Game Pacing Pitfalls Discussed

Thanks to GameSpot for their editorial discussing the problems in pacing a videogame correctly, as the author theorizes: "It's almost always the same sorts of things that make us get sick of them in a hurry", and goes on to pinpoint game facets that affect pacing adversely. He suggests: "Loading times are quite possibly the single worst thing about today's games", and also points out "...providing the player with easy access to often-used features" as a pacing-killer, referencing Vagrant Story's "unwieldy menu system." Finally, he argues that "the ideal game should never require pausing or fast-forwarding", mentioning that Star Wars: KOTOR had "...combat [that] was paced seemingly just right so that I'd be able to react to what was happening as it happened, not in between desperately toggling the pause button."

Comments

Unskippable Cutsequences

[jdonnis]

How about cutsequences you cannot escape.

It is easy to say a game has 40+ hours of gameplay when they KNOW that you have to watch all cutsequences at least twice and you cannot skip them.

Latest example: The Jedi Academy demo - why some developers don't get that they will face eternal damnation for a thing like this is beyond me.

What the author forgets...

[KDan]

is that different people like the game to be paced differently. I have friends who like to play Starcraft on infinite resource maps where clicking speed is a major factor in who wins the battle. Others like to take their time. Different people not only have different abilities in terms of what pace they can keep up with, but also different preferences.

Pacing may be an issue, sure - but it's not an issue that can be fixed in any way, because whatever you do, you'll still only hit just right one small portion of the gaming audience.

Daniel

Re:What the author forgets...

[Incoherent07]

And Starcraft, like a few other games, realizes this and allows you to change the speed of the game from agonizingly slow to a nice fast clip, not to mention the variety in maps you mentioned. And, unlike some of the complaints mentioned in the article, you can skip almost all of the cinematics in Starcraft if you so desire.

I think you can, in fact, fix pacing; it just takes a bit more effort to make varying game speeds. (For example, FF6 allowed you to vary the pace of the battles.) That, and the ability to cancel out of the increasingly-long cinematics, would do a world of good.