Patch 3.4 - Soul Surrender

[Zorzi]

That's one of the things I love about swtor. In that game they actually take the time to animate your character fighting NPC's and doing badass stuff in the cutscenes so said cutscenes aren't just the NPC's having all the fun.

As much as it bothers me too, I'm having a hard time thinking of how it would work, and account for class. Can't just, say, use an autoattack animation, because I doubt the WoD will be impressed by a bop on the head with a book. How did SWTOR do it? Was there some weapon or something that was common across all classes or did they just manually animate it?

[Fenral]

As much as it bothers me too, I'm having a hard time thinking of how it would work, and account for class. Can't just, say, use an autoattack animation, because I doubt the WoD will be impressed by a bop on the head with a book. How did SWTOR do it? Was there some weapon or something that was common across all classes or did they just manually animate it?

SWTOR's story quests were class specific, in which case there were only two possible weapons to animate per scene. Then again, there were also many times where you simply used abilities you can't use normally, like we already do with the Blade of Light.

FFXIV could pull it off with the number of Jobs we have, if they wanted to add one or two "stock" attacks for each job to be used in cutscenes. Or they could simply try any of the budget saving techniques used in most TV anime and combine some of our standard animations with clever framing to prevent having to show direct contact. Almost every Job at this point has some sort of casting animation or otherwise-indirect means of attacking that could be used in cutscenes for dramatic effect with very little extra work.

Unless their event scripts work the way I think they do, and they can't vary the animation track on a per-step basis without some sort of obvious transition. In that case, well, maybe it's something they'll consider for the next engine update.

[Cilia]

@Cilia:
Interesting analogy. I actually began replaying Devil May Cry very recently. I'm a Vergil fanboy, admittedly, mostly because I find him much more interesting than Dante and his cockiness. Though I do think this game is sorely in need of allowing our rivals/enemies to win from time to time and stick around in the background for quite some time.

I mean...they didn't kill off Rufus after FF7 because he was so memorable/popular. He also never really 'lost' against the protagonists either - he withdrew during the only direct battle featuring him and his silver tongue/allies got him out of trouble during other opportunities. Plus he wasn't without redeeming qualities either and was pragmatic enough to not go 'all the way' with the destruction of the planet...unlike Sephiroth.

What a coincidence, I happen to prefer Vergil over Dante too (not like that). Dante's brash cockiness is entertaining, but I feel Vergil is loads more interesting as a character since he's rather ambiguous in a world that's normally very black and white.

While Rufus has his good points, it should not be forgot that his self-professed philosophy was to rule through fear. He also uses the party as scapegoats for Meteor's appearance and tries to execute them on worldwide television... among other not-so-nice things. He gets better in subsequent installments of the VII world, but in the original game he's far from likable (in my opinion).

FFXIV could pull [the WoL fighting in cutscenes] off with the number of Jobs we have, if they wanted to add one or two "stock" attacks for each job to be used in cutscenes. Or they could simply try any of the budget saving techniques used in most TV anime and combine some of our standard animations with clever framing to prevent having to show direct contact. Almost every Job at this point has some sort of casting animation or otherwise-indirect means of attacking that could be used in cutscenes for dramatic effect with very little extra work.

While I'd love to see that, I don't see it happening. There's a big "what the hell do we do for magic classes?!" that remains unresolved; an AST star globe isn't exactly suited to dealing with Darklander's Bravura Atma. (The magic classes in ToR at least had weapons, even if they were mostly for show outside of cutscenes.) Even taking that out of account, weapon ranges are vastly different (MNK has point-blank only, MCH/BRD has long-range only, etc.) and how those weapons interact with our opponents needs to be taken into account.

I feel there's just too many variables to allow this to happen without animating a different scene for each class, which would just be too much work. Again, I'd love to see it (getting to bash Darklander's smug prick face in with my Guillotine of the Tyrant, in a cutscene, would be beyond satisfying) but at present the best I expect is to have our weapon drawn in a battle stance, showing we were fighting them a moment ago.

*flame retardant armor on*

[Fenral]

While I'd love to see that, I don't see it happening.

Casters are actually easier. Flashy charge animation -> cut to spell activation. No two things ever need to be shown making contact. For physical attacks, you can do an enemy's PoV shot of the WoL attacking -> the expected "enemy knocked back" shot. All this can be done with existing attack animations, and without the exponential increase in complexity caused by having both the WoL and their target in the frame at the same time. Making the shot as short as possible (<1 second) will also help preserve the illusion. It's classic lazy storyboarding, but I'm was never talking full Tetsuya Nomura fight choreography or anything, just pointing out a way of solving the "awkwardly standing around" problem.

Scripted fights are still better, because as a rule you don't want to show the player doing things they could be doing in gameplay.

[Khalithar]

How did SWTOR do it? Was there some weapon or something that was common across all classes or did they just manually animate it?

They manually animated it and gave you awesome cutscenes. Here is the sith warrior vs one of the bosses, you do a combination of fighting in cutscenes and fighting in gameplay:

The player character in this is the character with the white lightsaber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi1qy2yQ16M

Same battle cutscene but as a class with a pistol: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KwLyypzwsQ&t=14m41s

We need more stuff like this and less of our character standing there while the NPC's have all the fun.