Thread: 1.0 vs ARR Areas - A Visual Comparison

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).