"Everyone likes a rollercoaster" Me: I'm gonna die.

Games shouldn't be afraid to take it slow, too many games skip over the moments of quiet between the action.

Discovered your channel recently. It's really cool to have someone with so much experience giving detailed advice like this on game dev. I need more of this.

So, keeping with the food analogies, it seems that an open world game is like a buffet, and a non-open world game is like a 5-course meal. The player can complain about the food in either case, but in the case of the buffet, they're making their own plate(s)

thanks for the video Timothy, really formative and thoughtful.

I just found your channel and listening to this video (I'm only halfway through) has made so many ideas pop into my head for my game THANK YOU

Enjoyed this video a lot, thank you sir Cain. -- Control of the pacing to the player is an amazing thing, as long as linear world progression is not sacrificed. One of the things that subconsciously devalue the story of single player games, are the sacrifices made for inclusivity of content to give the player decision freedom. It makes the story and the world less believable, because the events, the quests, the *things*, they only happen when the character in in the zone. It is the classis 'world is only alive & moves when the character is in the screen'. It is somewhat fixed by a creative dialogue writing and cinematics, but as you and many other developers said - there is a limit to how much you can realistically write to retain quality & fun, not all wanna read 10+ minutes of each NPCs and quest's backstory. As opposed to linear storytelling, where the pacing feels just as great, and the story is just as believable as the quality of narration is, but it takes away creative freedom. -- Solution to it is the introduction of time that changes based on player's actions regardless of what they are, and events happening in the world regardless of player's existence. Such mechanics were introduced in Space Rangers for example, where the player could have just skipped days within the safe locations till the world around would drastically change - even up to the point of the game loss because arch-enemy conquering the entire world. Another example of the more known title is Pathfinder: Kingmaker, where the quests had time limit to get into, and in meanwhile, several events for the Kingdom to address that player would decide upon happening in parallel of main character's involvement in them. The system was far from its peak of potential but it was amazing. Some similarities to it were introduced in XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2. Players had to choose which objective on the worldmap to address first, sometimes even prioritizing one thing over another and thus making sacrifices - not being able to do *everything* adds value to replayability & choices consequences. However, in contrast, similar mechanic didn't really work in Wasteland 2, because of the game's design - forced choices between two areas, and the overall feeling of grief or doubting of making a 'mistake' in their choice (the idea was interesting, execution of it made the *players*, not the characters, feel bad about it - not something you want to do in a game). Could've been a win if those choices wouldn't be told as 'main storyline' but ultimately not affect it. It strains even more under scrutiny when such decisions are affecting the next IP in the same timeline, making that choice even less important since there will be canon to it. Mass Effect is a good example of pacing that has choices transfer from one timeline of events to another without sacrificing the quality of the story much (except underdeveloped, cheap endings, which are banes of most opera-style games).

I was thinking about BG3's pacing alot having just finished it. The first two acts were engrossing and efficient without being content stingy, each encounter felt incredibly well thought out and rich and fights were interspersed with plenty of exploration and dialogue opportunities. Then the third act you hit the city, it was a little more chaotic and overwhelming, partly I think due to the player's attention being pulled in 20 directions every five feet by NPCs, but after a few hours you realize it's more like Disneyland with animatronics you could stop and watch in between the actual "rides" (rides being dungeons, fights, NPCs with dialogue options instead of barks) and the city suddenly feels much smaller and less interactive. You could also sort of tell at points where they cut content last minute, as the encounters felt packed a little too tightly in some points, like they were planned to fit into another area, and dungeons gave way to more and more single room boss battles.

Let's not forget that a rollercoaster is not the only way to excite an audience. Some of the most memorable gaming experiences let you soak in what you are experiencing and reflect on what just happened. You might have a massive multi campaign boss level, but if the game just cuts to a "You win" and goes to credits, the experience feels terrible. Versus having a section post battle where you see the gravity of your accomplishment, such as returning to town and seeing what removal of this boss means for the people you encountered alone along the way, or putting all the pieces of the mystery together and seeing the end result. I am a big believer, just like horror movies, the ending of a journey can make or break a good adventure. As with pacing you can have everything perfect but if the end of the rollercoaster you get the brakes hit on you or just feels anticlimactic, then the whole ride feels like you don't want to do it again. Pacing is ultimately about getting you to a destination in an engaging manner. From those destinations you can continue the journey or finish but pacing and destinations go hang and hand and while the quiet moments should never be underestimated.

I do think that something like "monorail" pacing can work, but actually in the opposite sense of what Tim's prior colleagues were saying about all-boss games -- what we tend to call "arthouse games", especially narration-focused "walking simulators", are often low-key throughout their whole runtime, but it still manages to "work" for a lot of people. It's kind of like how people are willing to pay for train travel (instead of airline travel) whenever the route's views are especially breathtaking.

I had a thought about trying to take a piece of music I like, look at its audio wave curves and use them as guides to design the pacing of a game. This reminded me of that thought.

Text presentation and message relaying in games deserves a separate video.

Thank you, Tim! I really appreciate your insight.

These videos are gold, thank you!

Very interesting discussion. As someone who plays a lot of board games as well as video games, and given you brought up boardgames in a previous video -- I can say that a lot of boardgame designers either don't care about pacing or don't understand its value. (An example of a classic boardgame with phenomenal and dynamic pacing: Chess!) Anyway, I view pacing as extremely important to a game and also probably underrated.

Nice cape cod shirt :3 Warm thoughts from New England

Game pacing is definitely a lost art with some devs not even attempting it (or at least it feels that way). I would like to see you talk about a hierarchy of needs within development and what are some of the first things to go when time and budget get tight.

Loving the game desing vds! Tim can you make a follow up about player agency / freedom of choice and consequences? I think is a great topic, since there are many RPGs that seems to miss this aspect.

Tim, I had 100% speech check and didn't fight at the dam! It was AWESOME. This was in no masters playthrough.

Couldnt agree more about the pacing of Fallout random encounters, dialogue, all of it.

The pacing in Arcanum (that got some critisism like black mountain mines), Fallout, Bloodlines (that got some critisism like the sewers) all have imo absolutely fantastic pacing. Fallout did it best but all of them id rate extremely high on pacing.

I love that basically my two biggest gaming heroes Tim Cain and Marty O'Donnell have really leaned into developing their channels with the hope of inspiring other people to get into developing games for themselves.

Tim, I have an idea for you. ... Not a game idea - relax. It may not be a fun thing to discuss through and through, but I kind of feel like there could be great value coming from your insight and experience in this matter. So here it goes: Do you have it in you to talk for 10-15 mins about how to handle difficult employees - superiors and subordinates, people who are unapproachable/lazy/toxic/who bring so much energy to the workplace that they make others rather uncomfortable. Discussing how to handle people who don't shower is also on the table. (I know you touched on the subject to some extent or another at least a few times before, but I believe this one deserves a whole video.)

When you were explaining what game pacing is, you said “it’s a set of alot of highs and lows” which made me instantly think of games like Pokémon where you can have random encounters (highs) followed by going back to the game world/towns (lows). Similar this works in the indie game inscription. Where the player must fight with cards, but then after, choose a direction on a map. I hope this makes sense, you have really made me connect the dots with game pacing in a lot of games.

I got the BB gun in Fallout 1 once and kept wishing it would keep turning up!

I think god of war ragnorok nailed the pacing because the story structure was very tight in that game

1:48 Try The Long Dark. Wolves are always always a significant threat.

Both BG1 and Arcanum had annoying wolves early on. Although you could avoid both, sort of. The wolves were never ending in Arcanum, iirc until you moved onto the next section.

Great commentary on pacing and really enjoyed your chat with tks mantis that he posted the other day. Linear or not the pacing is definitely key to keeping me, as an attention span lacking consumer, from putting the game down. The Uncharted series has great linear pacing that keeps you constantly engaged while moving the story forward in a meaningful way. While RPGs can do this via difficulty spikes (and other tactics) in areas that the designers want to corral you away from for now.

Good morning Tim 🙂

Yea its tough because different players will seek different pacing in games. I have a friend who was really dissatisfied with Skyrim; not for the usual reasons and complaints you might hear, but because he jumped in and tediously grinded magic right off the bat for hours, only to be killed by level-scaled melee enemies during a main quest. He complained the game was grindy and boring, and combat wasnt fun. You can argue that he shouldve taken a more casual or explorative approach, but in the end, he played the way he wanted, and the game just didnt support it. Figuring out how to help those kinds of people enjoy your game is a Sisyphean task, but its also one of the most enjoyable things about game design for me.

In regards to pacing and the time limit of the water chip deadline, I wondered if a way out of that would have been to make it the second last water chip so it's the same task with no deadline.

I thought this said game pricing. I was intrigued about you talking about business side since I think you said you're more engineer and fun side. Haha.

Furi is a game with only boss fights, which still tells a story. You could find it interesting.

I would disagree about the bookcase example. While Tim didn't mention it, the player's ability to choose their pacing isn't entirely up to them. The designer still maintains control over the level of player freedom and the breadth of available options. Essentially, if the bookcase is stocked with 100 books, it can overwhelm a dedicated player. So, the designer can choose to include only 3 books instead. A general rule of thumb that I've noticed in Baldur's Gate 3 is that their books typically contain no more than 2-3 pages of text (Unlike Skyrim or Oblivion), and there are rarely more than 3 books in a single focused location. On the contrary, in Horizon Zero Dawn, there was a section where you could find around 7 audio logs on one table, which required 20 minutes of continuous listening and dedicated player had no option but to sit through those, stopping his gameplay entirly. That pacing felt way off, and the designer did a poor job implementing it.

Call me biased, but I really prefer STALKER-like AI "natural behavior" over FNV-like scripted random encounters. Random encounters were fine in F1/F2, but in 3D games like FNV they don't fit in. Instead of making world alive, random encounters become repetitive and frustrating over time. On a relevant topic: to this day I have no idea, why deathclaws haven't slaughtered everyone in Goodsprings. There is nothing that prevents it: no military installations, no natural borders, no minefields. That's just a minor nitpick, of course, but I'd like to point out that in 2D game this would never be a problem: every location in 2D is isolated by default, no one would question that.

I need one of those spinning light up globes behind your top right, where do I get one please?

7:48 Obviously, one uses Washo for making Rocket.

Didn't Cuphead prove that you could do bosses back to back?

idk a monorail sounds pretty sweet to me...

Hi, Recently Cloud Imperium Games released a tech demo video for their new StarEngine, it's look very impressive but I will like to know how it is from a game developer veterans's perspective, will you be taking a look?

I think it's interesting that you speak of non-combat like dialogue as "down-time" and combat as the "highs". Playing through the latest God of War, I found the combat to be really boring and just filler. I'm killing draugr, then there is this awesome cutscene, the plot is unfolding, then i have to kill draugr again. The combat was the downtime, and the and the story cutscenes became the "highs".

I thought the title said “game PRICING” Do you have enough thoughts on that to make a video about it?

I agree that pacing is something hard to control, as it's as much in the hands of the developer as it is in the players'. I remember experiencing awful pacing issues with Divinity 2, primarily due to the countless crates, barrels, and containers that you could open, often yielding nothing interesting. My gamer's compulsion to check every single prop was out of control, and it slowed the game's pace to a crawl, ruining my experience. To this day, I'm still haunted by it. I acknowledge that it's my own fault. I'm the one to blame! But I can't help but wonder why they decided to make every container interactable when they knew most gamers are conditioned to search inside everything. It's like a honeytrap for some people. Right after Divinity 2, I played Tyranny, and boy, it was such a relief. Simply strolling around without feeling the need to check what's inside every barrel in a settlement was a delight!

Monster Hunter is another one of those games with "all bosses"

Why are attributes more often quantitative over qualitative? In many rpgs I find myself chasing numbers over using things I like because they are objectively better sword A does more damage than sword A. Its rare when wearing space pirate armor makes pirates like you and cops distrust you or wearing a customary blade on the wrong side makes a culture think you stole it. Why does the top hat give me +5 persuasion instead of giving me credibility to wealthy npcs and distrust to poor npcs?

Fallout4 YES !!! Start at Sanctuary, Goto Red Rocket, GOTO Cave, >>> Get Fusion Core, Get Dogmeat, goto Sanctuary then go Northeast to Robotics Disposal Ground >> Magazine , Fatman Then to Concord !!! 😁😁😁

Talking off not being able to opt out of deep diving in dialogue. Outer worlds was the worst for this, having to sit through the companions talking about their horniness was not for me personally

I think new vegas is a good example of pacing within an open world structure due to how different zones are levelled. If you try to beeline from goodspring to vegas at the start of the game you're going to get clapped by cazadores and deathclaws, so there is a correct path but it doesn't really feel too forced. it balances being simultaneously linear and non linear