I could swear I saw one of the support humans say they were shooting for the end of this year. It was buried in a thread and I’m too lazy to look for it. I just have the vivid memory of spitting my coffee, when I read it. I agree that it will probably be at least another year.
I don’t really see PQ3 being essentially the same as GoW. But I do see the potential of dragging the sketchier monetization over here.
It’s impossible. Support humans don’t exist in this enterprise. You were cheated 
Originally, PQ3 was supposed to launch in 2021, as you correctly remember.
The quiet movement of the launch date to 2022 is fairly well hidden on the PQ3 home page in an article interviewing Sirrian regarding 505’s 15th anniversary.
The announcement:
Maybe, maybe not. But, if both games are going to borrow ideas from each other (PQ3 already borrows a lot from GoW, such as the rarity names and ascension order, relics and glyphs are just renamed arcane/celestial traitstones, and so on), then eventually PQ3 risks being this, as it may lose its own sense of identity:
Back in the day, there was a PQ3 dev stream with the internal 3D animator for the game. While I don’t think it was ever explicitly said, my takeaway was that the initial animations where both sides walk up to the game board is really just a hidden loading screen for slower/older phones. Newer phones and PC emulators don’t have a need for this, but I don’t think that there is any way to distinctly separate the loading screen from the animation (the stream seemed to imply that the idea was explored internally). The situation is similar to how in GoW, no matter how fast a PC is, there is a minimum loading screen time before each match starts. So, if such a seperation were possible, PQ3 players would likely face the same minimum time loading screen resulting in no net difference in time until a given match starts.
On animations during a match, however, that I firmly believe is a 100% dev internal decision. The history of 4x speed in GoW and all of the economic nerfs that occurred as as result (such as LTs) and the eventual design of GaP being based around of speed farming gnomes, is a situation the devs absolutely want to avoid at all costs in PQ3 as a freshly starting game. There’s no way economically a game can recover from a player being able to complete matches in 3-4 seconds repeatedly. The game at that point has to accept being able to farm at that speed as the accepted normal and everything that is later developed has to be designed around that realization (such as GaP).
The devs have shaved animation frames off here and there to speed things up a bit in PQ3. But I do believe that devs actively chose a red line of “no 2x or 4x speed in PQ3” as one that will likely never be crossed.
I know the devs have used this as an excuse, but it’s baloney. We are 1.5 years into this pandemic. Everyone knows how to work now. Most people at a gaming company can work from home. I don’t understand why the devs alternated between work from home and the office. Honestly, shame on their employer for requiring in office work right now.
For comparison, I also work in a dev shop and we only just reopened our main office last month. It’s optional to return. The vast majority of people haven’t. I run a local smaller office/branch, and permanently closed it a few months ago. It is irresponsible for any company to force in office work right now when their job can be done at home.
So nah. Lockdowns dont have much if any impact anymore on this type of work.
/rant
Rant not aimed at you Lyrian. You, as always, are lovely. Rant is aimed at all employers who are risking their employees for… Reasons?
To learn how to cross-post announcements! It takes a lot of time.
Agree. Plus the actual player input (matching gems and casting) is actually paced just right, imo. The enemies do not take a turn matching gems as they do in GoW, so that also sort of speeds things up. Many of the changes in PQ3 since the start of EA seem to be aimed at slowing things down, likely for the reasons you mentioned.
Working as intended
