Graphical upgrade is great and all that. But... Gameplay ? Animations ? It's Linked.

[Vahlnir]

You're eating food and drinking a potion in combat, of course it will take time to do. It shouldn't be instant.

In WoW your character has to sit on the ground to eat/drink. At least we can move here after use, though damage suffers for a couple of seconds.

[Absimiliard]

I hope they decide to fix the Au Ra run animation.

[Lihtleita]

i think theres a middle ground to be found here. things like eating food shouldnt be done during combat anyway, but other 1.0 things like leaning into your turns and unique death animations would be wonderful.

[SigmaOZ]

Agreed, cut-scenes in 1.0 were smoother and much better, even movie-like.


I don't see a reason why that type of movement couldn't be brought back, let's keep things separated between "combat movement" and "non-combat movement", all I want is my character to move more naturally outside of combat, just like they did in 1.0.


They can keep the current movements for battle and may even improve on it without affecting the combat, they can even neglect the potions' animations just like when used while running, there's no animation for them.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

Sadly all they can do is a face lift. They can't upgrade animations or even fix clipping problem. Don't forget they use some really strange engine.

[SilverObi]

I'd honestly be happy if they gave semi-unique stances and combat animations to each race. FFXI had each race and gender hold their weapons and do weapon skills in varying stances and with tweaks to the base animations to give them variety and in my opinion more life.

[Saraide]

You're eating food and drinking a potion in combat, of course it will take time to do. It shouldn't be instant.

It taking time is fine, it being so ping dependant is not. Animation lock in this game is very strange where it's both client side and then again server side, leading to situations where you cant play MCH on on anything but low ping without heavily clipping and drifting. Yet that's something SE refuses to even acknowledge. Of course less of a problem in a country like japan with mostly great internet connection infrastructure but the world is larger than that of course.

[Katt_Felista]

You're eating food and drinking a potion in combat, of course it will take time to do. It shouldn't be instant.

The problem is it's not tied only to eating or poting while fighting, as i said earlier, it's a whole animation codes and techniques problem that permiates even into skills, ogcd's, that are using overlaps / layers of priorities over other animations that are ment to be more flexible / can be "interpolated" into each others, there are types of animations of ogcd's that prevent to use a GCD right after for more then half a second, some of these are tied to how the animation system takes "host" of the whole character's anims from head to toe, locking this character in it's animation until completion before you are even allowed to activate the next skill. But root motion animations mix - matches between gcd's and ogcd's are also a big problem if you don't allow both of them to smoothly interpolate into each other to prevent this "lock" / hard "stop" before you can activate your gcd.

From the shader updates and slight reach for stylized subtle semi graphical realism, how some of the characters still behave in combat, it feels like they allways wanted some of the 1.0 animation / "fantasy" simulation kinda into the game, so adding back root motion systems for lower body/ legs and heels/feet with weight adaptation to swings would make it that step closer to homogeneity with graphic fidelity they are aiming/ going for.

Even tho players are probably not asking for an "overhaul" of the whole system, even tho there are areas that are lacking, and combat could be transformed into something much more dynamic / nervous, especially in ARR , the combat system is a bit of a bore, or something seen and seen and seen again and again and you are still waiting for a bunch of ogcd's to pop to be fillers of your boredom in combat, especially in ARR. But at least make it look like character movement has a bit more sense , and nice weight when characters move around using their heavy hitting skills. Add impact, add the gravitas / severity of it, without impeding at all on the character's movement speed.

[ReynTime]

Same here, I love how smooth and fluid character animations were in 1.0

However this cant be replicated anymore because back then, the combat was slow enough to allow those animations flow with the tempo of battle but in current game you have to take into account at the more snappier and quicker pace of battle flow that having smoother animations or in this case more frames would make the visual flow extremely jarring. Its a technique I see in fighting games where character models dont fully animate every single motion because they need to follow with the player's button presses and thus resort to instead make each character's "key poses" stand out to still sell the animation of an attack while not worrying about animation locks, which is probably the reason why this game is like that now.

Granted we could use more motion capturing in cutscenes or at least in very important scenes. THATS what I missed the most from 1.0, not the gameplay animations but the smoother cutscene animations between characters and the superior camera work.

I was waiting for someone to bring this again. I blame certain youtube videos made by people who didn't even play during 1.X themselves.

This is only true to action animations, the extra detail to the walk/run/stop animations did not prevent delay or lock you in place when it came to just running around. The combat slowed you down with weapons sheathed, but that was already not going to be a thing in ARR's new combat system. The only thing that stopped them from keeping the visual momentum in how characters move was the arbitrary design decision they took. And it's not like they don't have access to the animations already implemented. They're still used all the time in cutscenes.

[LystAP]

You're eating food and drinking a potion in combat, of course it will take time to do. It shouldn't be instant.

They should make it instant in combat, but with a % chance for your character to start choking and incapacitate themselves.

Joking aside, I'm sure it's fine as it is. No need to overoptimize.