generic attack motions & sounds

[Radacci]

True, but how far should they work on these small things in lieu of the bigger things? Is one animation change in battle to be favored over making a quest or overarching battle element better. Personally, I'd rather the foundation of a game be worked on than that the tertiary qualities beyond that.

i think the quests are already done
but either way both are something they can add in time. but i think making the game visually appealing will make people go oooh and aaah, and get them hooked, while a few extra *kill x boar* quests will be ignored.
Adding a Wind effect on your char and mob for Aero wouldn't be a big hassle anyways. But who knows, maybe they already did.
and designing quests wont go in the way of making effects, cause it's 2 different teams doing those.
And they might need to go a little over the top, considering how 1.0 fared.

[Solace]

I made a comment about this in beta for ffxiv.. All the animations and sounds were the same for casting and it looks monotonous. I couldn't agree more.. Some variation would be very welcome.
Little things really do mean alot.. Especially when you are looking at those little things for the majority of the time you are playing.. A mage, casts... That's what they do.. That's all they do..
Should be as much variation as possible to make the job feel unique and exciting.

But again I resort to my "We are stuck dealing with ps3 outdated hardware limitations" So only a certain amount of animations will likely be used.. Again I say, building ARR around outdated hardware like the ps3 is a bad idea.

[Imoen]

Actually this time they do

It is quite obvious that you have no idea what I'm talking about and are on some other page than me. You can only load so much without going over budget (Textures, triangles, animation calls etc...) Thus it is in your best interest to reuse as much as possible, you can hide and mask the reuse but they are reusing things. (If a model is perfectly symmetrical you don't waste time and "remake" the other side of it and texture both, you mirror the model and UVs, enabling you to have a smaller sized texture to load)

Animation is extremely time consuming even with mo-cap data, there is cleaning of axis curves (X,Y,Z on Rotation, movement, and scale) to get rid of redundant key frames etc...

Also not related to the above, you honestly believe that their team threw out EVERYTHING that was in 1.0 , highly unlikely. Tweaked sure, added new stuff sure, threw out a few things sure. however I highly highly doubt they threw out all their mo-cap data/models/textures etc... that would just be stupid for a project that's trying to make a relatively fast turn around. More realistically they looked at what was good and ported it to the new engine, and only remade and tweaked things where they needed it.

[Felis]

I made a comment about this in beta for ffxiv.. All the animations and sounds were the same for casting and it looks monotonous. I couldn't agree more.. Some variation would be very welcome.
Little things really do mean alot.. Especially when you are looking at those little things for the majority of the time you are playing.. A mage, casts... That's what they do.. That's all they do..
Should be as much variation as possible to make the job feel unique and exciting.

But again I resort to my "We are stuck dealing with ps3 outdated hardware limitations" So only a certain amount of animations will likely be used.. Again I say, building ARR around outdated hardware like the ps3 is a bad idea.

Isn't animation client-side? Just give the PS3 client the standard cast animation and the PC client the advanced cast animation. Of course the animation duration of both need to be the same.

[Solace]

Isn't animation client-side? Just give the PS3 client the standard cast animation and the PC client the advanced cast animation. Of course the animation duration of both need to be the same.

I sure hope that is possible.. If so, it would mean people on the ps3 would not see some animations though.
Might be replaced by "standard" animations, saved client side.. Good idea regardless.. ^^