Sleipnir on SALE!!

[Ryel]

Those adjustments require far more work than you're giving credit to. It's not simply scaling down Sleipnir and voila, mount. Odin's animations lack the same nuance player characters do, not to mention they have to account for the multitude of inputs we can make.

This.. isn't necessarily true actually.

Assuming the model for Sleipnir was already created / rigged for animation and had existing animations (it did) it really isn't that hard to convert it into a player mount (from an animation, not coding perspective) given the tools (the ones already existing in house) it probably would take all of an afternoon really, if that.

I mentioned scaling etc because that work was already done for Odin, meaning the framework existed for player characters already including using player character replicas for Odin's model for the player that landed the killing blow.

Odin's range of animation isn't relevant to Sleipnir's in any way whatsoever, all that matters is Sleipnir's range of animation which is really no different between a players and Odin's when concerning the default walk animation and running animations, the animations unique to the Odin FATE / trial obviously aren't being used by the players so they're simply omitted.

Additionally a player riding Sleipnir isn't using any particularly extreme animations when compared to other horse type mounts (like the unicorn that existed prior) as it just consists of folded arms while walking and a bent over posture when running, which is once again maybe a few hours worth of effort concerning the animations that have been reused and recycled for other mounts.

So no, I'm not downplaying it considering I've had to do similar animations myself.

Unlikely. A far more probable scenario is they only considered Sleipnir as a mount to promote the Cash Shop, and that it never would have come up otherwise.

This is more likely, i would be willing to bet they only considered releasing it as a mount to promote the cash shop, however this doesn't mean that they made it specifically for the cash shop as the majority of the work involved was already done and the asset was pretty much just sitting there.

It's like "Hey look, easy money!"

It'd be like saying the Magitek recolors were made for the cash shop when they're obvious palette swaps of an existing mount.