Animation Lock: Why don't you like it?

[indira]

ifrit is more of the server sucking theres times your already hit but its happens a few second later.

[AmyNeudaiz]

The general distaste of animation lock comes from how terribly it was done in 1.x in my opinion. It was a good system but it was done in a very flawed way. The animations lasted too long and the lag was too much to account for. What they needed to do was fix it, not remove it and they have everything they need to fix it and I'll tell you why in four major points.

*lt;dr version in bold*

I'll go ahead and knock this one out first because people have a tendency to over look it or brush it aside as a non-issue. Immersion is very important to a lot of people. If you want the game to succeed truly as a Final Fantasy, people need to be immersed and by having a characters break the laws of physics and throw anatomy out the window, I'm sorry but you've lost any character believability and a lot of immersion. Some will argue that it's a fantasy game but even in fantasy you need to be able to believe the character. In a world where magic exists, I can believe magic can happen but if you say that my characters spine can move like it's made of rubber then I'm going to lose that believability.

It restricts the creation of visually pleasing animations. Instead of asking "Will this look good?" they will ask first "Can we make it work while running?" and because of that you lose a great aesthetic to the game. In this day and age, or heck for a long time now it's not been all about gameplay. It's also about aesthetics and good aesthetics lead to a visually pleasing game which will attract more people. I am NOT saying that they are mutually exclusive but they can co-exist and they need to find a better balance and this is part of that balance.

No animation lock is down right irritating! If you leave the maximum effect range of a skill before it 100% completes, your skill cancels. Even if your character performed the actual hit, it cancels. How is that better than being stuck for 1-3 seconds? If you've ever been a Whm healing DPS who move around a lot, you can sympathize with this irritation and I am willing to bet you will agree that you don't want this infiltrating other areas of combat.

Let's face it, it was a tactical gameplay mechanic that made you think before you acted and made most boss fights actually engaging and done right that is a positive to the game. No animation lock removes that gameplay mechanic and that makes the game much more of a mindless spam fest. Instead of thinking before you act, you just simply act. A lot of the negative buzz around Alpha was that it was mindless and boring, why do you want it to be more boring?

I'd love to know if anyone has any counter points or anything to add to these points, this has always been one of my biggest worries about ARR that I feel they aren't handling properly.

[Ricky]

it's a form of self crowd control
sure you have control over when it happens but even the best players mess up as a result of it

[Punainen]

The general distaste of animation lock comes from how terribly it was done in 1.x in my opinion. It was a good system but it was done in a very flawed way. The animations lasted too long and the lag was too much to account for. What they needed to do was fix it, not remove it and they have everything they need to fix it and I'll tell you why in four major points.

*lt;dr version in bold*

I'll go ahead and knock this one out first because people have a tendency to over look it or brush it aside as a non-issue. Immersion is very important to a lot of people. If you want the game to succeed truly as a Final Fantasy, people need to be immersed and by having a characters break the laws of physics and throw anatomy out the window, I'm sorry but you've lost any character believability and a lot of immersion. Some will argue that it's a fantasy game but even in fantasy you need to be able to believe the character. In a world where magic exists, I can believe magic can happen but if you say that my characters spine can move like it's made of rubber then I'm going to lose that believability.

It restricts the creation of visually pleasing animations. Instead of asking "Will this look good?" they will ask first "Can we make it work while running?" and because of that you lose a great aesthetic to the game. In this day and age, or heck for a long time now it's not been all about gameplay. It's also about aesthetics and good aesthetics lead to a visually pleasing game which will attract more people. I am NOT saying that they are mutually exclusive but they can co-exist and they need to find a better balance and this is part of that balance.

No animation lock is down right irritating! If you leave the maximum effect range of a skill before it 100% completes, your skill cancels. Even if your character performed the actual hit, it cancels. How is that better than being stuck for 1-3 seconds? If you've ever been a Whm healing DPS who move around a lot, you can sympathize with this irritation and I am willing to bet you will agree that you don't want this infiltrating other areas of combat.

Let's face it, it was a tactical gameplay mechanic that made you think before you acted and made most boss fights actually engaging and done right that is a positive to the game. No animation lock removes that gameplay mechanic and that makes the game much more of a mindless spam fest. Instead of thinking before you act, you just simply act. A lot of the negative buzz around Alpha was that it was mindless and boring, why do you want it to be more boring?

I'd love to know if anyone has any counter points or anything to add to these points, this has always been one of my biggest worries about ARR that I feel they aren't handling properly.

Solution: Make the animation END when you move (you're supposed to stop casting when you move, so why the hell not make the animation stop?)

Also, no animation lock never made me stop and think instead of during Ifrit, at which point worrying about getting trapped in animation lock and hit by cracks only served to get people needlessly killed.

[Momita]

[Digirotta]

Seeing how we were handed a lot of content, where we had to be constantly on the move (instance speedruns, dodging Ifrit's cracks, "dance around" the target in order to pull off combos etc.), the animation lock started to get more and more in the way of our performance. When the unresponsive gameplay and sloppy controls start to get into the way of player's performance, the funfactor takes a deep, deep dive.

Not to mention, considering the future of PvP content, anilock in every skill is simply beyond comprehension. Considering a cat-and-mice-situation between two players, simply either one using a SINGLE skill - heck, ANY SKILL - would have most likely resulted to either getting mauled, or retreating succesfully.

[KaiTBF]

You don't need to *slide* around. In another game they animated upper/lower body separately. so you could run around, and upper body would rotate, and attack; lower body would run. If you stand still and attack it's the normal animation.

This would be far worse in my opinion, footwork is one of the most important parts of the martial arts and I would cringe every time I saw someone use a skill while running if they did that. Then you have to consider how they would make a skill like dragon kick work where you're in the air for a good portion of the skill. You'd either have to lock them down, make them do the slidey floaty thing, or not make animations where your feet leave the ground. I'd much rather have the animation lock, or even the slide if it meant I got to have badass skills like dragon kick.

Not to mention, considering the future of PvP content, anilock in every skill is simply beyond comprehension. Considering a cat-and-mice-situation between two players, simply either one using a SINGLE skill - heck, ANY SKILL - would have most likely resulted to either getting mauled, or retreating succesfully.

I think too many people here just have bad memories of animation lock in Ifrit, as a gameplay mechanic (and it is a gameplay mechanic, don't even try to argue that crap) animation lock can work very well. Especially in pvp. The issue with it in pvp for ffxiv woud be that it's not an action/fighting game so we couldn't rely on a hitstun effect to keep them in place while we used a skill. Even still though, animation lock could be added and worked around in pvp if they gave classes the right skills, in pvp the focus would be on locking down the enemy with a short hard cc effect at the right time then bursting and retreating before they could make any significant counter attack. Pvp would be about timing cc and winning trades. It's not that animation lock can't work in pvp or games where mobility is important (It's worked in countless games before, and in games where mobility was far more important and mistimed skills were punished much harder) they just chose to go a different route.

I don't hate the lack of animation lock, but skills made from this point onwards are likely to look rather lackluster.

[Enma]

I am curious to hear why it is seen as inferior to global cool downs, in terms of immersion/battle/etc.

It has nothing to do with "immersion". Animation Lock could give more reality in a static game, where people don't have to move aroung a mob, or through the batteflield. But as FFXIV 1.0 was and FFXIV: ARR will be, it's not good, because in many fights you can't stand in the same spot for all its duration. With this new concept of fight the Animation Lock looks amiss, something close to FFXI style.

[VoltaAsura]

It has nothing to do with "immersion". Animation Lock could give more reality in a static game, where people don't have to move aroung a mob, or through the batteflield. But as FFXIV 1.0 was and FFXIV: ARR will be, it's not good, because in many fights you can't stand in the same spot for all its duration. With this new concept of fight the Animation Lock looks amiss, something close to FFXI style.

Not sure about you, but if people in this game can just run by and spam spells and weaponskills without having to stop moving im going to lose my fucking mind. This is a Final Fantasy game, this isn't Quake or some FPS. Please give me real believable animations, this is 2013! I don't want some cheap fucking game!

[Cedri]

Animation lock shut down a lot of people from doing what they needed to do. This effect was able to nullify a person's usefulness due to game mechanics in certain cases. In the end, it was just the way the engine worked and we had to deal with it. Now that we don't I think most of the player base will be relieved that you can direct your character where you want at all times.