An open petition / discussion about Animation Lock and FFXIV

[Krausus]

for the record i hated WoW and no SWTOR is not a WoW clone.

ok im not going to compare SWTOR with FFXIV but SWTOR is as close to a WoW clone as you can come aside from the skin and story. And yes I have played it.

[Dreadnought]

ok im not going to compare SWTOR with FFXIV but SWTOR is as close to a WoW clone as you can come aside from the skin and story. And yes I have played it.

lol its so not the closest. aion is closer as a wow clone. Rift is WoW. just because there are certain things that are quite standard for MMOs doesnt make it a WoW clone.
sure there are lots of things that fit in the WoW clone veriety but nothing compared to sooooo many other games out there.

[Krausus]

lol its so not the closest. aion is closer as a wow clone. Rift is WoW. just because there are certain things that are quite standard for MMOs doesnt make it a WoW clone.
sure there are lots of things that fit in the WoW clone veriety but nothing compared to sooooo many other games out there.

lol its ok to like WoW, no one will judge you.

[Buddhsie]

lol ok, cuz your opinion is infallible.
i happen to dissagree and so do soooooo many other people including the great reviews by other dev companies.
for the record i hated WoW and no SWTOR is not a WoW clone.

if you enjoy terrible features such as sub targets and animation lock on every. single. ability... then i guess im the one with the infallible opinion. i wouldnt be surprised if you want lame Gobbue mounts too.

Well friends of mine and myself must be wrong because they've played WoW for years and strongly agree with me that SWTOR is a reskinned WoW. I enjoy realism, not sliding along the ground during an ability, or using a powerful weapon skill that allows you to run around during (lol). It's funny how god awful all of the abilities in SWTOR look, be thankful we don't have to look at that shit when we play FFXIV.

[Dragon]

Please don't reference SWTOR, it sucks, like.. a lot.

This.

SWTOR has horrifying animation, both inside battle and outside (eg. cutscene animation), the graphics are PS2-era crap, and the questing is pathetic. Being the BioWare/KOTOR fan I am, I was utterly disgusted by it this past week.

I just want to know if the people here really are expecting to be able to cast spells and shoot bows without any sort of animation lock.

If you ask me, most of the animation lock in FFXIV makes sense. Yes, a person should stand still to shoot an arrow and cast a spell. Those kinds of things should require focus, which really isn't gonna happen when running around.

Or, are you guys arguing that there should be no animation lock in the sense that we should be able to move at all times, but doing so would cancel things like spell casts and shooting bows?

If its the latter, then I am fine with such an idea. If you guys want to be able to do anything without having to think about smart positioning and timing your actions, then I'd have to say you're just lazy and want a brainless way to win.

Exactly.

If you've no problems canceling an ability/move/spell/whatever, then yeah, you should be able to move. But simply being able to move during an animation without having to cancel whatever you're doing should never happen (except through ingame stats such as "Concentration").

[Buddhsie]

Someone find the video from SWTOR of the cutscene where that ship lands, it shows it stop in mid air for half a second before the camera changes to a different angle where it's moving again. Looks funny as hell! (And people take that game srsly!)

[Lionheart]

totally support this. I find it very frustrating. Add my name if you wish

[KenJammin]

I like how my character moves his whole body into his attacks. I don't know how i feel about sacrificing that. In Wow the characters arms move independent from their legs, that's why the game looks like a bunch of gorillas swinging swords around.

I think issues like this continue to highlight why games that copy wow can't succeed without poor graphics to hide all the visual sacrifices they make for frantic game play.

I think they just need to speed up the animations a little, maybe let the character exit the animations a bit earlier, and cut down on all the linking and make individual monsters stronger cause clearly the current system benefits AOE characters more than anything. I think characters inputting actions should suffer a bit of a movement delay, attacks should have more depth and planning to them then just spamming them whenever tp is available, not to mention stronger attacks with longer animations now have a bit more to them, or planning to spam low cost TP attacks like skull sunder no longer become viable.

FFXI was a lot more refined then WoW I think thats why it maintained its consistent niche fan base, I think players so quick to ignore and sacrifice animations encourage games to look nerdy and close out their hardcore fan base. Wow players didn't leave wow and go to other MMO's they're moving away from the frantic unorganized gameplay onto the streamlined content rich console games that have been coming out during the past 3 years where developers have really gained a strong mastery of the platforms they're developing on.

[Soukyuu]

I think the larger problem here is the latency, not animation lock itself. Most of my deaths fighting Ifrit come from the fact he readies an attack, let's say, Eruption, and unless i start running immediately, i will get hit, even if he didn't finish casting when i started to run.

So if they never manage to fix server latency issues, then they should consider removing animation lock. But if they do manage to reduce it to acceptable level, then there I see no reason to do so.

[Kymusashi]

I just want to know if the people here really are expecting to be able to cast spells and shoot bows without any sort of animation lock.

If you ask me, most of the animation lock in FFXIV makes sense. Yes, a person should stand still to shoot an arrow and cast a spell. Those kinds of things should require focus, which really isn't gonna happen when running around.

Or, are you guys arguing that there should be no animation lock in the sense that we should be able to move at all times, but doing so would cancel things like spell casts and shooting bows?

If its the latter, then I am fine with such an idea. If you guys want to be able to do anything without having to think about smart positioning and timing your actions, then I'd have to say you're just lazy and want a brainless way to win.