10 Ways Video Games Keep Lying To You

Let's consider the announcement of the famously (or infamously) troubled Fallout 76 where Todd Howard claimed it was "four times bigger" than Fallout 4. Of course, what he forgot to specify was that, while the amount of land in the game may be four times more, there wasn't a whole lot of anything to do in it.

Abstract concepts like size and amount of play time are bandied about in video game marketing all the time, despite the fact that your mileage will obviously vary wildly.

Is a game really bigger or longer just because the map is bigger?

What they don't tell you is what that includes. How much of that is repetitive tasks like collecting 100 feathers; how much is boring side quests; how much of the map is auto-generated, copied and pasted assets that make all the dungeons basically the same? (I'm looking at you, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.)

Is a game really bigger or longer just because there's more space to do more repetitive activities?