Rush It or Relish It? Why the RPG Community's Biggest Debate Is Actually Its Greatest Strength
Picture two players booting up the same RPG on the same day. One of them will sprint through it with surgical precision, exploiting glitches and sequence breaks to finish in record time. The other will spend forty-five minutes decorating their in-game house before the main quest even starts.
Both will come out the other side raving about it.
The RPG community has a long, occasionally heated history with this divide — the speedrunners versus the savoring crowd, the record-chasers versus the completionists. Forums light up, Twitter threads spiral, and somehow everyone ends up feeling a little judged for how they choose to play. But here's the thing: that tension is actually one of the most interesting conversations in gaming right now, and it's worth having properly.
What Speedrunning Actually Is (And Isn't)
Let's clear something up first. Speedrunning an RPG isn't about disrespecting the game. If anything, it's the opposite. To break a 60-hour game into a 3-hour run, you need an almost obsessive understanding of its systems — every mechanic, every AI behavior, every frame-perfect opportunity. Speedrunners often know these games more intimately than anyone.
Watch a top-level speedrun of something like Ocarina of Time or Final Fantasy VII and you're watching a completely different kind of mastery. It's athletic, almost. The game becomes a puzzle to be solved as efficiently as possible, and the community that builds around that is genuinely collaborative — runners share discoveries, debate routes, celebrate each other's records with real enthusiasm.
There's also a creativity angle that doesn't get enough credit. Finding an unintended shortcut or a physics exploit that the developers never anticipated is, in its own way, a form of interactive storytelling. The player is rewriting the game's own rules.
The Art of the Long Play
On the other side of the spectrum, you've got the savoring crowd — players who read every item description, exhaust every dialogue tree, and won't leave a region until the map is fully cleared. Completionists. Lore hunters. The people who are genuinely upset when they miss a missable NPC conversation in act two.
This playstyle gets dismissed as obsessive sometimes, but there's something deeply intentional about it. Savoring an RPG is about trust — trust that the developers put something meaningful in every corner, and that the experience is worth inhabiting fully. It's the gaming equivalent of reading a novel slowly enough to notice the sentences.
For a lot of players, especially those who came up on games like Baldur's Gate, Morrowind, or Persona 4, this approach isn't just preferred — it's the whole point. The world-building, the character development, the ambient storytelling in environmental details: none of that lands if you're blowing past it.
The False War
Here's where the community discourse tends to go sideways. Both camps occasionally get territorial, implying that the other approach is somehow doing it wrong. Speedrunners get called disrespectful to developers' work. Completionists get called slow or unable to let go. Neither criticism is fair, and neither really holds up.
Games are interactive by definition. There is no single correct way to interact with them. The beauty of the medium — and RPGs specifically — is that a well-designed game can sustain radically different relationships with its players without breaking.
A completionist and a speedrunner can both love Elden Ring for completely different reasons. The completionist is there for the lore, the secrets, the sense of a world fully explored. The speedrunner is there for the mechanical challenge of mastering the game's systems at the highest possible level. Neither experience invalidates the other.
How Modern RPG Design Is Getting Smart About This
The good news is that developers are increasingly building games that honor both philosophies without forcing players to choose.
Hades is a fascinating example — a game that rewards speed and mechanical mastery while also burying enormous amounts of story and character development for players who want to dig. You can blast through runs as efficiently as possible and still be surprised by new dialogue thirty hours in. Or you can lean into the narrative at a leisurely pace. The game genuinely doesn't care which you choose.
Baldur's Gate 3 similarly accommodates both crowds. Its systems are deep enough to fascinate the optimization-minded player while its storytelling rewards the slow, exploratory approach. The fact that speedrunners cleared it in under an hour while some players are still on their first playthrough a year later isn't a bug — it's a testament to how much the game contains.
More developers are building in accessibility features and flexible difficulty settings that let players tune the experience to match their relationship with time. That's not dumbing anything down. That's respecting the diversity of the player base.
Finding Your Own Playstyle (Without the Guilt)
If you've ever felt weird about how you play — either because you blew through something people call a masterpiece or because you took three months to finish a 20-hour game — give yourself a break.
A few things worth asking yourself:
- What do you actually enjoy most? Combat mechanics? Story? Exploration? Let that drive your approach rather than what the community considers the "right" way.
- What does your time actually allow? A parent with two kids and a demanding job doesn't have the same relationship with a 100-hour RPG as a college student with open summers. Neither player is wrong for adapting accordingly.
- Are you having fun? Genuinely. Because if you're grinding through a completion checklist out of obligation rather than enjoyment, that's worth examining.
The RPG community is at its best when it celebrates the full spectrum of how people engage with these worlds. Whether you're chasing a world record or still deciding what to name your character — welcome to the quest. Your pace is valid.