How long should a tactics campaign be

Two complaints turn up constantly in reviews of tactics games, and they look like opposites.

The first is that there is not enough game: the systems are interesting, the fighting works, and it runs out before you were finished with it. The second is that it outstays its welcome: the last third is the same fight again with bigger numbers, and people stop playing without finishing.

Those are not opposites. They are the same complaint about the ratio of new problems to total hours, and that ratio is the actual design question. Length is just where it shows up.

A tactics campaign has only a few ways to stay interesting, and every one of them is finite.

The run. Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018) is finished in under an hour and is meant to be played forty times. It holds because the maps, enemies and squad change every attempt, so the content is recombined rather than consumed. The Last Spell (Ishtar Games, 2023) works the same way. This shape can support hundreds of hours out of very little material, which is why small studios keep choosing it.

The level set. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (Pyro Studios, 1998) and Desperados III (Mimimi Games, 2020) are fixed sequences of hand-built puzzles. There is no padding available: each level is as long as it is, and when they run out the game ends. These are the shortest campaigns in the genre and almost nobody complains about their length, because nothing in them repeats.

The told story. XCOM 2 (Firaxis Games, 2016) and Wasteland 3 (inXile Entertainment, 2020) have a beginning, a middle and an end, with set pieces placed along the way. This shape has a natural ceiling: once the story's problems are all introduced, the remaining hours are arithmetic. This is where most of the outstayed-its-welcome reviews come from.

The open campaign. Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) and Battle Brothers (Overhype Studios, 2017) let you make your own schedule on a map that does not care about your progress. These can be enormous without feeling padded, because the player chooses the next problem, and a problem you chose does not feel like filler. They are also the hardest and most expensive to build.

The failure almost always arrives at the same place: after the last new enemy type and before the ending. By then your squad is strong, the maps are familiar, and the game has no new question left, so it raises the numbers instead.

Three specific causes, in order of how often they do the damage. Generated maps that are different arrangements of the same pieces, which stops being new much earlier than designers expect. Power curves that outrun the difficulty, so the fights get easier while the health bars get longer. And a strategy layer whose decisions were all made in the first few hours, so there is nothing left upstairs to think about.

XCOM 2's answer to this is instructive: put a clock on almost every mission and a doom counter on the campaign, so playing carefully can never become playing slowly. The original Fallout gave you a hard deadline to find a water chip. Jagged Alliance 2 expires mercenary contracts on a calendar whether you are ready or not. In each case the fix was not more content. It was pressure that made the existing content harder to spend.

Sometimes the hours are fine and the minutes are the problem. A campaign feels bloated when each individual mission takes longer than the decisions in it justify: the slow walk to first contact, the overwatch crawl, the ten minutes of inventory sorting afterwards, the enemy turn you watch rather than play.

Cutting that is nearly always better value than cutting content. A game of forty hours where no hour contains dead time will be remembered as shorter and liked more than a game of twenty-five that makes you wait.

There is no number, but there is a rule, and it is usable: a campaign should end shortly after it stops being able to introduce a new problem.

For a hand-built level set that is a short game, and that is fine. For an open map with a real economy it can be very long. For a told story it is usually about two thirds of the length the studio planned, which is the most common and most expensive mistake in this genre.

The commercial pressure pushes the wrong way. Hours are the easiest thing to advertise and the easiest to pad, and a store page cannot show the difference between forty hours of new problems and forty hours of the same fight. Players find out after they buy, and then they write the review.

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows, real time with pause, set after a collapse, with zombies and with factions fighting over what is left. It is in development, and we are not going to describe anything in it that is not finished, including how long it is.

What we will commit to in public is the rule above rather than a number. We would rather ship something that ends while it is still asking questions than pad it to a figure that looks better in a store listing.