marketing teams leading design because they think this will make more money if they have a crafting system and open world