Hey Tenno! We are aware of this issue, we do not have a timeline for a fix, but we are investigating!
Our current theory is that this issue only occurs if you load into Orb Vallis directly and not if you select the bounty in Fortuna and enter Orb Vallis through the elevator.
We are happy to report that this bug has finally been fixed. It really should have been addressed earlier but the problem was this bug was particularly nasty and had nothing to do with UI and so it was sitting in the wrong team’s bug-backlog!
We eventually boiled down the reproduction to something embarrassingly simple: just look away. When the Exploiter Orb climbs down there’s a cinematic event that hides your HUD and then a moment later there’s another event that fires to show the boss title card and then show your HUD again when that’s done. If the first event fires but you miss the second your HUD is lost forever:
The tricky part was figuring out why you weren’t getting that second event and the reason turned out to be quite bizarre: when the Exploiter Orb is climbing down the animation system classifies this behavior as “flying.”
In order to run massive open worlds with enemies spread all over the map the engine has to carefully prioritize what to spend time updating. Animation is a particularly expensive subsystem to update and so when things are far away or off-screen we tend to update them less frequently (if at all). Animation for flying enemies is optimized particularly aggressively because their animations tend to be nearly impossible to see at a distance: if you aren’t aiming at a flying Dargyn there’s little chance you’d notice a discontinuity in the pilots animation so we can make the game run faster by putting it on hold.
The problem is, of course, that the Exploiter Orb is much bigger than a Dargyn and skipping its animation meant skipping important cinematic events. As it turns out the Exploiter Orb and other boss characters already have a special setting that indicates their animation events are important and shouldn’t be optimized away – the bug was that we happen to ignore that setting if they happen to be flying.
So we’ve actually fixed this bug in two ways: flying bosses won’t ignore the setting that ensures animation updates aren’t optimized away, and we’ve fused the two events in the Exploiter Orb into so that it hides and restores your HUD in a single event.
Sorry it took so long to track down – this was a nasty one.
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