Decline Inability to speed up animation in new turn-based games

It is impossible to speed up animation in many of the recent turn-based games. These include both strategies and RPGs. For instance, Hard West, Darkest Dungeon, Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus, Divinity: Original Sin, Blackguards, nu-X-Com, and a bunch of others. This was a problem in some older games too, but they were less self-indulgent about animation.

In many of the slightly older titles like Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Civilization 4, or nu-King's Bounty this was not an issue. These games did not force you to watch every repetitive animation for the duration of the entire game. If you wanted to look at them, you had animation speed 1, if you wanted them to be faster you had animation speed 2, or you could perhaps cut them down to a minimum. Some even had enemy units taking their turn all at once (in extremely quick succession). These options are now largely missing - at best you can maybe have x2 speed.

Now, we know that this can be fixed with CheatEngine. Still, this means that all animation will be sped up, so the units will be fidgeting like spastics and it doesn't work well with mixed systems. Why do developers force us to use an external program for this? Why was the speed-up option removed? The only reason I can think of is a cynical attempt to increase in-game time on Steam. The graphics whores have their default option anyway, so it can't be that.

Oddly, complaining to fans about this often leads to patronising replies like "Nu-XCom is a strategy game that requires a lot of thought - if you can't tolerate the animation, maybe you should play GTA". I imagine these people's idea of playing chess is that moving a piece must involve it spinning in the air for five seconds whilst blazing prosperous lightning as the cam zooms in.

Personally, I just started dumping a lot of such games like Hard West or Blackguards. Life is too short to suffer these cutscenes and there are many good games.

So what are your theories on why this is almost omnipresent? Do you maybe think there is some justification for it?

 

Because an epic 100h adventure could be completed in 20h, slow animations in TB games are the trash mobs of RT ones.

 

Personally I think it's usually just laziness on the part of the devs. It might also be poor coding practices, tying game logic to animation frames etc.

I also wouldn't put it past the egos of some of the artists on some of these nu-games, probably too in love with their animations and models to allow someone to "ruin" their genius.

 

Voted "pretty upset" because it depends case-by-case for me. In some games where the animations are decently quick already having no slider doesn't bother me at all. But in some others it can be really rage-inducing, especially if you have multiple contributing factors, like:

a) Long-ass detailed animations for everything
b) Multiple animations for every action you take
c) Numerous combatants per fight

Mordheim is probably the prime example for a game that has the entire trio. And it gets even better there given the yuge maps that require a lot of movement, and bad optimisation that produces frequent performance hiccups or memory leaks. Playing Mordheim was nothing short of a pain in the ass, even though it was a very fun game.

 

I think devs just don't consider it a big deal. It doesn't bother enough people for it to be a priority. That, or sped-up animations makes stuff look silly, which they think is a bigger problem than slow fights.

 

I've never had this problem, because most of the turn-based games I've played don't have animations. Though when I played Underrail I eventually got sick of the wait and reduced the animation time. I would be "pretty upset" if that were not in the game.

 

I love turn-based games. AND I HATE SLOW TURN-BASED GAMES. If there is animation speed slider, it goes to the max.

 

I think it is perhaps not 100% trivial to implement as games got more complicated, and started including (questionable things for turn based games) like physics simulations and the like.

I would guess it's also that slow animations really only get grating after many hours (at least for me, I'm unlikely to be seriously annoyed by it the first 10, unless they're really slow and repetitive), and going by steam cheevo statistics, most of the audience don't play games for that long.

I voted pretty upset because I do consider it a bad when games don't have it, buuuut worst case scenario you can always run cheatengine.

Not just the artists perhaps. Passive ads from streaming/youtube etc is considered a good marketing boost, and such things are often made by people who are deeply into the game. They'd likely run it on instant animations, which would make the game look worse to all the viewers.

 

because of "MUH IMMERSION" fags, probably

 

If I had to guess, I would say the developers don't expect people to play the game for 100+ hours. I usually like animations in the games that have them, but I generally don't play those for autistic lengths of time. Games that are designed for those ridiculous lengths are usually deliberately streamlined. Darkest Dungeon doesn't have an excuse for example, because of the infamous grind. But then the problem isn't the animation, but the grind itself.

 

There's a mod called 'stop wasting my time' for XCOM 2 that does away with a bunch of animations and speeds others up. Don't know if there is one for Unknown/Enemy Within.

Some older games had keys for speeding things up. I remember some Total War games used the spacebar for adding haste to map movements. Don't know why more modern games can't add in simple shortcuts. Console controller limitations, perhaps.

 

I'm an immersion fag but I fucking hate slow animations in turn-based.

If an animation lasts more than 2 seconds, give me a slider to speed that shit up. It's even worse when the game has a lot of combat: a trivial trash fight that might be over in 30 seconds is stretched out to 3 minutes due to slow animations. And then you get 5 trash fights in a row. ARRRRRRGH

 

All of them except for the first two (which had boardgame style pieces moving instantly on the world map). Space bar speeds up both your own and enemy animations on the world map in every TW game from Rome 1 to Three Kingdoms.

 

This happens because games require so many people to make now that the majority of the people working on them not only don't enjoy the game they are making, they don't even like the genre.

This indifferent majority creates an insidious inertia that makes it a chore to iterate in the right direction.

The majority working on the game just care if someone sees their individual work (writing, animation, etc) and don't even know how to tell if it is fun for the players.

 

And these phaggot ass Turn-Base clowns want to turn every RPG into this shit. That's why I always say you can shove these fuckers in the oven and leave them. I hate that these indie studios are even listening to these clowns. They ruin everything they touch. Fuck you turn-based drones with a fucking wooden spear. Die!

 

The legend of Dragoon man, long ass animations to every dragoon attack move, it made the game unreplayable for me.

also, look at this atrocity:

 

I think it's weird that in this age of instant gratification that people have the patience for slow animations, unskippable cutscenes, and all text being voiced when you can read it much quicker.

 

A lot of this animation porn is often synced (like attack animation of unit 1 matching parrying or hurting animation of unit 2), and changing speed screws synchronization up.

That still sucks.

 

They can always go and cry that realtime is better

 

What do animations have to do with "immerison" though? You can get "immersed" in an ASCII game.

 

This is one of my gaming cardinal sins, I enjoy good combat animations but over the course of a long game they can eat up so much time, cheat engine speed hack can help but it isn't a perfect fix for all games.

To add some substance to this post, will give a related anecdote: a friend really wanted me to try the fire emblem series so gave one of the games a shot on an emulator. Was utterly shocked when I beat it the same day, all because I speedhacked the animations and battles that should last 30min+ lasted less then 5. Goes to show how much of a time eater these animations can be.

 

I dunno, ask ropulos

 

Don't most of the Fire Emblem games allow you to switch off animations in the option menu anyway? I always play them with animations deactivated.

 

A huge strength of the Wizardry and the Wiz-like sub-genre, games like Elminage and so forth, is that everything is so fast. Hell, you can even turn off step animations and turn off attack animations as well during battles, and those are already really short already. Makes the games very satisfying to play, no time wasted, everything is meaningful, and you can get good gaming done in 10 minutes or 10 hours, whatever amount of time you decide to spend you know you spent doing something productive in the game. It's all pure gaming, no bullshit, no fat.

 

Ha maybe, didn’t think to check if that was the case. Would have made the speedhacking redundant indeed.