Pacing and Padding: Decreasing Value to Increase Price

Image © escapistmagazine.com

We've all played games that seem to drag on far longer than it should, or played those tacked on sections that are completely irrelevant to the rest of the game. As expectations rise for grand, expansive games so does the tendency to add more features and content into games beyond the initial vision. Budgets and scopes of games are becoming so grandiose that play times can stretch well over 100 hours before you come close to seeing everything the game has to offer.

But when does additional content shift from being an added bonus to annoying filler?

Feature vs Filler

I would argue that any content that noticeably slows the established pace and that doesn't contribute meaningfully to the core engagements of the game would be filler. There aren't any specific mechanics or tropes that necessarily indicate filler content, however there are some mechanics that get commonly misused as filler:

Backtracking - Forcing the player to backtrack through an area they've already completed for no real purpose is a very fast and cheap way to pad a game. While some games can use backtracking positively (most notably Metroidvanias), if the player is forced to go through an area multiple times without significant changes to it there are usually ulterior motives to the mechanic.

Grinding - While some actually like grinding in games, forcing it on players when it's not the core engagement is usually just intended to drag out the play time. Grinding isn't always in the form of random encounters or experience farming though - repeating fundamentally identical set pieces (puzzles, enemies, dungeons, etc.) is another typical form of forced grinding.

"Side" Quests - While increasing the number of sidequests seems to be an eternal goal of RPGs, the over-reliance on them as a replacement for relevant quests has been a growing trend. It's also becoming the norm in some games to require some amount of "optional" side questing in order to keep your power on par with the enemies, essentially using side quests to hide required grinding.

Collectables - While hiding secrets around a game can be a great way to encourage and reward exploration, it's becoming more prevalent to put artificial gates on progression tied to obtaining collectables. Whether in the form of stars, money, or another macguffin the game invented, if you see a message saying you must obtain another X of Y before you can progress then the developer likely sacrificed pacing for total game length.

It must be a bitch to have to borrow stars every time Bowser wants to get out of that room.

Branching Paths - While increasing the complexity and freedom of narrative by including more branching paths in a game has been an aspiration for years, there are times when it's misused to manipulate the player. Some games will only show you part of the narrative based on some arbitrary choices you made earlier and hide the rest of the content from you, forcing you to play the entire game again if you want to see all the important content.

All of these mechanics can be used very positively in games as well. There's nothing wrong with the mechanics themselves - these are just mechanics that tend to get misused to artificially extend the gameplay.

Pacing and Engagement

In the end, the negative impact of filler all boils down to pacing. Imagine if you were watching your favorite movie, only every 15 minutes you had to pause it and watch 15 minutes of a boring, mediocre movie. Even though that would double the time you get to spend watching your favorite movie, you'd hate it.

"Do or do not, there is no spoon." Actually, I'd probably watch that.

This is essentially what developers are doing when they put filler into a game - they add in content that doesn't flow well with the core engagement of the game. Not only does this stretch out and dilute the aspects of the game that are more enjoyable but it adds in additional content that you have to trudge through.

Filler content can also lead to a player giving up on a game before finishing (or in some cases before ever reaching the parts they might enjoy). Any time you've played a game with an overly slow intro or a game where things just seemed to screech to a halt somewhere in the middle of the game you've encountered a problem caused by filler content.

Even if the player doesn't stop playing at these moments and manages to push through they can be negatively impacted by the filler content. It's becoming all too common in story driven games to have sections where the plot is just dropped in favor of some tacked on section, and by the end of it the player can't even remember the last thing that happened. Worse still sometimes critical content is buried inside filler content, making it extremely easy to gloss over and entirely miss important elements of the game.

Entire games can be ruined by the addition of too much pointless content intended to waste your time rather than to contribute to the game.

Bloated Value

So the question remains: if filler content is so detrimental to games why is it included at all?

There are two explanations that I hear frequently to try and explain this. The first (and more charitable) explanation is feature creep - the scope of a game slowly expands during development and it's hard to justify removing large chunks that already ate up development budget rather than ship it and claim it's a feature. It can also be hard to identify what content is extraneous when you've been neck deep in creating it for a long time.

While I'm sure that's certainly a factor I have trouble believing that this explains most of the filler content that exists in games. Unfortunately I think the more cynical answer is probably more often the case - the content is designed specifically to either extend gameplay or add another line item to the "features" list on the back of the box, both for the purpose of justifying the large price tag.

That's right, the world's first MMORTFPSRPG! I wish I could make shit like this up.

Right now in the gaming industry there isn't too much of a middle ground between "indie" and "AAA". If you're not a small studio working on a very narrow scope you are (or are aspiring to be) a large development house making the next blockbuster title - and since people tend to be picky about what they call indie that means that too many games are being developed with budgets and scopes that are unrealistic.

The result is that the vast majority of games come out shooting for $60 price tag by default. That's an awful lot of money for most people, and many gamers try to get the most for their buck - and when a prospective customer is comparing two games they'll either know what they want to buy or they'll be looking at the back of the box. Considering this, it's easy to convince yourself that adding in more hours of gameplay or another "feature" to the list will increase overall sales regardless of the quality of the addition.

Even looking beyond store shelves it can be hard for shorter games. It's common for reviews to point out if they felt a game was too short, yet rare for them to significantly call out a game for filler content. Too often games are being given a free pass for filler content, or worse being praised for it simply because the game is long.

Incentivize Focus

Many games would benefit greatly from a more focused design. There are plenty of options for doing this, and some wouldn't even require developers to significantly change the way the games are developed or the actual content of the game:

Make filler content optional - If you include additional content on the side through optional side quests or missions, you can still claim it in your feature list - and without sacrificing the pacing of the game. You'd have the additional benefit of letting the player choose their own pacing, allowing them to focus on the core experience or explore everything the game has to offer. The key here is that it must be purely optional - you can't pressure the player into wanting to do it for some reward that affects the gameplay or adds to the core narrative. If the player feels like they should or have to play the optional content even if they dislike it you're doing it wrong.

Still cheaper than some game budgets.

Decrease both budget and price - Not every game has to be a blockbuster, and it's high time the industry realized this. By expanding the possible price points for games they could create more focused games at a lower price point and smaller budget. Not only would this allow for a greater variety of games to be created (since not every game would need to sell 5 million copies to break even) but it would allow publishers to experiment around with new ideas in a safer environment and cherry pick the best to improve their blockbuster titles.

Of course this wouldn't work for every game. Some types of games simply can't be made without a huge budget and large scope. Franchises known for their epic scale like GTA, Final Fantasy, Call of Duty, etc. simply couldn't exist without all the money and manpower behind them. I'm certainly not suggesting we do away with these types of titles - just pointing out that not every game can (or should) be made on that scale.