InYourFace Timesinks, Redux with Unskippable Cutscenes

"Dumbstruck, color me stupid
Good luck, you're gonna need it
Where I'm going if I get there at all"

 

Green Day - Waiting

 

 

One of Rogue Trader's more interesting fights tries to recreate Alien's feel of being trapped on a spaceship with large carnivorous lifeforms, appropriate enough as Tyrannids are just xenomorph rip-offs in the first place.

(luckily there's no cat involved)

The genestealers run fast, hit hard and automatically retreat to heal when taking too much damage, even on your own turn, thus excelling at hit-and-run. Well, guess what, so does my make-work evasion tank Kibble! And with two Strategists and an Officer behind her, I can blitz, voice of command, blitz again, danse macabre, blade dance and return to start all day long. Thus the hunter becomes the hunted, muahahahah! In fact I was annoyed to no end at having to reload the mission when it ended prematurely on my reaching the exit, as if I were trying to escape and not slice 'n dice dese foos.

 

All that back-and-forth did take a while though. One such lengthy chase in a campaign comes as an exciting change of pace. If I see it happen a second time, I'll call it a timesink. Ditto for the Nurgle mission with the artifact spawning waves of zombies. Once is brilliant, twice is a chore.

 

A decade and a half ago when I started commenting, the chief marketing gimmick for a computer game was copies sold. Everyone wanted to be in on the next big fad, the next Starcraft or Counterstrike or World of Warcraft. And so I countered by pointing out many lesser-selling niche games were keeping their customers happy and engaged far longer than the lowest-common-denominator shovelware on which you spent your money just because all the cool kids were doing it.

 

Of course any system can be gamed, any metric cheated, thus the top criterion is always faked. As "hours played" rose to primacy in gamers' minds, so did padding in the minds of canny game marketers, to the point Strangeland featured an entire scene mocking such temporizing. Of course it mostly started with MMOs, which had a pre-existing impetus to keep players online with "kill ten rats" quests to make their servers feel alive. Minigames (Witcher, KotOR) already functioned as padding in single-player, as did unskippable cutscenes of Final Fantasy infamy, or gratuitous reloads (Arcanum) or slowly walking across giant maps (Dreamfall, etc.) but as older, more blatant timesinks became recognized by customers, a more subtle version seems to have gained prominence: stalling interface interactions.

I mean not only forcing you to scroll through endless unsortable lists (Skyrim) but basically stretching any and everything you do with barely noticeable or seemingly accidental half-seconds of dead time. Individually they don't seem like much, but adding half a second to millions of clicks adds up to forcing hours and days of dead air on players. And while I've criticized Darkest Dungeon, Battletech or even no-name titles like Ashwalkers on this point, if you want a masterclass in interface timesinks, try Rogue Trader.

Technically you can speed up its combat animations. However, not only does this seemingly not apply to ship combat, which remains slow as molasses with about as much animation as Armageddon to justify it, but it's not each animation itself slowing things down. It's the prep and clean-up phases before and after it compounded by stacking multiple separate movements like the little twirl a blade dancer performs before Acrobatic Artistry. Or really any ability.

See what my character's doing there in the bottom right? Pointing. Pointing is very important. Forget lifting your gun and shooting. Fidgeting and pointing animations are appended to every single ability, even the most routine 0AP universals you use every single round. Multiple such abilities. Every. Single. Round. And. Every. Bonus. Round. And if you're behind cover, which most of your party always should be, every single one of those momentous opportunities to POINT YOUR HAND OMGWTFBBQ!! gets padded with yet another separate animation to rise from cover because you can't POINT YOUR FINGER while crouching, that's crazy-talk, after which you separately perform the pointing animation, after which you again turn and crouch behind your cover as yet another separate animation. If you're shooting, tack on two more animations for raising and lowering your weapon. Do that five or seven times a round for six characters six rounds in a row for six hundred fights and see how much of your "how long to beat" was spent beating around the bush.

And then there's the cargo system.

Ah, yes, the cargo system.

FUCK CARGO!

I'll address its basic validity when discussing the game as a whole. It's a laudable idea in itself: your vendor trash get auto-sorted away from your usable inventory. Except every piece of vendor trash has different values, all getting binned automatically until reaching 100% to be sold as one full container, after which a new bin automatically gets started. The timesink? No sorting algorithm. Overflow can reach 120% with 105% being very common, so let's estimate letting it pile up on its own wastes 10% of your loot on average. The real kicker? Even if you try to do it manually, the interface doesn't work like a normal inventory where you can place and move loot.

- you can only add items to the currently active bin, which defaults to the top unfilled one

- you must split stacks to exact numbers beforehand because the interface won't take shift-clicking

- the gigantic list jumps around of its own accord as you fill bins, often hiding the next bin above or below the visible area

- stacks in the "to cargo" area also sort themselves of their own accord

- many cargo items share identical icons, forcing you to scroll over them constantly for tooltips

- you can sort the list, but can't view only one category at a time

- you can't move cargo back to your inventory, therefore must perform any sorting in front of a corpse or barrel on some mission map

- players will readily tell you the amount of cargo you find is not enough to satisfy all factions in the first place, so you either do some manual sorting or give up on some rewards

Now that, children, is a helluva timesink. Keep in mind they deliberately spent development work-hours, paid for by you yourself, to program a secondary inventory interface to put you through this idiotic chore.

And while I'm only using Rogue Trader as emblematic of an industry-wide problem, I do have to wonder why Owlcat, whose games do in fact hold quite respectable amounts of content under objective analysis, competitive in their field, have in all three cases transparently inflated their size like bags of potato chips.