61 Responses to “The Power of Pacing”

1. Robyrt Says:
   October 7th, 2006 at 10:11 pm

   On pacing: I’d say there are three moments to consider pacing-wise, the beginning, middle, and end of games. You’ve covered the beginning and end, but I hear a lot of people say “oh, I didn’t finish that game, I didn’t get past Point X” where X is maybe 50-60% into the game. This happens either when something bizarrely difficult is presented or when the game has just shown you 100% of the good stuff already.

   God of War solves this problem by having one of their best scenes up front, giving you very substantive new powers through the middle of the game, and then just when you start to get bored with your abilities they introduce the story and have another boss battle. Although Prince of Persia: Sands of Time follows this scheme, people still don’t finish it because it falls into the “too difficult” trap of throwing complex puzzles and difficult battles at you early on.

   On reducing startup times: One elegant way of achieving branding and cutting down on times simultaneously is to show your company logo above the first loading screen. (Oblivion does it this way, and now I know exactly who made the game, but I can press “load game” within 10 seconds of startup.)

2. Hitaro Says:
   October 7th, 2006 at 10:42 pm

   Great read (like every article you write). Let’s hope that it’ll grab some people’s attention.

   Is there a reason why the first paragraph of “Pace for Impact” is copied twice?

3. Auston Says:
   October 8th, 2006 at 1:32 am

   I’ve heard that the newly released “Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime” has some of the best pacing in a game, ever. I’ve yet to play it, but it’s currently in 11th place for DS games at Gamerankings.com with a 85.3%, making it the second highest rated DS game not published by Nintendo.

4. Jim Miles Says:
   October 8th, 2006 at 7:32 am

   I think the largest question relating to pacing in vidoegames is “how do we get gamers to finish our game?”. Even if a game does as you suggest is the ideal and starts out at 8/10 and finishes on 9/10, many, many people still won’t get to that 9/10 spectacular ending if the game is 20 hours long and doesn’t have some very slickly managed pacing between the start and finish. Most of the serious gamers I know haven’t finished half the games they own, and they are hardcore - among the “casual” gamers it is even worse.

   Ought games to be shorter? Probably. But they don’t have to be so long as they can be designed so people actually play them the whole way through. I’d love to see a sequel to this article tackling the issue of pacing throughout a game to make the gamer see not only more than the first hour but actually the whole 20, 30, 40, or even 80 hours that the game has to offer.

   The problem is that games still sell even though people aren’t completing them. In fact, if no-one bought a new game before they’d finished their old one, way, way less games would be sold. So, in a way, the developers/publishers have a keen interest in not hooking gamers so much on their title.

   Games are a strange entertainment form in that many people are perfectly happy to buy them and get entertainment from them and move on (buying a new game and playing that instead) before they’ve seen levels that the developer spent time and money on making. Are we going to see a change in content delivery to reflect this? Perhaps we’ll see shorter, proportionally cheaper games with expansions for those gamers who want more and more. Or perhaps the focus of game development will be more on the gameworlds than what those worlds are used for. In GTA, the gameworld is what takes the time to build, not the relatively simplistic missions that operate within it - the beauty of such games is that the players can appreciate where the effort has gone in the game even if they don’t plough through the missions.

5. Rock Joe Says:
   October 8th, 2006 at 1:10 pm

   I never noticed you were the author. It does have that Sirlin-ness to it, tho.

   On getting players to finish more games, I don’t think there’s a silver bullet solution. You can’t make a movie that’ll please everyone who sees it. And movies have the advantage that they only need to make you embrace them for a couple hours. It’s hard to make a player want to dedicate enough chunks of his life to see everything you put in your game. And that’s for the good games!

   I guess a nice place to settle down on could be just convincing everyone who buys your game to not sell it. The odds they’ll finish it go up naturally. I myself have alot of unfinished games, but I’m sure that by the time I die, my percentage of finished games will be in the high 80s at least.

   On startup times, a nice idea would be some crazy minigame involving the company logo.

6. David Boudreau Says:
   October 8th, 2006 at 9:39 pm

   If Super Turbo’s “Super Combo Finish” points reward distribution offers any insight into the profitability of how to structure the best delivery of the best game content, here is the breakdown of characters with 5 hits, e.g. Ryu:

   1st hit 23.80952%
   2nd hit 47.61904%
   3rd hit 9.52380%
   4th hit 9.52380%
   5th hit 9.52380%

   Note the 3rd, 4th and 5th hits each offer equal and small amounts of profitability. Combined, they only make up 28.5714% of the full super combo finish point total- still less than the second hit alone, all by itself.

   That second hit comprises half the point value of the entire super combo. After that, the first hit packs the most wallop (as the first hit cannot yet even be considered part of a combo, necessarily). The first hit also happens to be closest to an equal amount of points for one out of five of the hits, i.e., you’d think 1 hit out of 5 total hits should = 20.00000%, all hits being equal. But it’s not all equally distributed; the first two hits provide over 70% of the total value- and the rest is change.

   If you had a big pile of money, and wanted the most altruistic good in the world to come out of it, how should it be spent? Robyrt, would you agree that the Parable of the Talents can provide an answer to this question? I think it was demonstrated recently when the world’s second richest man allocated most of his life’s profits to the world’s richest man.

   Disclaimer: Of course, points don’t really mean shit in Super Turbo, whatsoever. And this may in fact be one of the worst ways to go about pacing the best content in an actual game. Actually, percentages may mean very little as a meaningful metric here- after all, we’re not living during the time when disk space was a limiting factor in the screenshot reward graphic(s) you saw at the end/openning of a game. If I had to guess, I’d say the best strategy would be to provide 11/10 for the openning, at _least_ 10/10 for anything mid-game, then 12/10 for the mind-blowing big finish (and then the replay value adds like, this whole other dimension of epiphany and self-actualization). Of course, 11/10 may exceed production capacity (or even imagination), but 9/10 is… well… it’s not 10/10.

7. Mark Conkle Says:
   October 8th, 2006 at 11:41 pm

   It’s too bad that some people don’t understand what a 10 point system means. Sirlin is an amazing author with great ideas. But while we’re asking for game to very between the best game possible and 20% better than the best game possible, I have some ideas. Let’s make the system free, and the games cost $10, but with a $20 rebate. Also, when you play, you’ll hook your brain up to a time extender that makes everything seem like it’s taking longer than it is. That way, you can play an 80 hour game in one afternoon. I can’t wait ’til they start taking my ideas.

8. Patrick Says:
   October 9th, 2006 at 9:47 am

   Even though several games use it to great effect, I fundementally hate previewing things and then taking them away from the player. I was having a lot of fun, and now I have to play through the game to get them back? It only works if the content inbetween is fun, but it still in itself isnt a fun to experience and subtracts from the game(though something fun needs to be in the begining regardless). I think the real goal is making a memorable opening sequence that is both fun and has a hook in it, something to entice the player into playing. It sounds like God of War follows this model, though I have never played it myself so I cant say for certain.

9. Tohoya Says:
   October 9th, 2006 at 12:02 pm

   I think everyone here is missing the point: give us your best and don’t ever let up. If you’ve got a kick ass opening level, and an awesome end-boss, give us that and that alone. Cut out the 20 hours of filler. Give me a 5-hour long game as good as Resident Evil 4 over a 20-hour game that has some moments of brilliance but insists on having filler.

10. Mitch Says:
    October 9th, 2006 at 10:51 pm

    Good article. That loading screen is ridiculous, worse than a PS1 game. I would demand a refund for a game like that today.

11. Sirlin Says:
    October 9th, 2006 at 11:58 pm

    Tohoya has a good point. Here’s another quote of mine from about 10 years ago that I still stand by: “I’ve never played a game that was too short.” I’ve certainly played games that cost too much or that were too long though. The perception (and the reality?) of the market is that you can’t get away with releasing a really short game though.

    God of War is 10-12 hours (note that the time counter is actually wrong, so I’m giving real hours here). I’m really happy that it got away with being short and incredibly good. It actually got a lot of buzz from the industry because working game industry professionals who don’t have time to play an 80 hour game actually finished God of War.

    –Sirlin

12. James O Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 9:00 am

    Beyond long-term pacing, which is of course crucial, I think short term pacing is just as critical for keeping interest in a game. God of War was good partially because it had tight macro-pacing throughout all 8-16 hours of it. However, also worth noting is that the micro-pacing was very well done too - you didn’t have to sit down for hours to get a good play experience; the pacing scaled very well. Twenty-odd minutes of monster bashing could generally advance you to a new location/save point; and you were treated to new points of interest (new powers, weapons, spells, enemies) at least hourly. The long-term pacing was well supported by constant smaller scale rewards - as opposed to most Japanese RPGs, which tend to plod for longer stretches before a player is rewarded with some sort of narrative or mechanical payoff.

13. Tyler Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 9:35 am

    Good article, I have been waiting for a new one to show up. I don’t buy alot of games and I RARELY rent games. The games that I do buy I usually play for a long time before getting tired of them and then sometimes come back to them later. Especially when games are $60 (Canadian) I can’t keep buying new games, trying them and then throwing them away. Any game that I have started I have finished which is a fair number but not a ridiculously high number. If it got too hard I would stop for the day and comeback later and the problem usually got solved. I can’t half ass it playing games becuase I feel that I might be missing something, like a story element or a secret area.

    I really think its sad that games must become shorter just because. I can see how they are getting shorter because of developement costs and times but to me episodic content is the way to go. Half Life 2 Episodes is great pacing in its own way because “Half Life 3″ would be a long game if it was released all together, but episodic content allows more people to finish the game because it is spanned over a longer peiod of time.

14. Grayman Says:
    October 11th, 2006 at 11:15 am

    As mentioned above final fantasy games usually have great pacing. From the opening of final fantasy 7 to the exit of midgar the game is very well paced with lots of action and an introduction to most mechanics. The only way it could have been imrpoved would be giving access to more materia early on like enemy skills or steal but that would have left the midgame lacking(or lackinger). FF8 didn’t have this at all and started with 20 minutes of being stuck in school and then you finally get out to fight wasp monsters, i turned it off at this point when I tried replaying it over the summer.

    Metal Gear solid 3 has an interesting variation on the start with all your gear but loss it soon method. The game has a ridiculous amount of intro scenes and hand holding, but the first 20 minute mission has many midgame(in the second mission) items hidden in it. If you just wanted to fool around with gaurds in the game this first mission gives you access to a silenced pisol, shotgun, xm(m16 type machine gun), all types of grenades, infra red goggles and possibly another assault rifle. Playing the second mission and real bulk of the game these items are stretched out over the first 50%.

    I agree about games that have very fast startup times. God of War surprised me plesently with how fast I was at a menu for the first time. Another game like this is Gran turismo 4, once you’ve set up your options it also starts quite fast skipping the movies and going straight to the main menu or right into sim mode.

    I joke that some bad games usually have the long unskipable developer screens because players are less likely to play the game again. I wouldn’t think developers would want to advertise on that though.

    I really enjoy the sandbox gameplay even though I do enjoy doing some of the missions usually. The missions in grand theft auto are required to get to the juicery parts of the game. Portions of the map with more vehicles and weapons are usually locked off until lots of missions are done. So the game does deliver it’s biggest punch at the end when more options are available but still has many open at the start.

15. Guest Says:
    October 11th, 2006 at 11:38 am

    I remember feeling very strongly at the end of Luigi’s Mansion that the game had some good underlying mechanics and ideas, but it was simply far too short. It would have been an average game in my eyes had it been at least twice as long, but it was so short that I felt like I was seeing a neat way to play a game and then the game was over just as I could get into playing. I often consider the economic side of my gaming, and I always think of how many hours per dollar I am getting from a game. I feel as if though the value I am getting from a game can be at least partially expressed by time played divided by price. So for a standard issue $50 game, I, being cheap(frugal), expect 50 hours. Of course, I count every time the game will inspire me to replay it so a 20 hour game I replay 4 more times after beating it has the same value on this scale as a 100 hour game I never play again, and in both cases I’m fairly satisfied as I just effectively payed $0.50 per hour on entertainment, a really phenominal deal when compared with other forms of entertainment.

    I often compare games like this. For instance, Luigi’s Mansion took me about 7 hours to beat the first time, and I have replayed it once. I only have one file I have ever made on Pokemon Sapphire, and I have about 350 hours on it. Luigi’s Mansion cost $50, and Pokemon Sapphire cost $35. Now, let’s do math. I payed about $4 per an hour of gametime on Luigi’s Mansion, and I payed about a dime per hour of entertainment on Pokemon Sapphire. In order for me to call Luigi’s Mansion a better value, I would have had to have had forty times more fun or gotten forty times a more fulfilling experience during that time than I got from Pokemon Sapphire. Of course, this is not true at all, and if anything that magnifies what a great purchase Pokemon Sapphire was and what a horrible purchase Luigi’s Mansion was. However, I did enjoy Luigi’s Mansion on the surface; it was captivating enough to make me want to keep playing and finish the game, even to get an A rank mansion and capture all the boos on the second playthrough. It certainly would have kept me playing if it were longer; I can see I would only have benefitted. Were the game twice as long, I see it would have been twice the value. $2 per hour of entertainment isn’t anything to get excited over, but it’s fair. $4 is a highway robbery from my eyes. Of course, games that get values like a dime per hour are legendary to me, and I am always looking to buy more games like that. So I suppose that I can’t say a whole lot about pacing other than that a straight line of quality always satisfies more than a sine curve, but I think the statement that length tends to be negative is really not true. From a value perspective, length only hurts if the added length drives the enjoyment to time ratio down further than it increases the time per money ratio, and as long as a game is using the same mechanics(especially a game like a platformer), that will almost never be true and more length/more levels will almost always be positive.

16. Sirlin Says:
    October 11th, 2006 at 12:14 pm

    I disagree entirely with Guest about Luigi’s Mansion. It is, in my opinion, the EXACT length it should have been. The entire game is based on a gimmick, and that gimmick is explored in about every puzzley way it could have been. When they ran out of tricks, the game ended (and with a surprisingly hard ending, considering the rest of the game).

    I remember actually thinking “Wow, this game more than almost any other…ended at the right time.” A lesser game would have added more garbage to be longer for longer’s sake.

    I also think guest is being far too price sensitive here. The longest symphonies are not the best. The longest books are not the best. The longest games are not the best. There is something to be said for hours/dollar in a game, but if it’s your only metric, then clearly you are missing out on games that have a high quality, but lower hours/dollar. Also, Guest could have argued that Luigi’s Mansion should have simply cost less. That I could imagine, at least, but I was entertained by it. It took me 12 hours to finish it, if I recall.

    God of War was even shorter, and worth every penny.

    –Sirlin

17. Guest Says:
    October 11th, 2006 at 4:18 pm

    Eh, I think we may be looking at this from different angles, and I think my criticism of Luigi’s Mansion may have not come out clearly. I felt as if though I was really just getting into it when it ended, and I didn’t see much incentive to keep going on another run. Length can also mean other stuff too such as unlockables(even simple stuff like a graphic swap so the vacuum looks like a Yoshi as a reward for an A rank would have been nice). IMO, if Luigi’s Mansion were really serious about being a much better game, Luigi’s Mansion really should have had a level editor; that could have quintupled the effective length without exhausting the quality of the core concept. The mansion format easily lent itself to an editor too, and it would have made this incredibly short game as long as any other game as it would have been terrific fun designing custom mansions and then swapping them with friends. That is part of what I consider length really: how long you are really playing this game. I mean, the main story of Luigi’s Mansion really was about right if a bit on the short side; the real robbery was that once you had done that, you were kinda done with the game. Hidden Mansion was kinda cool in a small way, but the more powerful vacuum cancels with the stronger ghosts to equal about the same thing; it certainly was not enough to compensate for a short and not particularly replayable main story. Another length suppliment model that Luigi’s Mansion could have used would be a Zelda1-style true second quest in lieu of the practically the same thing Hidden Mansion. A second mansion following the same principles that built the first but completely re-arranged and with significantly increased difficulty(since it comes after the main game, those who are casual about it have already had their fun) would have been another thing that could have made the game much longer without jepordizing quality even if you don’t think there was any further standard gameplay that could be gained from their style of play.

    GoW, from what I’ve seen and heard, is deceptively long as I saw a friend beat it and then immediately start up another file, and I saw a sort of gameplay archtype develop around absolutely mastering the combat system. Well, if it is giving you reasons to keep playing it, that fairly does count for length. Short but replayable is the same thing as long. You run into problems when you are only mildly replayable and are also really short.

    Luigi’s Mansion costing less would have been fine; I would never have complained it if were a lot cheaper. I just felt robbed that I got so little out of the game; it was diverting for the time, but it was nothing fantastic, and it was not much time. I actually did mention that quality plays a big role; had Luigi’s Mansion been forty times better than Pokemon Sapphire, they would have been an equivalent value. I guess I never expressed it full out mathematically, but I generally would judge a game as:

    (hours/dollars) * quality

    With quality being a subjective value that I use comparatively. Like, if a game is twice as good(I.E. enjoyable to play), it can get away with having half as much of an hours/dollar value, but it couldn’t get away with having one fifth the value. It sounds very hard and mathematical, but I can only get so many games, and the value of the game as a whole is very important to me. I kinda said this earlier, but I may not have been clear. Also, it is somewhat absorbed by the fact that a few months later, I will likely get an urge to replay a quality game whereas I will not get a similar urge with a lesser but longer game. Like I said, a short game I play many times can add up to one long game. No, I’m not trying to sing the praises of those games that are really long because the world is massive and mostly empty and you spend a long time just moving around it(Wind Waker much?). Of course, I really support the games that manage to be both long and extremely fun; Tales of Symphonia could be my favorite game for the Gamecube.

    I want to iterate again that length is not the time to play it once to the ending, but I consider it the total time I will ever play the game as long as I own it(which is until the format on which the game is stored breaks as I don’t sell old games). This includes all replays and allows some games(a few classics come to mind) to have infinite value as I will never tire of replaying them. I do not know everyone else’s gaming habits, but for me one of the most important factors in a game is replayability as it just is free game length, and odds are if I want to replay a game, that means that the time I spend with the game is real quality time. In that sense, Super Mario Brothers, a game you can easily beat in under ten minutes and play everything easily within a few hours, can have the same value as an extremely long modern RPG. I know people who have beaten Super Mario Brothers hundreds of times; it was certainly a better value for them than a 50 hour RPG that they would play once and never again could ever be.

    On a random final note, more games really need level editors. Even a low quality feature like Advance Wars DS’s Design Maps can add many hours to a game, and level editors really allow the concepts of a game to come alive just as the player wants them to. I remember I lent a friend Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, a game that we agreed had a questionable single player mode and levels that didn’t feel nearly as skate friendly as the prequels which somewhat limited the multiplayer possibilities. I spent little time with the game’s single player and generally considered it to have been a poor purchase as I got little value from it. However, he just took off with the level editor and created a completely separate platforming game out of it which required you to grind over spike pits and navigate various obstacles to reach, of all things, a flagpole at the end. All the time he spent designing those levels and that my friends and I spent playing them, doing something I doubt the designers ever considered possible and that significantly increased the amount of value gotten out of that game, was possible because they put in a level editor, even if it had a really irritating object limit and did not let you do as many things with rails as it could have. I guess that’s my point out of all of this; I think that length is an important(perhaps the most important) indicator of value, and by length I just don’t mean length to see the ending credits, but all the time together that game will make you want to play it. Obviously mindless filler is a one time length enhancement that kills replayability, but different gameplay models can add some extra length more easily. RPGs can put in sidequests and optional bosses. Platformers can have extra levels. Sports and racing games can have unlockable teams, vehicles, tracks, etc. and “master level” competitions in which the AI uses these things. Action games can have features like “boss rush” or some sort of competitive scoring system like Ninja Gaiden. I think games that go the extra mile and add length like this rather than just being content with the basic package really do stand out, and I think this is often missed and misunderstood.

18. Sirlin Says:
    October 12th, 2006 at 2:13 am

    Guest has cleared up his comments on quality, so that’s good. A good quality game that’s short is certainly worth it. But his entire worldview is still very opposite of my own. I respect his view as representitive of one market segment though.

    I actually prefer a game to be short. I don’t have time to play an 80 hour game and I don’t really want to have to play that long to see all the cool stuff in a game. This wouldn’t be true of a competitive game like Starcraft or Street Fighter and I guess I’ll give a special exception to MMOs as well. But for a standard 1p game like Luigi’s Mansion, it definitely holds for me.

    I can count on one hand the number of these standard 1p games that I’ve beat AND wanted to keep playing. Resident Evil 4 was one of them. Tony Hawk was also one, as was Res. But these are rare games indeed. Luigi’s Mansion didn’t get close to making that cut, for me and neither did God of War.

    Btw, adding a level editor is a major, major increase in expense from the developer’s point of view. The additional testing required is large. When you give the player the ability to build anything, he can build things that really cause trouble. For a console game, the testing required by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are very intensive. Much moreso than you would ever imagine, and oh the stories I could tell. Are level editors great and fun? Yes. But realize that it’s a big expense to include them. The Tony Hawk series found that almost no one used the level editor and stopped including it in later games.

    That said, player created content is really awesome, don’t get me wrong. It’s just much easier to pull of on PC than in the current rules-intensive console environment.

    –Sirlin

19. Nikolas Payne Says:
    October 12th, 2006 at 3:59 pm

    A good example of a (highly) traditional RPG which actively fights the pacing problem is Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. I don’t know if you’ve played it, but it starts in medias res, with you controlling a high-level party of heroes raiding the titular evil castle.

    Basically, the game starts with the final dungeon, gameplay, and story of a normal RPG; then it ends, and it turns out the real game picks up 50 years later, with you playing as the descendents and heirs of those heroes you started out with. It’s similar to Metroid Prime, in the way you mentioned.

20. Charles Says:
    October 12th, 2006 at 10:48 pm

    Guest: Sorry to math geek out here, but I would venture that for most people, length / dollar and quality don’t have equal influence on the overall quality.

    That is, I’d bet that if a game B is twice as good as game A, I think a lot of people would be willing to pay more than twice as much for B than A (or have B be less than half the length of A for the same price). Basically, I think that for the same dollar cost, many people would rather have a better game than a longer one. So, I think for a lot of people, the equation would look more like:

    overall value = (hours / dollar) * (k * quality)
    with k > 1 (and varies according to person, genre preference, etc.)

    Actually, I personally think there’d be an exponential factor in there as well (one extremely good game is worth relatively more to me when compared to an average game than the average game would be compared to 2 below average games), but that’s getting into details of the equation, which isn’t really what this discussion is about. This probably demonstrates the danger of trying to assign arbitrary numerical values to “quality.”

    Also of course, this is a demand side equation, the supply side question of the cost associated with increasing the three terms is a completely different question). But I think the overall point is its harder (and thus rarer) to get a better game than a longer one, so its probably worth more to the consumer.

21. Metadeos Says:
    October 13th, 2006 at 5:02 am

    For most people economical quality in games is restricted to ‘visible effort’/price. period. If developers put two years into developing and balancing a highly flexible system, hardly anyone will care as long as it is 2D and/or the singleplayer is short.

    I’d like to adress a bad habit of newer games here, which is somewhat related to the topic. I can’t stand games showing you clearly when they are going to be over. Everytime that happens it gets hard for me to appreciate the game the way it might deserve.
    As an example I’d like to name Beyond Good & Evil. I don’t think the game was bad, it was fun and had a lot of variety. But then it served you three goals at the beginning which just felt like some kind of introduction, so I hoped for a long part of the game there would be some kind of ‘big bonus quest’. In the end not even the last boss could really impress me, so I was left disappointed.
    Examples how to do it right are games like SOTN (see above) or the MegaMan Battle Network series which features Bonus-Quests/Areas/Bosses to be beaten after you’ve seen the credits.

22. Rock Joe Says:
    October 13th, 2006 at 10:34 am

    I’ll comment on Tohoya’s comment first since it’s further back. I think you’re right that length is just one of the many factors to consider when talking about quality, but I appreciate the slower moments in games that can be used to build up tension and anticipation. The waves make the ride fun.

    And as big a math geek as I am, I’ve never really liked trying to put an equation on things like quality and value. I think if we were to come up with something that even a significant minority could agree on, the equation would have so many terms that people could all pick and chose which ones to set to zero. :)

23. Chadius Says:
    October 14th, 2006 at 10:54 pm

    …That loading time video was horrible. 6:28.01 to actually play a game? Thank goodness Nintendo has been really anal about loading times (Mario Kart Double Dash comes to mind. Those loading times are NInja.)

    For the main part, I just want shorter good games than long, bad games. Publishers are so obsessed with making long games that they stuff their game with padding, or “here’s another room full of enemies, get cracking!”

    Once again Sirlin, a great article.

24. Emmanuel Says:
    October 16th, 2006 at 5:34 am

    This an excellent article, as always. I would like to highlight a few interseting points :

    First here is a link
    http://www.jeuxvideo.com/articles/0000/00006417_test.htm

    which point to a very well known french game testing site. The point isn’t the test I link, nor the site by itself. But the exemple of something ugly : a mark including “Length” of the game. Get rid of it please. Developper’s may believe we want filler content. This site follow’s a traditional rule in the game reviews : a mark on game length. Could we drop this rule please ? The sooner the better. Game publishers believe in game reviews, we don’t want game reviews to imply that we want a certain quantity of boredom.

    Another important argument concerns the price of a game. A game doesn’t cost you only X dollars. It costs you X dollars and Y hours, providing you Y hours of Z quality fun. Well Y - 10% if you count the fucking developper’s logo at the begining.

    The fact is that my hours have a (rother high) price. So yes, the “fun quality”, Z, has to be very high. I don’t wan’t to get bored for Y hours, nor spend them watching corporate logos.

    Filler scenes look to me like taking an excellent wine and diluting it with water : the global amount of quality decreases. Nobody does it with wine. Why would we do it with games ?

25. James M Says:
    October 16th, 2006 at 2:30 pm

    Sirlin, you forgot to mention the best paced game ever made, by far: Contra 3.

    That is the ultimate example of an awesomely paced game without filler. It has so many unique levels, unique parts of levels, bosses, minibosses, etc. The entire game is moving from one situation to the next. Nothing is ever around long enough to get stale.

    About people quitting halfway through a game - this happens a lot when the game runs out of stuff to show you. It may introduce some new things for a while but for most games you get used to the gameplay and what they have to offer. A new level may have something slightly new like different texture or teleporters or bouncy pads or something but most games quickly become old hat.

    Competitive games don’t have this problem because they are tests of skill. While you may quickly learn all that the game has to offer, you can never learn all that opponents have to offer.

    In single player games typically you become accustomed to the gameplay and then unless you just *love* the gameplay there is no urge to continue. Customizability issues are one way around this- for example create-a-wrestler modes in wrestling games. (The actual gameplay in most wrestling games becomes old very quickly)

    I think sandbox games are another example of this, where you don’t become bored of the gameplay because you largely create it yourself.

26. Jeff Stewart Says:
    October 17th, 2006 at 7:57 am

    First of all, love your site. It’s nice to know there are a few good designers out there.

    I think Tohoya hit the nail on the head. Deliver well and never let up. The problem with many development houses is that the market is diluted, and people can get away with not doing their job. That goes double for designers.

    I meet very few in the industry anymore who actually respect the audience. They have a “people will buy anything” attitude, and it’s pervasive. If you are not a writer, you have no business putting your grubby little paws on the story. If you don’t understand simple RPS concepts, you have no business balancing armor tables. Unfortunately, publishers and marketing departments are having more and more say in the design room.

    The thing is, people are buying this crap now, hoping with every purchase that they’ll come across a well-designed, well-executed gem. Most of the time they don’t, but I don’t have to explain to you why they keep trying. The monkey with the button that randomly produces food is brought to mind.

    The long term effects are that our industry will suffer as a whole because of the rampant badness out there. It used to be that you could tell a clone from the original. I think the overall problem lies with us as designers. We need to evolve. We need to make it so much better that the copycat designers can’t keep up.

27. Griffith Says:
    October 17th, 2006 at 1:39 pm

    I agree with Jeff Stewart.

    It seems one of the best ways to make a point within the games industry is to either become a developer yourself and utterly destroy your competition with a superior product/game (which is a tall order, I’m sure), or vote with your wallet as a customer/consumer and only buy games that are *truly* worthy of your support so that those within the games industry will know what to make more of based on what people are buying.

    If people buy utter garbage, developers will continue to not only supply them with it, but (in my opinion, wrongly) profit from it. If people buy only the highest quality games and leave the low quality garbage to collect dust on the shelves, developers will be forced to ‘raise the bar’ and include the same level of quality in their games or be doomed with limited sales.

    Unfortunately many gamers/consumers are not only getting used to swallowing low quality games consisting of un-required, repetitive, and overall un-fun ‘fluff’ and ‘filler content’, but they are coming to accept them as something that is not only normal, but also reasonable. Whenever someone opposes the mindless hoards that merely accept what they are given, they get shunned by the desensitised masses that make ridiculous claims in the defence of those who are, in effect, looking to trade inferior rubbish for our cash. Granted, while not many games will fall into the category of “inferior rubbish”, I’m sure you’d agree with me when I say there is certainly an abundance of games available that simply do not cut it. Variety is one thing; making games solely to fill your pockets with $$$ where the end justifies the means is another.

    That said, I am sure there is a large amount of politics and red tape to deal with in the business of games, and while many developers may desire to make higher quality games, there are forces that prevent that from easily happening. It would seem that in order to move past this uncomfortable point some necessary changes will need to be made in order to deal with issues such as product distribution, excessive development costs, and the problems that come from a failure to expand the market beyond those who currently play games.

    On a more positive note, I do look forward to the time where developers are going to be able to drop the ‘either/or’ approach where they feel they must choose between profit or passion, and they actually have the creative freedom to create great games that are not only profitable, but also of high quality, and a product of their passion. While we may not be at this point yet, I think the industry is slowly but surely moving towards a more promising future where we will be able to look back at all of this, laugh it up, and think of how silly it was.

    Regards,
    Griffith

28. STCAB Says:
    October 18th, 2006 at 2:58 am

    Some people manage to “push” more value out of a game by doing stuff the designers never imagined the player would do. (the “kid running up the slide” effect)
    Such as warthog jumping in halo. (placing tons of grenades under a jeep like vehicle, and detonating them, thereby sending the warthog flying skyhigh, and not just like 50m.)
    Or lets take a hypothetical game, the game is about fighting some ‘dudes’. The player realizes that there are a lot of cars in this game. He then figures, that, “hey, with X item, I can send stuff flying”. He then proceeds to see how many cars he can stack on top of each other.
    COMPLETELY unrelated to the games’ original point, of fighting ‘dudes’.

    Some people also ’search’ the game for hidden stuff not possible to ‘unlock’ through normal play.
    Most of the time, people find leftover junk from the beta stages of the game, but sometimes they find stuff like the Arwing in Ocarina of Time. It’s like the Devs rewarded them for hacking and/or searching the game.

    I know this is somewhat unrelated to the subject of the article. But it sort of got me thinking of this by reading the comments.

    On the problem with RPG pacing:
    I never got why WoW got so popular. I guess it’s just the fact that a lot of people bought it, and then they told their friends, which told their friends… etc.

    Also, I can’t remember a specific game, but I seem to remember some RPG game which (following the Final Fantasy style gameplay of having multiple characters) gave you, early on, a character 10x more powerfull than your own character. This guy would help you out early on for some reason and leave you later.
    You’d then be left with “Omfg can I get as strong as this guy?!” feeling. Of course, at some point, this guy would join your party later on or you would end up killing him.

    Yeah… just an interesting note. Or maybe it’s just me. (probably just me)

29. Jesse Says:
    October 20th, 2006 at 2:38 am

    sirlin is sexy…. that is all….

    Ok thats not all. Sirlin your articles make me want to be an engineer. I like how you take sensible approaches at your craft and never lose sight of what you are supposed to be doing, making a damn fun game.

30. Jesus Says:
    October 20th, 2006 at 3:15 am

    http://img62.imageshack.us/my.php?image=adella3gwbl7.jpg

31. Guest2 Says:
    October 20th, 2006 at 8:44 am

    A game in my limited experience that comes to mind with an intro loading time problem is shenmue 2. Like you know every time when you switch it on there’s a chunk of time that’s going to be wasted while like 5 screens come up, which brings me to my next point…

    What do people think about allowing players to skip in-game cutscenes? always necessary? What about if they are essential to telling the story or building character? But then what about if the player has already previously been through the game and passed that particular cutscene?

32. Chadius Says:
    October 21st, 2006 at 10:14 pm

    Always allow cutscenes to be skipped.

    The first time I play the game, I won’t skip it. The second time I play though, I will skip every scene. And the friends who have watched me play the game all the way through? They’ll skip every cutscene.

33. aDAM Says:
    October 22nd, 2006 at 5:58 pm

    At some point, someone at THQ said “Last year’s one was fine. Let’s not make another one.”

    http://psp.ign.com/objects/820/820798.html

34. TC Says:
    October 24th, 2006 at 3:02 pm

    Couple of things; One - the reason that RPGs are no longer played is that they offer an incredibly poor menu-based gameplay standard; or failing that, a weak “Gauntlet: Legends” style run around and hit stuff scheme that translates directly into lame. Either way the experience is repatitve and not significantly interactive, and relies almost entirely on the story to carry. New spells and abilites pretty much fall into Heal, Buff, Attack, AoE, and Debuff, and powerleveling is preferred so you can just mash A and auto-attack your way through the lame battles.

    The reason the Final Fantasy series sells so well is because they try to keep the fight scenes with interesting new abilities, turn order planning, and all that, and they also pack in appropriately timed cutscenes and repeatable mini-games (like chocobo racing and Blitzball) to keep the user occupied when they don’t feel like hunting baddies. Kingdom Hearts does great in this respect because the battles are always interesting and never repetative (unless you are running around collecting mats for your uber items), and the story and game art keep you enthralled.

35. Dominic Says:
    October 26th, 2006 at 9:38 pm

    I totally agree with you, Sirlin, about the length issues. Sure, when I was a kid I often found myself wishing that games were longer, but nowadays I’m very happy to have shorter games. 40 hours sure looks like a steep investment and it often discourages me from gaming. In fact, my most memorable gaming experience of 2005 has been Shadow of the Colossus, which I finished in a 3-day rental and felt very, very good about. Luigi’s Mansion, and this game, both had a perfect length. The specificity of games lies in variability, so why not use that? If the game’s short but great, people will play it again if they want more out of it, that’s all. Contra III: The Alien Wars has seen its fair share of usage from me, but the vast majority of Xbox games I bought probably won’t come out of my library in the future. Finished, case closed, and I don’t feel like I can put in 20 hours another time.

36. Manji Says:
    October 30th, 2006 at 7:49 am

    I don’t think the length of the game is important per se, as long as it isn’t about an hour long. What I do think is important is how long will the game stay with you and how much will you be willing to replay it. In much that same way that a great film or book (or song) can be very short, a game also can. But those films, books and songs will be re-watched, -read and -listened to many, many times throughout one’s life, particularly in the case of the song.

    Many of my favourite games of all time are very short, such as Resident Evil 1 and 2, Onimusha 2 and Street Fighter III:3rd Strike (in the sense that to get to Gill and defeat him takes only a few minutes) but I’ve replayed them many, many times with SF3:3s being particularly reliable due to multiplayer. If I had never replayed Resident Evil 2 again after the hour and fifty minutes it took me to complete, it wouldn’t have been an arbitrary decision to abandon it - something would have been missing from the game in the first place. Not that the game would have been particularly poor, but it logically must have lacked enough parts that I wanted to re-experience.

    I often see a highly enjoyable film that I’m very glad I watched, but I come away thinking “I don’t think I’ll see it again, though”. It’s actually become a category or rating of film for me and my friends; The “brilliant, but you won’t want to watch it again” film. I’ve seen films better than, say, Pirates of the Caribbean, but few are so re-watchable. Even a lengthy film like Return of the King was very watchable for me, and consequently I saw it five times at the cinema and twice on DVD! It’s not just epic action movies that have this trait; a much more sedate and psychological film can also have this trait - such as Eraserhead, in which “nothing happens” - so it’s not as simple as “Gee, I want to see thing explode over and over again!” It can also be a certain mood or style that you become attached to. For example, just riding Epona around in Ocarina of Time or triple-jumping around the mountains in Mario 64. Maybe even just practicing combos in Street Fighter or trying to see how long you can escape from a 5-star strength of police in GTA.

    God of War was a great game and it was pretty much constant fun to play, but I completed it in about 3 or 4 sittings over a particularly empty weekend and was left feeling somewhat hollow. It wasn’t that I was thinking “Man, that was a waste of my time!” or “Oh, is that it?” but there was just this ominous feeling of “That was the last time I will ever play this game…” It was a stark contrast to when I completed, say, Omimusha 2 and thought “OMG! Again!”

    I suppose that a concise summary of my point is this; It’s not the length it takes to complete the game that one should be concerned with, it’s the total time that you will experience the game in your life. [End of concise summary]

    FFX took me about 60 or 70 hours to complete once, whereas SF3 took only 6 minutes or less, but I’ve certainly played it for longer through repetition. I had absolutely no desire to re-experience any element of FFX. However, I’ve re-completed FFVII many times, simply because the feeling of being “there” and amongst the characters or in the many different predicaments was so addictive and compelling.

37. Canaan Says:
    October 30th, 2006 at 1:04 pm

    Sirlin, would you say that Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had pretty good pacing?

38. IPB Says:
    November 2nd, 2006 at 1:54 pm

    YEEN!!

39. Andrew Suber Says:
    November 3rd, 2006 at 4:10 am

    Pacing has to be a function of the genre and psychological drive behind the game itself. For instance, an arcade racing game or multiplayer fighter has to have each feature up front. PC-based RPG’s are generally for adults with good attention spans. We expect them to be cumulative and involved, so our character often starts out at level zero.

    Cutscene clutter, I believe, is a byproduct of games attempting to adopt other media’s idioms. In RPG’s, the cutscenes are there to make it feel like a film; to flesh out character and to show the psychological drives behind the character’s actions. In sports titles, they serve the same purpose that all the filler serves in televised sports. The announcers create a context for the battle to ensue. Instead of nameless individuals in a uniform, there are specific atheletes with specific skills and attributes.

    The cutscene clutter is least welcome in ‘pure’ games, franchises that depend on the intrinsic joy of gaming, not on another medium’s strengths. The purest games, in my opinion, are fighting games and puzzle games. The rewards in these games rely on the player mastering an difficult set of resource management problems totally unique to the game. I feel that generally game developers are smart enough to keep cutscene clutter to a minimum in pure games.

40. BOMBkangaroo Says:
    November 11th, 2006 at 7:05 am

    One game I recently played through in two sittings, which I feel deserves a mention, was Half Life 2: Episode 1.

    First off, loading a big 3d environment for the main menu, although it may look very pretty, really pisses me off. I can take it the first time, but they don’t include an option to disable it, meaning my PC has to load it every single time I start the game, wasting a good 30 seconds to a minute of my time.

    The actual game, however, I found to be superbly paced.
    The initial cut-scenes aren’t too long, and they get to the point, then you’re reintroduced to the characters from HL2, just in case the player hasn’t played HL2 yet, but without reiterating too much that we learned from HL2. That means newer players get an introduction, whilst veterans of the series don’t get bored with redundant details.

    Since we’re armed with only the Gravity Gun for probably the first quarter of the game, we’re made to feel slightly vulnerable, but we’re given Alyx, and her infinite ammo pistol, to hold our hand through the early sections.
    At this point, I’d say the game is maybe a 6/10 or 7/10, as things are just getting moving, and we’re given our motivation.

    The game then introduces the basics of the puzzles we’ll later have to solve, keeping everything fairly intuitive. After that, we get the confistation ray enhanced G-Gun, and we’re nigh-unstoppable.
    The action becomes pretty fast, and the elevator section with the falling debris helps keep us on our toes.
    The game cranks it up to 8/10 or 9/10 around this point, as everything becomes exciting and we’re very busy.

    Then, of course, we lose the enhanced G-Gun, and we feel almost naked.
    Suddenly, because of the very subtle conditioning thus far, we become even more attached to Alyx, as she really is our primary defense against everything, and the brief seperations become daunting affairs. She’s further humanised on the train, and we’re made to feel more of an equal in the partnership. So, despite the lack of action during that particular section, we’re still kept occupied with something interesting.
    This is a hard part to put in a scale, as it’s not quite as action packed as before, but it remains an instense experience because we now feel so vulnerable, having had our “I win” button taken away.

    Then the game alternates between slower sections with dialogue, and frantic rampages in pitch black undeground areas. Probably the one part of the game that felt like an 11/10 section was waiting for the elevator with only a few flares, the flashlight, and the lovely Alyx Vance for company. (plus a shotgun)
    Here the player is literally trapped, with a near constant stream of enemies running at them screaming and wailing. I cannot describe the terror and shock those zombies cause when you see the distinctive red glow of the grenade coming towards you from the black void extending from five foot ahead of you, into the distance. It’s a long time since a game made me care about living and dying, let alone scared. I escaped this part with only 6 health and no armour, it was fantastic.
    Immediately afterwards we’re calmed down with a nice context sensitive object puzzle.

    From here on it alternates between discussions with NPCs, and fairly standard shooting sections interspersed with the occasional puzzle, but what really amazes me is that despite the near apocalyptic setting, and the regular action, the game always manages to throw you a curve-ball.
    I have a lot of the games traps sussed before I walk into them, and can identify exactly where to set up most objects for puzzle related kills, btu somehow HL2ep1 still manages to get me with those scripted disasters. Once example would be the cargo container near the end, where you’re crawling through next to some shells containing venomous Head Crabs, and you think you’re safe. Not so, an enemy shoots the container, rupturing the shells, laving me frantically spraying with my SMG while I tried to see the Head Crabs.

    I love how Valve seem to be able to keep the pace quick with plenty of action, keep it fresh by altering the pace with dialogue, and then still manage to surprise you, even though you should know that some scripted disaster is about to befall you. The game surprises even slightly paranoid people like me who try to analyze every terrain detail to see if they can avoid falling into a trap. That’s what’s best about how they paced it, it can fluctuate between 6/10 and 10/10, and sometimes you’re not sure where it is on the ten-point scale, but it’s always worth continuing because you want to know what happens next.

    The game ended exactly as it should do. Normally I’m not a fan of short games, stuff like The Wind Waker comes to mind, but this was fine by me. I didn’t spend much on it, and it wasn’t until right near the end that it became completely obvious that it was ending soon.
    Then, they throw in a trailer for HL2ep2. Perfect. Even those who don’t like the game ending where it did wouldn’t feel too let down, because they’re now gettign hyped for the next installment. That, to me, was the perfect send off, because like the entire game that came before it, it keeps the player thinking ahead.

41. Dylan Says:
    November 11th, 2006 at 7:23 am

    The no logo idea is a good one. Imagine if the first time you played God of War, there was no title screen, no company logos, just Kratos on the deck, kicking ass.

42. Xhad Says:
    November 17th, 2006 at 5:36 am

    The first thing that leapt to my mind while reading this article was Final Fantasy Tactics for the GBA. I never would have gotten to the first actual battle if I hadn’t already played the PS1 version, simply because of the way-too-long session of stupid “storyline” near the beginning, including the first “battle” which is a bunch of playground kids throwing rocks at each other. When recommending the game I’ve always followed up with, “Believe me, you’re going to hate the beginning, you’re going to be yelling at your GBA that a game had better show up within 5 minutes or you’re turning it off, and then next thing you know it feels like it’s 20 minutes later, but the game turns fun.”

43. Marc Says:
    November 23rd, 2006 at 6:30 pm

    The Legend of Zelda series tends to do the worst thing possible and only offer side-quests inbetween the times you explore dungeons, which tend to have little relevance to getting to the next dungeon. And that filler space tends to be large. The worst for pacing in the series is The Wind Waker; about half of your efforts in the game involve side-quests and mini-games. Not really fun. Then there’s the several minutes spent trolling around sailing in a vacant sea with minisucle islands with little to offer.

    I am very surprised that I actually managed to pull myself through all the filler. Perhaps in future games, they will cut it out. I have yet to play Twilight Princess, but presumably it will follow the same trend of huge filler parts. Cut to the chase, Nintendo! Do it!

44. Zimmy Says:
    December 5th, 2006 at 2:11 am

    Very interesting article. When I first starting reading your article, one genre came to mind-the shoot em’ up or “shmup” as they are called these days. This is a genre thats built upon the notion of putting the best content first. These games tend to keep your abilities the same throughout the game, so you’re exposed to everything at the get-go, and these games also tend to put some of the most cinematic, interesting, but also easy(this allows the player to actually enjoy the presentation without worrying about the challange)levels in the beggining. While this by no means applies to every shmup, some of the best follow your advice; Gunlock(also called Layer Section and Ray Force I think)uses tons of scaling and psuedo-3D effects in the first level, whereas other levels are considerably more straightforward, Ikaruga also features a very well-done first level followed by more traditional later levels. Although, the move to “manic shmups” in the past few years have made me lose nearly all interest in the genre, its still an aspect that I would love seen put in other genres: I’m especially fed up with FPS developers putting the required 15 minutes intro run through a friendly area with no combat(Doom 3 and Half-Life 2: I’m looking at you). Anyway, great article, and it’s good to know you’re writing articles again.

    BTW: everybody, check out my game, The Legion, made with Game Maker(gamemaker.nl)at my site

45. Sheoulrisk Says:
    December 9th, 2006 at 2:53 am

    I would like to start off by saying that Sirlin’s articles are very insightful and interesting, and I have gotten something out of every article that I’ve read, even if I didn’t always agree with what was said.

    This article, in of itself, I would agree with on most points. It does serve a game well to have a strong beginning AND a strong finish.

    The points on loading time, however, has much less to do with game play mechanics and ‘fluff’ and more to do with efficient code. I’m willing to bet that the same game that took 6 minutes to load COULD have taken as little as 1 second if the programmers were just a little smarter.

    To prove my point: How long does it take SSBM to load when you’re playing Vs. Mode? Not very long, maybe a second or two. Not really noticeable. Now compare that to the legendary 6+ minutes of the aforementioned SvR and you can see a huge difference in the time.

    Now, take a look at the two games. SSBM has up to 4 players, which means 4 models, and a highly detailed stage to load. SvR has a small stage which is very simple in its design and only two player models to load, AND those models don’t seem to be as detailed either. From a casual glance, it seems to me that SvR actually has LESS data to load than SSBM, and yet it takes 360 times the loading time. Now, what’s the difference here? Well you could just say that the PSP is just slower than the GCN since it’s a portable, but the game should be designed with the hardware capabilities in mind, so that’s really a non-issue.

    So then what is the issue here? Poor coding. The team that worked on SSBM is 1337. The team that worked on SvR is n00b.

    That’s really all that I had to say.

46. Shiki Dan Says:
    December 10th, 2006 at 8:51 am

    You know what the WORST part of that SvR 2006 Loading Video is?

    He skipped the opening video, picked his character within 2 seconds, and also skipped all of the cutscenes and match entrances.

    IT STILL TOOK SIX AND A HALF MINUTES!

    Watching all of those videos and cutscenes, as well as looking at the entire character selection roster would’ve tacked on another 5 minutes, AT LEAST.

47. VormavPrime Says:
    December 18th, 2006 at 7:44 am

    Very good arcticle Sirlin and I must say I have been reading them for a while now as I started on Playing to Win and it changed how I viewed fighting games. Which later led me to play at Evo!

    Anyway pacing is EXTREMELY important. Some games drag on far too long when you feel like your getting towards the end. Drakenguard 2 is one of those games. I loved both Drakenguards but as I kept felt like I was getting closer and closer to the end of the game I realized it was still actually quite far away. The pacing I believe was bad as it gives you that good 8 or 9/10 push in the beginning but then it dwindles down to 3,4,5/10 push through the middle with the exception of some parts which bring it up for a bit below just dropping it back down.

    Games need to focus on cutting filler out if you also notice some of the best Animes are only 4 to 25 episodes long. If you watch anime just think of all the good ones and how long they lasted. Then think of all the long ones and how many episodes truely were entertaining and part of the story and not just filler.

    Great Article again keep writting.

48. Kalil Says:
    December 20th, 2006 at 8:22 am

    TC points out above that the battle system of Kingdom Hearts is more complex and interactive than that of most other entries in the RPG genre. I’d also like to add that the pacing of the KH games falls more into the psuedo-front-loading that Sirlin talks about. In both the KH games, you’re given a near-complete set of abilities right from the start - while leveling up improves those abilities, the only really revolutionary change is the introduction of Glide. The opening sequences are pretty awe-inspiring, and the ‘tutorials’ have you fighting pretty impressive enemies, instead of your run-of-the-mill rats or whelk-clones. The KH2 tutorial/prologue is almost a game in and of itself, with an introduction, climax, and conclusion.

49. Jeff Stewart Says:
    January 31st, 2007 at 12:58 am

    These problems stem directly from the publisher side. While it’s obvious the amount of performance anxiety that publishers get over creating the first level of a game, what may not be immediately apparent is how the typical solutions destroy the rest of the product.

    In games past, each level typically introduced new monsters, items, etc. and the mini-boss of one level may attack in hordes in the next. In almost every project I’ve worked on, publishers or managers try to cram as much content as possible into the first 10 minutes of the game.

    We affectionately call this “blowing your load on the first level.” It’s a syndrome of people with no experience trying to compete in a market in which they do not understand or respect the medium.

    Such is the nature of marketing and publishing.

50. Jacen Says:
    February 5th, 2007 at 4:27 am

    FF 12 was almost the exact length it needed to be to get me to finish it, watch the ending, and go ‘WTF! I wasted how long on this?’ without making me break the disk, break my controller, or send a stink bomb to S-E

51. MaskedFalcon Says:
    April 23rd, 2007 at 7:24 am

    Back in the olde days, all games would begin quickly. No lengthy opening sequences, no unnecessary tutorials, just gameplay from the get-go. I was playing Pilotwings recently. It’s a pretty good game - it certainly doesn’t have any glaring weaknesses, and the gameplay is compelling and challenging. In Pilotwings, you have to be proficient in at least five different vehicles to clear the game, and they each have different control and a different feel. Now, in a modern game, you would have to trudge through five tutorials before getting to any levels. Not in Pilotwings. You start your first level with only a map of the controls as your guide. Your must use your brain to sort out the gameplay quirks and think on your feet to adapt to the many different vehicles. Now, for those of you who are merely looking for a fl0w-like “experience” of a game, the act of *thinking* during a video game is an impediment; but I prefer games that don’t assume that I’m brain-dead, but rather demand skillful and thoughtful gameplay from me.

52. RandomGuy Says:
    May 13th, 2007 at 10:09 am

    I appreciate your article. Very insightful.

    I also read all the replies and understand them. I just want to say, that “quality” is always subjective. Even if I and my friend like the same genre of games, it is not uncommon that we have opposite views on “quality” on them and therefore one shuns a game while the other plays it 2 times in a row. I just want to point this out, as I don´t see it mentioned here before.

    To the topic of Intros/Tutorials:
    I don´t think an Intro should be short to non-existant, neither I think Tuorials should be long.
    An example i liked much was Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance for Gamecube. In the beginning is the Intro Movie introducing the main characters and hinting at a plot twist. The plot twist being is your character sees a woman for about three seconds, but you won´t get to know her name for about 50% of the game. The only tutorial you get at the start is only essential gameplay(click a, move vursor there, click a again etc.) takes about 10-15 dialogue bobbles and introduces one more character. Moreso, the dialogue is quite funny.
    Every other more in-depth tutorial is optional and always reviewable via the ingame menu.

    The other aspects about the game were good, too. You can skip all videos even if they are really short and an atmospheric experience for themselves as well as you can skip dialogues partly or wholly(you can also reread all dialogues of a chapter, if you want). It is also fun to replay it, as you can only take that much characters into a fight, whereas every character is unique in stats while also customizable to a certain extent. When you fight you choose your own team and depending on who you choose your play focuses more on certain tactics(e.g. 2 fat guys tank damage while 3 fragile guys cause your main damage from the back) For every character there are triggerable dialogues with other characters, though its rather repetitive and boring if you don´t know 30 of 50 possible dialogues, as they are more icing on the cake than a goal by themselves. I would recommend to play it once or twice.

    I also value good story-telling in a game. If the story compels me, I am likely to replay the game, too. That said, I consider myself a passionate RPG-player. I dislike Online-RPG´s on the other side, since there is no real story element in them from my view. They rely on people interacting with each other in a roleplaying style way. Therefore gameplay is redundant in the first place. Plus the others you play with are most likely not interacting with you that supposed way but instead lol´ing and discussing their favourite movies or something. So in the end it´s all about leveling up your character, doing Player vs. Player battles and completing mind numbing quests(kill monster x for a 10% to get item y and return 50 pieces of item y to me for your quest experience points)

    I also want to comment on FF 12. It looks like it´s based on such a online-RPG, just singleplayer. Though there is a story present in the game, it´s not compelling at all. You are citizen of small kingdom X and the world is mostly ruled by big kingdoms Y and Z. Knowing Z, just forget that it exists. Y is at war with X and being much bigger and stronger, Y wins. Y now rules X. You are some boy that lives in the sewers and kills rats when being bored. By some Plot twists you meet a bunch of famous or successful people your former princess who wants her kingdom back. Though she has absolutely no idea how to do that, and as well clueless are all people you meet. That was 2 hours in the game and after another 5 hours it was basically the same. The best thing about the story is, that the very end is not satisfying at all. It feels like having wasted time to even watch the video.

    Gameplaywise, you can spend all game long searching for specific items without ever getting them, no matter how hard you try. The ultimate weapon is available in two different ways. First one is, you don´t open 4 treasure chests in the game. There is no hint for doing this, neither is there hint or a reasonable explanation which 4 that are. Note that treasure chests are plenty in this game. Outside of Dungeons they spawn randomly and in Dungeons most chests spawn/respawn depending on a percental chance. Well after not opening 4 not distinguishable chests a certain chests will spawn with a 100% chance containing that said ultimate weapon.
    The other way is even more fun. In a certain dungeon, there is a chest spot. The probability of the chest spawning is about 10%. The probability that the chest contains that said ultimate weapon is 1%. So the probability of getting the weapon would be 1/1000. Luckily, to have a chance to respawn the chest you have to walk away from the spot about 3 minutes, then come all the way back. This also not hinted at at all.

    The fighting system allows you to set a fighting AI to do all the clicking for you. Because 90% of the fights are mindnumbing and boring too, yet required to get exp. Plus there are quite a number of skills that are rather difficult to achieve but absolutely useless.

    Some statements may be a bit generalized, but that about shows how fascinating FF 12 is, just to re-justify Jacen´s prior statement.

53. RandomGuy Says:
    May 13th, 2007 at 10:23 am

    “I also read all the replies and understand them.”
    This sentence was kinda redundant. I actually forgot what I wanted to type after that, yet I forgot to delete this sentence.

    There are other spelling mistakes or missing words for which I hereby want to apologize.

    Another thing I forgot was to comment on Level Editors in Games. Blizzard made the expansion set for Warcraft 3 with an improved Map-Editor. While WC3 is still a fun and competitive game, the map-editor allowed such drastic changes on the principles of the game, that players are practically able to produce their own(competitive) games. One even has its own league(s) nowadays and is played competitively on major electronic sports events. I am sure Blizzard could charge people to play online and most people still would, because it created not just one game, but infinite games with infinite variety.

54. inflatable Says:
    May 23rd, 2007 at 4:42 pm

    Good post,thank you for your great words!

55. Scourge Says:
    July 24th, 2007 at 12:37 am

    I found this pretty interesting and must say that it provides a decent insight into how one should go about the pacing of a game. the one thing i really liked was this

    “Oops, I saved my most interesting idea for the end of the article where no one will really see it.”

    excellent!
    keep up the good work.

56. Dr. Kraid Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 11:20 pm

    Ah, Yakety Sax: making any banality comedy gold since 1963.

    *salutes with a tear in my eye*

57. Xeno Says:
    August 16th, 2007 at 2:09 pm

    I tend to judge a game more by the feeling I get from it (it’s content) then hours spent — I love long hours if the atmosphere is top-notch, but I love short games if the atmosphere is top notch too. There are many a (free) text adventure which take less then 3 hours to complete, but deliver satisfying experiences. That being said, I would not spend $50 on a 3 hour text adventure.. but maybe $20 (at the most).
    One of my favorite games for pacing (and one of my favorite games) is Ikaruga. The whole game takes a little under 35 minutes to complete (it was originally an arcade game). However, it can take you hundreds (a thousand?) hours to master and get the best possible score.
    Because of it’s top-notch gameplay, I feel compelled to replay it repeatedly. However, I can sit down, play for 30 minutes and beat the game, and then go off and do other things and feel satisfied about the experience.
    Multiplayer games generally have the same structure: Matches last between 2 minutes and one hour, so a “complete” experience can be had in a very short amount of time compared to a single player adventure game.
    That being said, if a 100 hour adventure game had 10/10 quality all the way, it would be played to completion by most of the people who played it, provided the save points were common enough.

58. Priam Says:
    August 23rd, 2007 at 7:30 am

    I think there’s a couple things that are being slightly misunderstood, the way I see it. Most notably, I cite the description of Metroid Prime–I am not certain in the least that this was intended to be a “HERE IS ALL OUR COOL STUFF!!” demonstration, because there was plenty left to discover (weapon combos coming immediately to mind). Rather, the opening scene in Prime was the tutorial stage: When you permanently regained the grapple beam, for instance, you didn’t have to mess with it to see how it worked, because you’d already used it by then. Instead of having clunky, immersion-breaking tutorial screens and essays, you were given the things to mess around with and brief HUD text lines telling you how to do things when you needed to do them. If it is a display of cool stuff, I think that is, to a significant extent, by happenstance.

    What’s important, I think, in pacing is the hook. When is it that you can see the direction that the game is going, and how cool does it look? One of my favorite CRPGs, as far as storyline goes, is Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne.

    Now, SMT: Nocturne is a pretty goddamned boring game, if you look at what it’s actually consisted of. It’s a dungeoncrawler with little to no interaction between party members, and lots of time in between plot sequences. But it hooks you quickly–after a briefish exposition, you are thrown into the face of both the final boss and the secret optional past-final boss. And they tell you very large things. Being able to see their areas, and walk a small part of the Uber-boss’s realm, gives an incentive to try to make your way back. And the occasional story bits that you do get are poignant, perhaps made more so by their rarity, and are written very well, providing extra motivation to press on.

    On the other side of the coin, Xenogears. By God I love this game, but the amount of time it takes for you to see the plot hook is nigh unforgivable–something like eight hours in. If the battle system were not so rewarding (both visually and mechanically–being able to see measurable progress in your characters every time they do anything is very satisfying and motivating), the game would fall flat and only the hardest gamer cores could find themselves bothering to complete the game.

    Clarity of direction is important, too. I picked up Beyond Good and Evil, got hung up on one part where I simply could not figure out where the heck I was supposed to go, and have remorselessly put the game away for good. Any time the player, instead of thinking “Okay, now I should get this taken care of” thinks “Damn it, where’s the next event handle,” the game has failed. Other kisses of death include changing from fighting opponents to fighting the interface.

    It may be important to show what you got early on, but more important, I think, is making the game make sense, and giving good direction–and good rewards for following it.

59. Daniel Boutros Says:
    January 8th, 2008 at 12:52 am

    Great piece dude.

60. xthetenth Says:
    March 2nd, 2008 at 11:38 am

    About the loading screens, sins of a solar empire, if you turn the intro movie off, which there is an option for, will load to a map that will give seemingly endless hours of gameplay (45 mins to well over ten hours, depends on your map choice) in the same svelte 1.5 minutes on a laptop that has no business playing any games (runs oldblivion with shadows turned off at about 15 fps and no noticeable lag on sins) with or without the three tastefully simple splash screens (publisher, developer and splash logo, and trust me, i tried it with them off and it didn’t help). does that count? Some of the initial loading is black screen, but that bit scales to your computer. Its a great game that all fans of macro oriented turn based strategy should buy and everybody else should check out.

61. Kuben Says:
    April 23rd, 2008 at 8:10 pm

    <strong>Kuben</strong>

    I have seen many sites before and most of them do not look this good. I cannot wait to let my friends know about this site. Thanks for the excellent content.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website