I play Gloomhaven with friends. Since we live in different parts of the country, we only meet up to play twice a year to play. It will take us years to complete Gloomhaven. It's awesome. It means we can just keep playing long into our retirements (at which point we might meet and play more often!)
Not to say they couldn't include more modules, but when you're trying to progress a storyline it's really frustrating to have multiple sessions (most many hours long) in between you a plot development.
I think it would have been better as 8 starting classes, 8 unlockables, and two more compressed campaigns with some other progression compressed accordingly.
"Campaign", in this case, doesn't mean something like Gloomhaven's scenario-driven design, with a single character pad and a couple card decks that need to stay in order between serial 1-4 hour play sessions. It's a single game, with huge maps and logistical tables whose state needs to be tracked for the entire duration.
> Isn't it great if you know you have enough content to play the game for the next 20 years?
"Content" in games is generally awful and the modern focus on it is destroying what makes games interesting. Most games, especially competitive games, should become more interesting with repeat plays as you explore the systems involved. Gloomhaven works because the story "content" is largely divorced from the mechanics/dynamics of the scenario so you're playing "the game" dozens of times, and those systems are interesting. Modern narrative campaign games that don't have anything interesting going on in a much smaller inner loop are trash.
Maybe some are fine experiencing this one thing over many months/years, but most people (by far, I would guess) would prefer experiencing more of a variety in the limited time we have.
Our group is playing Jaws of the Lion, but only play it about once every few months, while still playing several other games in between.
But depending on how long a given campaign would take, it might take more than we want to invest in a single game -- in the example of this article, that would take a lifetime for us.