Unlocking a door

The way that unlocking gates or doors work is that you use the key, the key turns, and after the turning animation is completed, the door will be able to be opened. Until then, if you try to open the door you get a message that its still locked.

While cool, unfortunately, it isn't always obvious when the unlock is done, especially if you have your sound turned off. At least if your sound is on, you can hear the key turning. However, even with the sound on, it isn't ideal.

Some suggestions,

- If we do have to wait until the animation is done for the unlock to complete, make it the same as how harvesting works, where the game would lock your char in place, and you get a circular progress meter that says "Unlocking" under it, which completes when the animation is done. If you want to move away before progress is done, it cancels the unlock action. This would only make sense anyway.

- Possibly, the game could zoom in the camera more on door or gate with the lock, though this might not mean much if its dark / night time, because you couldn't see it anyway. In that case, some slight sparkle might help. All in all, if we have the progress meter and message, that's probably enough to let the player know what's happening.

 

The best solution to this would be to change doors so that they open if you have the key(s), and stays closed and tells you you need a key if you don't.

I don't think a sparkle animation would be a better solution, and I definitely don't want my camera changing on me (at least not without an option to disable it - I've already disabled the camera changes with NPC conversations, what a godsend).

 

I think its cool that you have to unlock it manually, and it creates a tactical dilemma since it makes it a problem to do in the middle of fighting; but on the other hand, you bring up another point, which is that the player has to know to select the lock and not the door in order to use the key... which I think is confusing to new players.

I think if you have the key and you select the door, it should perform the action of unlocking. You shouldn't have to select the lock specifically to unlock. (Unless there is a reason for it, but if there is, I don't know).

 

This has actually been brought up before (spoilers for the truth plot).

 

Just realized, we're going to need some mechanic like this when we get lockpicking in the game. If not a mini-game, it would have to be a skill-based progress bar. (Or it could involve both in some way).

 

There actually used to be some doors that would automatically open when they were unlocked, like the wooden doors in Spectral Mines, but now they work the same way that the iron gates do. I've always found it pretty annoying.