Bad Sector
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2012
- Messages
- 2,334
I really don't buy that. Maybe for a completely brand new player they'll spend more time being lost, but those animations slow the pacing down a huge amount.
Even if they know where to go exactly, different players would still do it in different ways, resulting in a variation of time between them reaching their goal. That variation is going to be way more than the animations in the game, not just people who don't know where to go. Humans aren't machines to always find the most optimal path from point A to point B (sometimes even when said path is straight ahead). And they also tend to be distracted - a lot. People will stop look around the environment, etc (in both games).
Note that i'm not trying to excuse the animations (even though personally i don't care much about them either way), i'm just saying that in the grand scheme of things they make zero practical difference. I get that you dislike them and since they have been criticized by others even outside RPGCodex i think that Nightdive should add an option to disable them for those who don't like them, but at the same time i think your dislike for them makes you overestimate the impact they have on the game.
And i'm writing this as someone who dislikes those pointless wastes of time - some time ago i even made some "slides" on how Dragon Age: Inquisition's overall design (here is an explicit link, since the new theme make inline links look exactly the same as text) wastes the player's time. But i never got that from the System Shock Demo.