Wayhaven has a ridiculous amount of padding. And it’s not good padding. You meet a new team every game, only to talk to them for two seconds before proceeding to never see them again (or only see them in passing). In b3, you meet a team who, if they like you, insists on coming to rescue you from trappers because, “ooh, you’re soooo cool!” You have an ass load of trappers and a bunch of supernaturals there to purchase the MC’s blood (and other supernaturals’ powers, apparently), and the Agency sends two freaking teams of four people? One of which is a water-based team? WTAF??? What’s more, they give a hand wave to the top team (“Nah, UA, you stay behind, we don’t need you!!”) in lieu of sending the team that’s nearly at the end of their alphabet-ranked groups. Why? Instead of padding each book with “meet the next team that’s more fantastical than the last!” crap, it would be nice to actually have some interactions with the first team we met past them sniffing you and never talking to you again. Yes, I know it’s all setting up for an Avengers’ style ending, but it feels like padding, and like someone is playing a game of “what four creatures can I pull out of my ass next?”.
B3 was rife with padding–the blood drive (this was dumb and served no purpose other than to have the cutesy skill-checks that were beyond ludicrous), the constant POVs from Sin (thanks for blowing the entire plot at the beginning of the game!), Verda behaving like a child when he’s often the only adult in the room, meeting the chamber (which seemed to exist only to make Rebecca look like more of an asshole, which probably was not the intent)… and I could keep going. The padding increases exponentially with each game, and includes not only forced plot stupidity but also a great deal of padding in the prose, where it has become so flowery that half the time I have no clue what the hell is going on (cough weird sex scenes cough).
Anyway…
The thing with padding is that it can work as long as there’s a purpose. I haven’t played the Infinity series, but believe @JBento about all the things that happen serve a purpose in happening.
Hell, as much as I complain about MC abuse in Infamous, I love the game because everything that happens serves a purpose. The game is three chapters in and has almost half a million words, but there’s no padding. Every scene has a purpose. Every scene exists because something happens. It probably helps that what some might call “padding” is there to either further build your MC or to let you (or the MC) get to know the NPCs. Introduction of new characters is handled well–and it doesn’t feel like it’s just a repetitive cycle of, “here’s a new character or group of characters, and… now they’re gone!”. It feels natural, even in the slower moments. In fact, it’s so character-focused that it’s difficult not to love the game, even if it is frustrating as hell at times to play a MC who feels like a soccer ball being kicked around a field. On replays, it can feel slow in some places (the more screens you click through without a choice, the more it starts feeling like drudgery), but that doesn’t take away from how good the game is and how well everything is tied together.
I guess my point is that, if you’re going to add “padding”, make it mean something. There are places in Wayhaven where I’m left asking why the hell there wasn’t more of a scene. Why are we skipping a week of living in the warehouse without interacting with the LI or bff more? These bastards move faster than cars–you can’t tell me they’re patrolling 24/7 when they can sweep the whole damned town in five minutes. The padding we desperately need in that game is kept from us in order to keep things from moving at a decent pace! Instead, it feels like the games are padded with what is, quite frankly, worthless crap, just to fill each one so it can stretch out the actual freaking plot and romances to seven books. If that’s your purpose for padding–to add words so you can drag out the parts people actually want to experience–just, please don’t. If, instead, you want to add padding by having extra scenes between the characters (the MC with NPCs, not a bunch of scenes between NPCs with the MC out of the picture) in order to build the characters and build the relationships (friendships, romances, or even between enemies), then I applaud you. That kind of “padding” is sorely lacking in a lot of these games, so I do the Snoopy dance when I see it.