Design: Pacing

For this post, I'm just going to do some writing about the idea of pacing in video games in general. As a preface, I'm going to point out where I think some video games fall flat in their pacing - but what works for me might not work for you.

Pacing is a powerful force in any medium - movies, books, and video games all rely on it to keep their audiences absorbed and entertained. But in video games, it's an even more powerful force than normal, as there are many ways to influence pacing, and many ways to therefore screw it up. And if it gets screwed up, then you can bet that you're going to lose some people along the way to your fabulous ending, amazing plot twists, incredible dungeons, or what have you.

I just posted my review of an old game that I really enjoy called Turtles in Time. It is a prime example of pacing done right, in many ways. For one thing, the characters move quickly, and thus can get where you want them to quickly. This may seem obvious, but there are certain games (especially RPG's) where the characters just don't move fast enough, and you feel like it takes you ages to get anywhere. For another, the fights are well-interspersed through the levels - you never have to go far to find one, but the levels are more than just one really long fight. Again, I've seen games screw this up - Teen Titans, for the Gamecube, while largely a pretty good beat-em-up, starts to drag towards the end because the fights take too long and there are too many of them in each level. Another way that Turtles in Time paces itself well is in terms of fight differentiation. True, the enemies are largely palette-swaps of other enemies, but you're always finding new types of enemies with new abilities to adapt to. A game that screws this idea up big-time is Alien Syndrome for the Wii. It takes ages to get to a new type of enemy in that game, and while that is one flaw among several for that game, it is quite significant.

But Turtles in Time only has so much it can teach us. In other genres than just the beat-em-up, pacing is huge.

Take, for example, the RPG. It can screw up pacing in a new and unique way - the story. If nothing happens in the story for too long, the players (or at least some of them) lose interest. The story needs to be long enough to satisfy the gamer, yet short enough to not make them feel like they just want it to be over. This is a similar problem to movies and books, but there are unique problems for video games. They have to balance dungeons vs city/exploration time - spend too much time between dungeons, and you begin to feel like you'll never make progress. Spend too much time in a dungeon, and you get the same feeling.

A game that I can think of that largely manages to pace itself well, both story and dungeon-wise, is Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube. Its dungeons aren't too long or too short, and they're interesting enough to keep you engaged. There are a few points where the plot fails, in my opinion, but by and large the characters always have an objective, and you always feel like you're making progress towards that objective. That objective also changes from time to time, rather than remaining stagnant like the next game I'm going to talk about.

Which is: Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. The vast majority of that plot is spent trying to find things to get to the next person that might help you to accomplish your final goal. There aren't enough twists and turns - the meta-plot is always "go find people who know about stuff that can stop the bad guys," or "go find stuff to stop the bad guys." Once you finally get around to stopping the bad guys, that's it. There's no feeling of an epic struggle, or fighting emissaries of the bad guys, or even finding out who the heck the bad guys are and what they want - it's just trying to build up your power to stop them.

Now, there are standard tactics one can use to pace a game. One obvious and common one is to give you access to new abilities throughout the game. Most games do this (though, interestingly, Turtles in Time does not) - and for good reason. It keeps combat and puzzles interesting. Zelda and other such games give you new equipment - the bow, the bombs, the boomerang, the Ocarina. RPG's frequently give you new spells or abilities. FPS's give you new guns, RTS's give you new units, and so on and so forth. These tools are great when done well - however, you do run the risk of overwhelming your player with too many abilities or items, and if the items begin to become useless, the gamer feels cheated - I mentioned this in my review of Psi-Ops. A great example of this is the Zelda item from Twilight Princess that lets you control statues - it's only useful when there are statues around, whereas something like the bow is useful in many places. It made me, at least, feel cheated in that I didn't feel like I gained any power from the dungeon, at least not compared to the amount I gained from previous dungeons.

You can also, like I said, overwhelm the character with options - one example of this might be Zelda: Majora's Mask. You get a whole bunch of masks, but it's not really obvious when to use which, and many are useless in all but one specific situation. You can get through the game only using the primary masks, but doing some of the side-quests without a guide would be annoying.

Another tactic to pace a game is to formulate it, at least to some extent. Now while this might seem like an odd thing to say, the point is to give you a set point where you can feel like you accomplished something. This is critical in quite a few games - World of Warcraft is probably the best example of this. As you level up, you gain a bit of power after each level. As you go through dungeons and raids at max level, you can always aim for that next piece of equipment. Another example would be Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals. Its dungeons always have the boss key, and some puzzles that make you feel like you make real progress when you solve them. Zelda, obviously, is another great example of this - the dungeons are always "explore, miniboss, new item, use new item to get to new part of the dungeon, miniboss, boss key, boss." And after each of these steps, you feel like you made progress - keeping you interested in the specific dungeon, and interested in the game.

I think I've talked about this enough for today, but I'll probably revisit it later. Pacing is a hugely important idea in video games (as in many media), after all, and one that entire books could be written on.