PADDED OUT RUNNING TIMES
There are so many games that just don’t know when to end. More and more, games are looking to have more content to offer to players, to keep them engaged for longer or to make a compelling case for themselves for higher sales. More content is, of course, always appreciated, and whining about that isn’t what this is about- that would make no sense. But oftentimes, games decide to artificially pad out their running times to become longer than they should be, which ends up harming their pacing. Last year, Persona 5 was one of the best games of 2017, but it was a game that was about 15 to 20 hours too long, with at least one arc specifically that felt, in the grand scheme of things, unneeded (looking at you, Haru). This year’s God of War is without a doubt one of the greatest games of the generation, but even that suffers somewhat from pacing issues, and feels like its main story could have been at least five hours shorter (we have to do one more thing to make it to the top of the mountain?). That isn’t to say that all long games are padded out. It’s when games add in stuff that doesn’t need to be there to pad out there running time that their pacing really gets affected.
