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by AnIdiotOnTheNet 1863 days ago
> Everything feels slow - not because it needs better programming, but because it doesn't resolve actions fast enough.

This is, unfortunately, a sin committed by a whole lot of games these days. Off the top of my head I can name XCOM 2, which notoriously seemed to have delays resolving actions for no discernible reason whatsoever. The mod to fix this was literally named "stop wasting my time".

2 comments

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.
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.
> 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.

Magic Arena does this. It's _incredibly_ irritating, especially if you play a combo deck or something click intensive. Those 5-10s animations get really old after the millionth time.