[jerf]

I don't 100% percent know this for sure, but since a lot of gamers are using "how long the game is" as a significant portion of their "is this game worth buying" metric, we've unfortunately incentivized game developers to pad this unnecessarily. I'm not sure which is worse, the micro ways like this that they pad things out or the inclusion of entire irrelevant subplots or the "Cut and Paste Dungeon It Will Take You Longer To Go Through Than It Took Us To Make (Please Enjoy These Palette Swapped Enemies And Palette Swapped Boss Rush)" in the last third of the game just because they need more run time.

[enkid]

Another possible explanation is that it feels/looks better for demonstration purposes. For press and initial players, having some time to process the information or make the animation look pretty is probably much more attractive then if information is spewing at them. As you progress, you need less processing time and understand what information on the screen is actually valuable, and therefore don't need as much time, so now the long animations go from being useful to being repetitive and boring.

[void_mint]

> I don't 100% percent know this for sure, but since a lot of gamers are using "how long the game is" as a significant portion of their "is this game worth buying" metric, we've unfortunately incentivized game developers to pad this unnecessarily.

I can confirm that this is a common, intentional practice in the games industry.