Please keep the condo list. Give people the choice to use it, if no one does then you can consider removing it. As it is though please just keep it. Not everyone wants to load into a condo hub just to load into another condo. A condo hub is nice eyecandy, maybe it makes for some decent social interactions but it also makes joining a condo way more inconvenient.
Even a load time of a few seconds for the condo hub is too much of an annoyance with too little gain. clicking through a menu is near instantaneous while loading a world, then checking what’s actually there and walking to where you want to go is much more effort. This will just negatively impact how often I hop around the condos. Let’s say I’m building in my own condo building but I get tired of it, now I can look at the condo list see if there’s an interesting one open, maybe someones condo I haven’t seen before or one I haven’t visited in a while, then I can just click the join button and join. If there isn’t one I just press escape and continue building.
If I were to do that in the new system I would have to leave my condo, go to the condo hub, then look around if there’s an interesting one and join. but what if there isn’t one? Load into my own condo again. TU isn’t a game where there’s always a condo open that I would want to join, sometimes there’s only 2 in the condo list or even less.
The whole condo hub seems full of fluff instead of adding functionality which would improve my experience. Instead of a nice list that’s functional(even though it can be improved considerably as it is) I’ll have to go through a world to look at a less functional list or even worse look around at each door. It may be good for VR but please also keep an UI that’s less tedious. A large part of the reason that I’m playing Tower Unite over for example VRchat or Neos VR to name two is that Tower Unite was mainly a pc game with a UI made around that.
I know this is a matter that always comes up with UI redesigns but in this case the fundamental way in which they are used is just wildly different. we’re not talking about rounder corners, a different colour scheme, no more compact mode. But about needing to load into a world so you can look around what worlds are open.
On the livestream it took from 33:03 to 33:11 from the time you clicked the button to join the condo hub to being able to move your camera. It’s 8 seconds, lets say you get it down to 5, that’s still much slower than opening the condo list, it’s a speedbumb that will, for me atleast, cause a lot of annoyance. One more loading screen between the others.
As for it being more immersive, please don’t put immersiveness above usability, functionality and convenience. Please don’t force a menuless usage upon me, for me menus are a lot more convenient than walking around places and being stuck in more loading screens. Just because everything is integrated does not make it easier or more convenient to use. To me this seems like Pixeltail is planning to put VR usage above normal PC usage, which for me is a purely negative development.
Let me reiterate just to be clear, I’m not saying that the new system is inherently bad and that it should not be implemented at all but please keep the old condo list and don’t remove it so that I am required to use the new condo hub. Don’t hide the condo list behind another button but simply allow me easy access to it like there is currently, allow people to use what they prefer and what is convenient for them. The same goes for the new autojoin the busiest plaza, give people the option to use it instead of removing the ability to join a specific plaza they want.
But perhaps that is just my view on this so I would encourage everyone to share their own views here aswell.
