Games you feel have too much padding

[Yossarian1507]

Half Life 2. The first part of the game was so padded, I decided to screw this noise and watch the rest of the plot on YT.

To elaborate: The very beginning - awesome. I appear in town, people recognize me, Combine soldiers chase me, I run away, situation looks bad, and then Alyx comes to the rescue. Sequence was action packed, major character established, great job. BUT THEN...

After getting a brief explanation of what's going on, they're going to teleport me, so I can start the job from there. Awesome... Except headcrab jumped in, and teleporter went loco. I need to get to the place on foot. Okay, I understand, we're introducing Breen into the game, and entire sequence would be fine, if it was 1 firefight, maybe 2, and then we get back on the track. But the sequence is awfully long, and have those terrible boat sections in between (generic weaponry and scripted enemies didn't help as well). What a bore... But okay, I made it, I got an awesome gravity gun, now I can start rolling, right?

Nope, rocks fell, I'm separated, Now I must go through this spooky town to basically get back AGAIN to the starting point plot-wise. Again, I understand, father Grigori shows up, fine, but if it wasn't for gravity gun, Ravenholm would be a serious contender for worst level in gaming history.

Okay, I made it again, can I start the plot? What, another boat section? Oh no, not this time, fuck this game.

Seriously, whenever someone tells me that HL2 (or HL1 for that matter) has a good pacing, I die inside a little. For me this game is seriously overrated overall, but his particular part is just mind boggling for me, especially coming from people who bash other games for bad pacing, and then with a straight face tell me that HL series does it great (Yahtzee is a good example).

 

[Ihateregistering1]

Surprised no one has mentioned Darksiders 2.

I loved the game, but Christ did it feel padded at times. As Yahtzee joked about, everything about it is in threes. You go through this huge quest to reach the King of the Dead, and then he says you must kill 3 of his Lieutenants. During the quest to kill one of them, you have to retrieve 3 items to proceed, and that's merely the beginning. Pretty much everything in the game is a giant tease where you get to this major objective, only to discover that now you need some magical maguffin to make it work.

Like I said, I loved the game, but there were times when I said "you have got to be kidding me!" when I was told I needed to go retrieve 3 orbs of power to open this next door or whatever.

And as someone already mentioned, the Dwarf quest from Dragon Age: Origins. Christ I felt like I was running around in those tunnels for days.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Wasn't DMC 4 famous for padding out its game length by making you fight each boss two times?

Actually you fight most of the bosses 3 times, and the second half of the game is just backtracking through the first half, just in a slightly different order.

God that game annoyed me so much. If it wasn't for the fact that the combat system is FUCKING BRILLIANT it would be one of the worst games I've ever played. Then again, because the combat is just that brilliant, it is in fact one of the best character action games.

 

[Chaos Isaac]

Bioshock Infinite: Just about half of the gunfights and the entire finding the gunsmith guy. Just. Waste of time.
DMC4: As said above.
Grand Theft Auto 5: No, Michael, I don't care about your family or your studio crap in the later acts. Trevor also felt like 90% padding, I can't honestly remember him adding much to the game as a whole.
Far Cry 3: Uh, after Vaas was just padding. Seriously. Also, the forced turning on your friends segment.
Far Cry 2: I just.... over half of that game. At least. Fun, but oh my god.
Turrets: Every shooter ever.
Last of Us: About half of the hunter fights in/after the city.
Pokemon: Key item roadblocks, and other things. They're rarely needed and sometimes harm the experience.
Mabinogi: Every damn dungeon with like eight different forks in the road with nine of them ending in a pointless end of the hall. Oh my goodness.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

Most games are much too padded for me personally. My 3 recent games have been Far Cry 3, Alice: Madness returns and Bastion.

Far Cry 3 got to a point where I was doing the exact same thing with the odd little interesting mission thrown in to keep me interested. It didn't work for long and I got very bored of the game.

Alice's platforming and combat sections felt a little dragged out and very repetitive, adding unwanted length to the game.

Bastion was fine until they decided to throw a little twist in there and have you collect fragments instead of cores, adding unwanted length to the game.

 

[aozgolo]

The worst game for padding I ever played was Suikoden IV. You spend like 50% of the game sailing across a boring-ass ocean dealing with random battles on the same boring ship background, that have very little variance.... so awful!

 

[FFP2]

The most recent game that suffers from this is DD Dark Arisen. 90% of the sidequests are "Kill X amount of Y for person Z". Also, most quests take place on the opposite end of the noticeboard that you got the quest from. I normally wouldn't mind that but this game has a really bad fast travel system.

Like, really bad. Might as well not even have one.

 

[pearcinator]

Zelda: Skyward Sword springs to mind...

I normally like long games...especially if the story is captivating enough for me to push on through the dull bits. You don't really play Zelda games for the story though and I just wanted to push on but they kept throwing in a fetch quest before you could get to the next temple/dungeon.

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

Skyrim. Yes, the game's intention is to provide an open world with tons of small things to do in it. But the main story suffers because of it. Heck, some side-quests are better than the main storyline. If you put a main story in your game, you should damn well make sure it's at least as good as any other quest, instead of filling the game with dozens of generic dungeon crawling ones.

As much as I agree with you to an extent (and everyone else who mentioned Skyrim) but at least they were good attempts at padding, and allowed a good access for roleplaying. I would have liked to have seen more attempt at closing off certain quests based on your character build though... Why did my duel wielding pirate who focused on strength manage to beat the mages guild quests when all he could really do was summon a flame atronach?

I wouldn't count that as padding as much as 'collect the token' sandbox games such as Assasins Creed, Crackdown and Saints Row 4... All I remember from those games is a vague recollection of the story, and how I spent hours giving in to my OCD and collecting goddam everything!

The Saboteur had something similar too, but the 'collection' was similar to that in mercenaries, where a lot of the time you didn't just collect a token or place yourself in a certain area, but you had to blow something up, or fight yourway through an area! Much more exciting, and gave you mini adventures across the board!
The other thing that made The Saboteurs' collection better was it fitted neatly into the story. The whole idea was that you worked with the French resistance to liberate paris from German control. By taking out all the stuff in the game like V2 sites, AA guns and encampments this further freed up areas to your control that made you feel like you were progressing. The missions just helped open up areas, and were usually really good with fun set peices! The art style was good too... German areas had cloudy skies and were largely in greyscale with a splash of colour, whereas liberated areas were in full colour with blue sunny skies... it really gave you a feeling of progress through the game.

 

[sXeth]

Someone already got AC 1, but allow me to throw Assassin's Creed 2 into the mix.

You had a fairly frantic pace up until you hit Venice, then suddenly you hit a bunch of boring almost-retutorial missions to assemble the thieve's guild. The Venice targets in general are barely given any screentime or role in the conspiracy. There's the tedious carnival minigame bit. After all that, you then have to go find all the Codex pages, and get the Armor, before it graciously allows you to go on the final mission.

The last part particularly seems like they just changed optional collectables into a requirement, to pad it out after failing to complete the missing chapters for release date.

 

[deepdoop]

I'm not an MMORPG expert, having only played maybe ten in my whole life, but MMORPGs in general. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy them, but they rely so heavily on fluff game play like taking eight years to walk from point A to B, then back to A from B, then go to C only to come back to B. Or A. I can't remember, I got lost.

Mind you, some definitely do a good job of making that easier. I know there are mounts and ways to teleport. However, there are MMOs I've played where this is more noticeable. I'm actually impressed by how well FF14:ARR handles it, even if it isn't flawlessly done. Probably one of the better MMOs I've played in that regard because you don't often have to walk real far.

It's kind of an interesting topic though, because recently MGS5: Ground Zeroes was criticized when it came out that it isn't very long. Some of it is valid because they are going to charge too much (BUT I LOVE METAL GEAR), but the bigger issue is basically, "Do games have to be long to be justified?" I say no. I'd rather a short but awesome experience over a long but mediocre game where they pad stuff just to add to the length.

 

[Evangel]

After just finishing it, Assassin's Creed 4 comes to mind. If you go story to story it isn't that bad but chasing 100% completion and a platinum added tns of tedium. Treasure chests and fragments out on the ocean, fleet missions taking up to 24 real hours unless you had friends on. And then making you hit 55 in the multiplayer to platinum. All this to pad out a good but short main story.