Game pace is the speed of the gameplay experience, which is affected by factors such as the type of game and target audience. Each genre has their own conventions and expectations regarding pacing and what makes a moment tense and exciting. A heart-racing moment in Call of Duty is entirely different from a heart-racing moment in Amnesia. Game pace feels abstract and highly situational, but it’s the result of clear planning on the part of the designers. Learn here some of the frameworks and strategies game designers use to explain and evaluate game pacing.
What is the meaning of game pace?
The meaning of game pace is the perceived speed and intensity of the gameplay experience. The pacing drives players to return again and again to experience something new. A well-designed curve ramps up the intensity over the course of the experience, surprises the player, and gives them enough lulls to keep from getting overwhelmed. Eventually, the player feels prepared to face the game’s toughest challenges.
A well-paced video game includes moments that are especially intense, interesting, challenging, or engaging, but not all the time. The high moments in a game have little meaning if they are common or reached quickly. For example, getting power armor in Fallout 4 is meaningless because such a powerful and satisfying piece of equipment is handed to the player for free at the very beginning, unlike previous Fallout titles where power armor was either entirely missable or came late in the story.
Balance, systems design, and game pace all affect the intensity of the experience and work together to solve similar gameplay issues. One difficulty level is always too easy for some players and too hard for others, so finding a balance and giving players options is important both for gameplay and the experience’s overall pacing. This variability between players is another reason to design for increasing skill. No difficulty curve pleases everyone, so it’s more sensible to focus on making it interesting for the target audience.
All designers have to think about pacing because their mechanic or system is experienced with a certain timing. A creature designer has some idea of whether the enemy they’re creating is a minion or the final boss. Level designers think the most about pace, as they make sure the player experiences a variety of intensities over the course of the level to drive player engagement. Systems designers are crucial for ensuring the gameplay continues to challenge the player through enemy scaling, loot drops, and leveling systems.
What factors influence game pace in game development?
Factors that influence game pace include the difficulty and the game systems. Difficulty in the form of a higher chance of failure, a large number of choices required at a given time, or limited time to make decisions create a more intense and fast-paced atmosphere. The game’s systems are crucial for setting the speed of player progression, as taking too long to level up or gaining power too quickly disrupts the planned difficulty curve. Talk of pace and game balance go hand in hand, as the level of intensity is determined both by the player’s skill and the game’s challenge, and balance is a key part of matching the challenge to the playerbase.
Players must be pushed out of their comfort zone every now and then to keep them invested as their skill increases. Even the most casual mobile titles increase the number of mechanics and the pressure on the player as time goes on. The challenge with pacing is how far to push and when. A common framework used in balancing and game pacing to assist with this is the flow state.
The flow state is a psychological phenomenon that’s intuitive to understand for anyone who’s experienced it. Being “in the zone” or “absorbed” in a task are other names for flow. So totally absorbing is the flow state that people forget about themselves for a while. Anyone who’s started playing Factorio at night and then looked around to see the sun coming up knows about it.
The flow state is the desired end goal of a well-paced level or game. Solid pacing keeps players close to the middle while strategically nudging them into the easier and more challenging sections. Games become uninteresting if the level of challenge never varies. Players need to both encounter unexpected resistance and be granted moments of rest. Adjusting the difficulty to match the player’s increasing skill keeps them at a point where they’re both challenged and in control, a feeling of mastery that lets them fully engage.
The ways challenge affects pace are limitless, but here are a few. Giving players more systems and mechanics to deal with over the course of the game adds a new challenge. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain gradually increases the base-building aspect of the game, from building one platform to five to multiple bases to managing what jobs your PMC takes on. Enemies also gain new disruptions based on the player’s choices; if the player attacks primarily at night, enemies gain night vision, for example. The experience ramps up from simple solo stealth missions against unprepared enemies to a PMC management simulator.
Making a greater number of decisions in the same period of time adds challenge, even if the mechanics are simple. The gameplay of Overcooked is straightforward, with tasks in the kitchen performed by placing a character at a station, but the intensity is relatively high for how simple the game is. Each kitchen task is on its own timer, separate from the overall timer for the whole match. Overlapping timers create a complex situation where prioritizing becomes difficult, and panic begins to set in. Overcooked has much more frantic pacing than a turn-based RPG, where the number of factors to consider is high but the player has no time limit when considering their next move.
The simplest factor that increases intensity and affects pacing is the margin of error players have. A smaller margin of error for executing high-level abilities, making enemies more damaging and more tanky, or recombining challenges in new environments puts more pressure on players. Increasing the damage output and health of enemies is a simple way to do this. Scaling enemy stats is a less organic way of increasing difficulty, but it’s necessary in games where players scale up their own damage and health through leveling.
A well-crafted difficulty curve with dynamic challenges isn’t enough if the game systems don’t support the intended pacing. To stay with the Souls example, a leveling system that’s too slow encourages players to stay in an area and grind enemies for levels. A too-quick leveling system trivializes the enemies the design team worked so hard to make a serious challenge. Testing and analyzing the game’s systems repeatedly prevents pacing problems from developing.
How to develop game pace in a game system?
To develop game pace in a game system, adjust the systems alongside the content. Game systems, to clarify, are the elements of a game outside of the player’s control. Once the bullet leaves a gun, the sword hits an enemy, or the player starts falling, game systems take over to decide the outcome. Common examples are damage scaling, enemy HP, leveling up, and loot systems. Developing pace takes place through game systems, not just in them.
The curve of increasing player mastery is closely intertwined with the game systems. As the player gets more skilled, the game gives players both harder challenges and new mechanics to deal with. A mage at the end of Dragon Age: Origins has many spells to use in combat, and they’ve likely discovered that certain spells combo with special effects, making for more involved decision-making. The amount of XP a player’s able to get in each area, the the number of levels they get with that XP, and the increasing resistances of the enemies are just a few systems that determine how quickly the player masters the game’s most advanced mechanics.
Developing the game systems to fit the desired pacing and mastery curve requires balance and content to work hand in hand. On WoW, lead balance designer Kris Zierhut and I regularly reviewed the pacing of quests and zones at a systemic level, asking questions like “How many kills is a quest worth? How many quests per level? How many levels per zone?” These high-level decisions dramatically changed the play experience. When the content crush happened in an expansion after my time, the rebalancing of the game to allow any zone to be done in any order was a MAJOR shift in pacing that demanded a huge refactor of systems.
Balancing game systems for pacing starts with getting player feedback. Not every criticism from playtests is valuable, but criticisms about the pacing from multiple sources and from members of the target demographic are worth more attention. To target pacing, I’d ask a playtester about it directly. A question such as, “Did you feel like you were introduced to new spells and concepts in a pace that allowed you time to learn and master the previous ones?” works for a fantasy RPG playtest.
Systems are important for guiding player behavior in multiplayer experiences, where there isn’t always a traditional story or narrative path. On League of Legends, a lot of work I did in Season 4 was monitoring the pacing of gold income for support characters, and increasing it to 80 to 90% of a mid-laner’s value while sharing a lane with a Marksman. This system changes the pacing of laning, returning to base, item purchases, and even the entire power curve of the game. The most important takeaway here is to convert abstract units, like XP, into concrete units. The number of waves per level, kills per wave, and proportion between waves and kills are questions designers consider when designing progression systems.
Visual aids help the designer conceptualize these changes, whether it’s the frequency an event occurs or the amount of time spent at each level. Attaching colors and shapes to these systems makes them easier to understand than a spreadsheet full of numbers. If you’re studying how mana cost compares with the power of spells, placing them on a graph shows whether there’s a clear relationship between those two elements in the whole system.
How to balance fast-paced and slow-paced segments?
To balance fast-paced and slow-paced segments, give players enough of both so that no one level of intensity is overutilized. This kind of pacing that considers the order of events is the domain of the level designer, and they consider pacing curves just as systems designers do. The goal of a well-paced encounter (or level or game) is to surprise the player and keep them guessing what happens next. No-one wants to hear that the whole experience felt predictable.
Going back and forth between fast- and slow-paced segments, like a sine wave, is varied but too predictable. Once the player realizes the pattern, they start to predict a lull is coming up after every action sequence, then fail to have their expectations shattered. With formulaic back-and-forth challenge segments, the maximum intensity never goes up.
The Woods from the Last of Us is an example of a traditional difficulty curve that starts low and increases gradually. The area only has five combat encounters, and the first four are optional, letting the player choose whether and how to engage. The fourth is the most challenging, with a clicker ambushing the player. Optional challenges keep players at ease, if not a little troubled by the deadly tripwires. Until the part where a chain trap pulls the player upside down and they have to fight back waves of infected while Ellie cuts them down, of course. The intensity keeps building throughout the level, but very slowly until a sudden spike, lulling the player until it surprises them.
The key to pacing segments well is to set an expectation, then break it. The context is important; a level with steadily rising intensity doesn’t work when every level follows the same curve. Levels like Uncharted 2’s Desperate Times show this approach in action. Players fight their way in during the first act, starting the level at a high intensity. Once the player enters the hotel and leaves the street, combat virtually disappears, unexpectedly reducing the intensity in the second section. Just when the players have gotten used to the lower intensity, an enemy helicopter appears and destroys the hotel. The second-act lull is only a distraction. Players think they’re taking an easy path to their next objective, but the helicopter appears to show the real challenge.
The three-act structure is a common framework for creating engaging levels that match interest curves appropriately. The first act includes an inciting incident that introduces the conflict, the second act is the midpoint where there’s no going back for the protagonist, often with a great failure, and the final act includes the climax and resolution of the action. To apply this to the level from Uncharted, the inciting incident is the battle in the streets. The heroes move into the hotel, where the second act begins. Nathan has reached his objective and spotted the temple, but the warlord camped there has now sent an attack helicopter in the level’s second-act turning point. The heroes are low and forced to flee, but in act three, they escape the collapsing hotel and destroy the helicopter with a grenade launcher.
How to ensure the game pace feels engaging?
To ensure the game pace feels engaging, walk through the process with multiple play styles in mind. Players bring their own skill levels and knowledge of the genre to the experience, and an approach that considers both new and veteran players finds a wider audience.
Giving players choices to control the pacing helps modify the intensity. The Woods level mentioned previously gives the player the option to engage in multiple combat encounters or avoid all but the last one. The level of intensity is still lower for players who attack all the enemies, as the enemies are unaware of the player until they approach, but it still allows more confident players to take the risk.
Giving players options makes the intensity less predictable, so a linear experience ought to take this into consideration. Peter Ellis suggests modifying encounters based on how a player approaches it to keep the same intensity for both. A player who chooses to approach a situation through stealth gets a longer, tense experience, but a player who goes in guns blazing gets through the encounter much quicker. He encourages a designer to add a few waves of enemies for the aggressive player to make sure the intensities match across play styles.
Level timelines and interest curves are a common method for making sure the pacing matches the desired experience. Level designers draw out a graph of the level where the x-axis represents time and the y-axis is the intended intensity or interest. Drawing out this graph forces the designer to think about the structure underlying the planned encounters. Visualization here is just as important as it is for systems and more abstract elements of the game.
Set strategies for game pace work well for linear or narrative-driven games, but open-world and competitive multiplayer games are far less curated and controlled. The player is free to choose the order of encounters and the method of approaching encounters, making the designer’s job much harder when it comes to pacing.
Competitive multiplayer uses the map and the systems to guide the pacing. Maps in games from shooters to MOBAs stick with a three lane formula for a reason. David Vonderhaar of Treyarch, who worked on several Call of Duty titles, said that he always ensures the player never has to choose between more than three paths forward. Maps also have natural gathering points, so the player is able to make quick guesses about which areas are safe or dangerous. The push and pull between teams in these highly visible areas create the pacing of a match. Pulling back to recover creates the lulls, while pushing forward into the front lines creates the more intense moments.
Open-world games manage player attention in a similar way to keep the game from getting stale. Choosing to go in a direction off the beaten path just to find no reward is frustrating. World designers place skyline-breaking points of interest within view of each other at all points. Any time the player finishes a dungeon or leaves a city, there’s some landmark begging to be discovered on the horizon. The player has this guarantee that something of interest is waiting and not wasting their time by turning the game into a walking simulator. CD Projekt Red reportedly has a rule that 40 seconds is the max a player ought to explore before seeing something interesting.
How to test game pacing during development?
To test game pacing during development, get feedback from fellow designers and playtesters as early as possible. You’ve already mapped out the pacing, but you need to see whether the execution matches the intention. Pre-production is the time where the greatest changes are able to be made, so prepare to make adjustments to the plan early.
Fellow designers are an ideal early source of feedback before a playable prototype is ready. Experienced designers have a better feel for what works and what doesn’t, so going to senior designers for help eliminates a lot of trial and error. Having them go through a paper/board game version first (if applicable) is a common way to get quick feedback before devoting resources to a digital prototype.
Put together a playable build as soon as possible to test the pacing with players directly. Designers are constantly playing their own and each other’s work, but eventually the time comes when members of the target audience need to try the game. Designers aren’t the target audience; players are, even though players don’t always know what makes game pacing feel better or how to best adjust it.
Getting clear feedback from playtesters is done in a few ways. One is to ask playtesters directly what they thought about different parts, or whether they were excited/bored by any one section. Asking the playtester to draw their own interest curve lets you compare directly with your own to look for any mismatches.
Playtests give designers concrete data on how well the pacing curve was implemented. Without knowing the design intentions Valve had, Jesse Schell put together the following graph of the pacing curve of Half Life 2 by counting the number of deaths players had in each section. Tracking the number of failures and where they occur is one way to see which sections are harder. Whether the intensity needs to be pulled back or pushed even harder depends on the game.
My work on No Rest for the Wicked required a look at the data and playtests to adjust the pacing. We VERY much needed to deeply understand how many souls players got from the starting area. Then we needed to know how much that progress slows down: how long players take to catch up in higher level zones, whether it was worthwhile to move to new zones, or whether we encouraged farming of weaker zones.
This process is a combination of spreadsheets (rough stone) and playtesting (detailing), as there are realities you possibly don’t understand until you play the game. Maybe the progression of the souls and level-ups is fine, but the drops aren’t. Or you didn’t plan out the pacing of the item acquisition. Or you added too many items, but most are irrelevant and instead make your game all about gold (looking at you, Diablo 3). Getting the right pacing is a matter of understanding how the systems affect player behavior and whether the behavior is desirable or undesirable for the experience you’re creating.
