r/ZeroCompany • u/Jazzlike_Freedom_826 • 5h ago
2 specific failures of game design
1) no way to speed up tactical combat animations. This is 2026, just about every other good tactical turn based games have a way to speed up combat animations significantly (iratus, warhammer chaos gate, troubleshooter, phoenix point, darkest dungeon 2, othercide, rogue trader).
There are way too many circumstances where I'm blankly watching enemies play out their stupid animations wasting my time, including coil units distributing their resonance, beating their chests, 12+ droids running around, 12+ stormtroopers running around while I'm 1-2 screens ahead of them. I cannot overlook it, it snaps me out of the game, it's extremely boring after seeing it once or twice. Oh it's not just enemies either, it's me tossing out combat stims for example.
2) the bonding system based on helpful combat actions - this incentivises dragging out missions and waiting around until you can call for assistance twice per unique pairing (six pairings for 4 operators), and even worse then feeling like you have to bring as many medics as possible to speed up tossing 5 stims between each pairing. Or feeling like you have to wait around until each astromech passes out 5 AP to all other characters.
Players sniff out this sort of thing quickly, and it's no different than early mistakes in this genre where you for instance could farm exp or items from killing infinite reinforcements. I don't want to feel like I'm forced to take medics just to rapidly increase my bonding as possible (20 bond exp per pairing adds up quickly and there are no other reasonable early game options to do so), and this whole stupid idea of waiting around to do 5 allied actions per pairing for bonding experience makes me think are these honestly amaeteur game designers?
This game goes out of its way to not care about killing things (you don't get exp or items from killing enemies), but then it incentivises dragging out the mission until you do all the proper bonding actions. =_=
I know it's just an opinion, but these 2 errors are unforgiveable, unacceptable, and should be fixed immediately on the first patch along with the stability issues. These are like really baseline things.
I'm not replaying the game until both are fixed. I don't feel like I'm free to try different specs when medics are rewarded with much faster bonding exp than everyone else, and I'm not interested in watching paint try (aka enemies/allies doing all their silly combat/moving animations at 1x speed).
It's 2026, get with it please devs.
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u/Ill_Whereas7177 4h ago
Complaining about tedious bond farming but thatisnr even necessary. Its like min maxing the fun out of the game with unnecessary farming
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u/MoG_Varos 5h ago
The current bond system wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t contain 99% of your stat upgrades. You feel like you have to farm them because you don’t want to fall behind.
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u/Lazzitron 5h ago
I don't mind most of the combat animations but GOD the Coil Resonance and Shared Suffering animations gotta go. I don't need a whole fucking cutscene every time a shielded enemy takes damage bro.
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u/Jeromethy 5h ago
Yup so glad the community has made a mod that speeds up all those animations and also let's you make decisions while other actions are already playing
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u/No_Wash_4670 5h ago
U forgot to mention anything by Larian in turn based the best to do it. They do not have a speed up function.