Quote Originally Posted by Zorzi View Post
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.