I recently learned that GTA 4 added a bunch of construction in the middle of the longest road in the game to prevent players from driving too quickly down it and outrunning the game's ability to stream data from the disk. Besides the "door that takes awhile to unlock" and the "character moves through a tight space very slowly", what are other game design decisions dictated by read/write speeds?
The first Mass Effect famously made players wait in elevators while assets streamed in. There were a lot of elevator-specific conversations that triggered in that game.
When I did some level design on a game (that eventually got cancelled for other reasons), I would often have to construct narrow hallways between larger areas that required a player to enter on one closed door and be unable to see the next area from the entrance so that the game could stream in the assets for the next area. We called them "decomps", short for "decompression chamber".
There was a Tiger Woods Golf game (Tiger Woods 99 PGA Tour Golf) that famously got recalled for padding their disc with a South Park episode so that the game data was closer to the outer ring of the disc and would thus be read faster by the device laser.
We will also hide many loading sessions with cutscenes and cinematics. While the cinematic is playing (with camera angles carefully chosen, visual effects constrained, and timing controlled), we can load the next gameplay area without the player noticing.
Many environment designs will feature a short dropoff in the geometry after navigating through a play area. Most players will never look back, but the dropoff exists to stop players from backtracking to the previously explored area. Once the player passes the dropoff, it is safe to unload the previous environment since the player can't easily go back.
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