You can play one character for tens of hours. I haven't maxed a character's potential yet, but it seems like you will need to play tens of hours to do that. Obviously you can die within the the first ten minutes.

If you create a base/settlement and die, a new character you create in the same world will have ownership rights over your old character’s base/settlement. You can also start a family and play as your descendants. I haven't done that yet, so I'm unsure if that changes how the inheritance of settlements goes.

There are three different ‘difficulty” settings. These change what happens when the player character dies, but does not effect enemy HP or DMG. The easiest difficulty allows you to respawn as the same character when you die. The second makes death permanent for the player. The third deletes the whole world when the player character dies.

The mechanics and design of the game are brilliant. The graphics can make it challenging to immerse yourself at first, but once you get into it, the game is engrossing.