![]() ![]() Shenmue II: After being worn down to the limits of boredom and tedium by an interminable mountain climb coupled with an inane conversation, people put down the game, only to discover later that was right at the game's ending.The opposite of Slow-Paced Beginning, but there's nothing stopping a game suffering from both.Īs this is on the verge of being an Ending Trope, beware that there may be things you consider unmarked spoilers up ahead. In a lot of cases (namely story-focused games), this can lead to a Cosmic Deadline situation. If you really want people throwing their discs into a fire, then it can be combined with an A Winner Is You or No Ending as a "reward" for the player's perseverance. As a result, they often focus most of their development, playtesting, content, and other efforts on the early parts of the game (which more people will see and which the game is more likely to be critically judged by) while the final level or two, which fewer people will reach, gets correspondingly less attention. In the worst situations, you'll get a combination of the above where the game designers put far less effort than they should into the later parts while the writers and artists put in a great deal of work into the same areas, and the designers are obliged to have the player go through long, uneventful levels so such work doesn't go to waste, resulting in Ending Fatigue as the player is forced to make their way through levels that were completed in some aspects but not others.Īs with Cosmic Deadline, the reason for this disappointing last levels is partially because developers know full well that reviewers often won't be able to play the full game, and even normal players often won't finish it. When it works, it's not an example of this trope, but it fails hard when it doesn't. This was even more prevalent in the days of Shareware: when the first third of your game was going to advertise the rest, suddenly you were incentivized to put all the good levels in that part.Ī lot of the time, this also stems from a desire to make the ending very dramatic and different from the rest of the game, in order to make the emotional impact stronger. Another possibility is if one of the designers andor writers Died During Production without sorting out the ending out ahead of time. Even if individual developers don't want to be a part of this problem, Executive Meddling will often enforce this trope, especially if the game is Christmas Rushed and the ending is the first thing that's sacrificed. ![]() This initiates an obvious vicious cycle of players who would otherwise finish being put off by terrible ending levels, with the expectation that no really great gameplay surprises (with positive impact) will happen after the first half or so of a game is completed. ![]() Even some professional reviewers admit they don't play enough of the game and many reviews are based off of the early-mid parts of the game. Many developers have admitted to paying far less attention to their climaxes than they probably should, as most players don't get that far. Essentially A Winner Is You from a game design standpoint. This climax should be as good as what lay beforehand and then some, yet it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth after an otherwise enjoyable game. The end boss? Dies with about as much effort as it took to beat the first level's Warm-Up Boss. There's no new enemies, and what new mechanics get introduced should probably have been left on the cutting room floor. The gameplay is suddenly full of awkward stealth, Trial-and-Error Gameplay, and terribly-placed ( if at all) checkpoints. The pacing is slow-paced and boring, filled with blatant padding in a generally fast-paced game world. The difficulty becomes largely inconsistent and unable to make up its mind about whether to spike or drop. The game's quality suddenly dips to hell and beyond, so much so that it feels as though the game was outsourced to another, less-competent group of developers for the endgame. What you're thinking of seems too good to be true. raocow, in a description on a Let's Play video of An SMWC ProductionĪ game is building up to the climax, and you can only imagine how amazing it's going to be with how great everything was beforehand. ![]()
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