Modern designers have finally started to take account of this. In Mass Effect 2, you do almost all of your side-questing while you wait for your employer to gather information about the main problem. Once the party does get started, the game makes it emphatically clear that waiting any more than absolutely necessary is going to severely compromise your primary mission.
jim answered quite thoroughly. I’ll add that I was hinting mainly at the fact that the BioWare developers knew that most players would, by habit, take their sweet time no matter how many universes were at stake, and planned accordingly.
If your most trusted ally tells you “We must hurry, or we will fail!”, a veteran gamer knows to ignore him and go rescue a kitten. If a pop-up window tells you to hurry up or you will fail, you do hurry up. Some messages can only be given on this side of the fourth wall.
Yes; if you’re too slow, it kills off some minor characters who would otherwise survive. The ending to that game is quite well done. It also has you assign NPCs to tasks, and kills a character for each assignment you get wrong, including some non-obvious and unstated requirements, like you can’t put someone in charge of a squad if their backstory doesn’t mention leadership experience.
However, the early game still has the usual timing incentive problem. Side-quests fall into major and minor categories, and the clock doesn’t start ticking until you’ve done all the major ones.
Modern designers have finally started to take account of this. In Mass Effect 2, you do almost all of your side-questing while you wait for your employer to gather information about the main problem. Once the party does get started, the game makes it emphatically clear that waiting any more than absolutely necessary is going to severely compromise your primary mission.
But does it actually punish you for waiting, or just threaten to? (I haven’t gotten around to playing Mass Effect 2 yet.)
jim answered quite thoroughly. I’ll add that I was hinting mainly at the fact that the BioWare developers knew that most players would, by habit, take their sweet time no matter how many universes were at stake, and planned accordingly.
If your most trusted ally tells you “We must hurry, or we will fail!”, a veteran gamer knows to ignore him and go rescue a kitten. If a pop-up window tells you to hurry up or you will fail, you do hurry up. Some messages can only be given on this side of the fourth wall.
Yes; if you’re too slow, it kills off some minor characters who would otherwise survive. The ending to that game is quite well done. It also has you assign NPCs to tasks, and kills a character for each assignment you get wrong, including some non-obvious and unstated requirements, like you can’t put someone in charge of a squad if their backstory doesn’t mention leadership experience.
However, the early game still has the usual timing incentive problem. Side-quests fall into major and minor categories, and the clock doesn’t start ticking until you’ve done all the major ones.