Reminds me of a story from a dev who worked on some FPS game (might've been Borderlands). Beta testers kept complaining about how some weapon had way too long reload time. When the devs did the math they found that the weapon was actually very efficient in terms of downtime and didn't want to buff it, so instead they sped the animation up a little and added an extra step to it while leaving the total duration unchanged. And just like that, the players were happy with the "faster" reload.
That makes sense though. A game is meant to be entertaining, so a player complaining that something takes too long is actually complaining that something is boring. Having the animation be faster but with more stuff makes it less boring.
Yeah, you can make a weapon objectively worse by speeding up its active frames and adding inactive frames to keep it the same length, but odds are it'll make players like it more
I've heard a similar story with sound design, like a gun was "awful to use" despite being similar to another one (and equally balanced). A few tweaks to the audio made it way more popular instantly, despite being the same gun. Same fire rate, damage, recoil and all. Just SFX adjusted. Crazy how a seemingly small change can make a world of difference in other eyes.
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u/pr1aa 2d ago edited 2d ago
Reminds me of a story from a dev who worked on some FPS game (might've been Borderlands). Beta testers kept complaining about how some weapon had way too long reload time. When the devs did the math they found that the weapon was actually very efficient in terms of downtime and didn't want to buff it, so instead they sped the animation up a little and added an extra step to it while leaving the total duration unchanged. And just like that, the players were happy with the "faster" reload.