Good idea for a poll. Unfortunately, nothing has changed in update 9.4 or rather, things have gotten worse.
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One additional thing to note: While there are, indeed, the same number of âclicksâ to progress through Explore, as before, the actual impact depends on the platform you play on.
If youâre on a touch screen, a small screen and smaller buttons makes them harder to successfully hit. But otherwise, touch screens are faster because you can use all your fingers â plus years of hand-eye coordination practice.
If youâre using a mouse, the smaller buttons and varied locations of where you need to click definitely make things slower than before.
If youâre using a controller, it depends entirely on how theyâve programmed things. Is the default trigger action to start the battle? Is it one arrow movement and one trigger to pick and start a Side Quest battle? If so, itâs probably faster than either a touch screen or mouse, but likely still slower than the previous GUI.
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Using a controller on PS5, itâs x on the world map to open a kingdom, x to select difficulty, then we have to press down (on the d-pad) to move from the selected difficulty (after changing it if needed) to continue, then x to return to the map, then x to go to the battle setup screen, and x to start the battle (assuming you donât need to change teams). - x, down, x, x, x
If youâre already in the middle of an explore run, itâs just tap x three times and youâre in the battle, so yeah, itâs really fast.
As for side quests, when they appear we alternate between the main battle and the side one with triangle. So, either hit x to skip the side battle, or hit triangle then x to fight the side battle.
Since our buttons donât move and we have fixed inputs (button mapping for shortcuts), itâs very fast. But definitely slower than the previous GUI, because we have to wait for annoying animations to finish.
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If the game actually loaded the next fight during the dots that would be cool. Like a RE door but they dont and cant so now its basically 2 loading screens between every fight
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Rather than sharing in the patch notes for 9.4, just going to post this in here.
I did previously have a discussion with Sirrian around animations, especially around when the Explore update was being released, so I poked at them again today about it⌠Because I couldnât find my talk with them through all the messages I have sent about Explore and animations generally
Sharing this with the stipulation and understanding of, I donât think this is going to change anyones opinions on animations, the reasons âbehindâ them being implemented etc, I just wanted to get something from Sirrian directly to share.
- Using the PUZZLE BOARD as an example:
- In general - a lot of the really weird bugs you see in battle are because of 4x speed mode and animation skipping.
- Weâll never take 4x animation speed away - obviously - but the lesson we learned from that is to put in animations and let them play out - allow skips on longer ones, never shorter ones.
- The nature of modern game engines is that you get some fairly complex time-related issues - something as simple as a match-3 game can be more complex than an FPS here, because of the strictly sequential nature of things - order of resolution becomes extremely important
- This gets exacerbated by three things:
- All the different spec/performance devices we need to operate on - some of which cause all sorts of timing issues
- 12 years of content and updates that get exponentially more difficult to test with each other and give the possibility of bad timing interactions
- The particular server model of GoW can be a bit sensitive to skipping ahead past server calls [again, a 12 year old game system]
- Our solution:
- Use unskippable animations to hide server calls
- Use animations sparingly to allow things to resolve in the background
- Allow skips where we can (e.g. reward lists, because these happen after an animation call)
- Just to reiterate
Animations are never added maliciously to slow anyoneâs enjoyment
- They ARE added to improve stability and player experience - and they are always kept to a minimum
- Skipping is added wherever we can do so without the risk of more problems
Again, I donât think this is going to change anyoneâs opinions or theories, but I wanted to get a direct quote to share.
Also, this was after I specifically mentioned Explore, in case anyone reads this and assumes this whole comment is only about battle animations
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A suggestion to compensate the time lost during GaP due to explore animations: remove the gnome animations at the begining of the battle.
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Thatâs an existing QOL, was also I comment I shared in that exact discussion i.e extend GAP
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that and they really could undo the gap gnome reward nerf on the side resources. it got nerfed because players could play fast and now⌠we canât.
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Would it be possible to pause the timer during periods when the player canât input anything? If thatâs not feasible, Iâd really appreciate it if you could slightly increase the Vault Key drop rate and raise the rewards a little as well
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There is also a QOL to pause the timer in screens that arenât the battle itself
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Extending GaP would mean a higher time investment from the player for the same rewards, which is what is already happening in regular explore.
A preferable alternative would be adjusting the rewards/key drop rate (both in explore and GaP) to maintain an ROI (Verses/time) for the players similar to the one we had pre-animations.
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@Jeto I appreciate your efforts, and the detailed explanation from Sirrian, but consoles (Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox) risk a soft-lock if we touch anything during the animations, and it is impossible for me to enjoy Explore now. I have to actively wait for the animations, cancel an offer, then wait for a loading screen, and playing that game mode is now longer relaxing for me.
Why canât they honestly just have the loading screen during the pathing animation? It seems kind of ridiculous that we are waiting for another loading screen after waiting for an animation that is about half a loading screen. When I realized how much time I wasted looking at a map and loading screens, it was clear that this would no longer be a productive use of my time.
And there were hardly any problems with Explore before 9.2. It was simple, but effective. We just went from one battle to the next, without having to look at a map while waiting to play. All the Devs had to do was increase the difficulty to 16, while adding better rewards.
And PC/Mobile can skip the animations while consoles cannot, so that leaves us at a distinct disadvantage.
But Vault Weekends? I already calculated it out, and I will be losing about 25% of the resources that I would have gotten before.
That is unacceptable, and if nothing is going to be done with this, I will probably just try to adopt another strategy of using paloozas in PvP.
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When you finish a PvP battle there is a delay before you see the potential opponents. The slots are empty at first. This is, imo, slow. Yet I have not seen anyone complain about it. It is obvious what is happening.
With explore the animation is disconnected from what is happening in the background. I think a better solution, if it has to be slow, is to do it the same way that PvP work. Have the potential battles fade in when the client has received (all) the information from the server. There would still be a delay to avoid issues but it would be a delay directly related to what is actually happening.
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