Thread: 1.0 vs ARR Areas - A Visual Comparison

I know this is an unpopular opinion but I miss 1.0's shroud. When you think of a thick forest away from the cities, you think of plenty of trees and an ease of getting lost. 1.0 shroud did this very well, with its winding trails and such it was easy to lose your way even with a map up.

Originally Posted by Canadane

I know this is an unpopular opinion but I miss 1.0's shroud. When you think of a thick forest away from the cities, you think of plenty of trees and an ease of getting lost. 1.0 shroud did this very well, with its winding trails and such it was easy to lose your way even with a map up.

It was fittingly dangerous and spooky, especially with its original music "Emerald Labyrinth".

I just went through some of my recordings and put together a short video from the old Black Shroud in case anyone wants to see what it was like to run through:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW0MJ1rHHoE

I loved the animation and weight our characters had in their movements -- you can see it when we come to pause a during our running.

At the end of the video, we probably had several dozen people together to take down a treant -- of course you couldn't see everyone, but I think there were many more people there. lol
This was back when Mog weapons were some of the strongest in the game, when Wrist Flick was a thing for stunning enemies, and the Level 99 treants could just one-shot anyone with 9999 damage.

Originally Posted by Mikita

It was fittingly dangerous and spooky, especially with its original music "Emerald Labyrinth".

I just went through some of my recordings and put together a short video from the old Black Shroud in case anyone wants to see what it was like to run through:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW0MJ1rHHoE

I loved the animation and weight our characters had in their movements -- you can see it when we come to pause a during our running.

At the end of the video, we probably had several dozen people together to take down a treant -- of course you couldn't see everyone, but I think there were many more people there. lol
This was back when Mog weapons were some of the strongest in the game, when Wrist Flick was a thing for stunning enemies, and the Level 99 treants could just one-shot anyone with 9999 damage.

You didn't pet the Lalas
Really cool vid though!

Originally Posted by Lihtleita

while they are good looking keep in mind a slow starting run or stop animation like in 1.0 would cause a lot of grief while dodging aoes.
they had a similar problem in tomb raider angel of darkness. gorgeous, lovingly animated movements.....that you got sick of waiting to play out and would kill you sometimes.

the little lean into turns would be nice to have back though

Technically speaking that's what animation canceling and blending are for. I'm not saying it HAS to be smooth when using such techniques, often in action combat games it's purposefully not to ensure a stronger sense of weight and commitment (with very choice animation canceling actions), just that you can have reaaaallly good movement animations and not feel like you're a freight train. One suggestion I had way back when was to use those two above techniques with also a minor amount of elasticity to your point of detection (SE uses a literal pixel for our "in the bad, not in the bad")- so when you're changing movement your pixel would be slightly elastic to the direction you're facing (if you're trying to u turn out of red for example your character is blending beautifully and your pixel would be 'leaning' with the direction you're intending to go rather than directly under the center of your character).

In combination I strongly feel it would be possible to have high quality, grounded, slightly weighted, movement animations while also not making your character impractical to use. Another solution, but quite substantially changes gameplay and so probably for another game would be to use something like many other games with strong animations use.. a dodge roll. To see dodge roll in an mmo space you could look GW2 and how that adjusts combat, some interesting changes in that you can dodge 'through' a marker. Wouldn't suggest that now, but could be a future game option.

The main issue in that being a quality blending and canceling on thousands of players at once would (or at least could) be impractical, so you yourself would likely look like buttery rich goodness but everyone else would need to be like as we are now (or less players displayed on screen).