Animation Lock: Why don't you like it?

[Zantetsuken]

Animation lock is animation lock. Latency made it worse but it would have been a problem without it.

It was the timing critical and position critical Boss battles that made it a problem though. Did anyone complain about animation lock while xp grinding?

To draw a parallel:

Nobody ever complained that Link in 'The Legend of Zelda' (NES) couldn't jump because the game never required him to.

Conversely:

People were extremely frustrated over the unforgiving jumping mechanic in 'Castlevania I' (NES) because the level designs in that game required absolute precision jumping.

As sort of suggested by the above poster, another option is if you move before all the hits land, you interrupt the attack and don't get the full damage. There are plenty of ways to handle the problem situation you described, and many games have used them. WoW has many spells and abilities that require you to be still, and moving will cancel them, giving you less than the full effect. This creates vaulable tactical oppertunities while also keeping actions while "locked" realistic.

Movement locking that is not directly caused by the animation and is instead set by the designers can be okay, as long as you are only locked when movement is an impossibility in a realistic sense.

Ideally, I'd prefer that Chaos Thrust (it really is the best example) change from a total animation lock length of ~4 sec to 2.5 sec

Allow a total cancellation of the move up to the point where the first hit connects (using jump button), and allow movement immediately upon the 3rd and final hit.

Any time between those two points, you are committed to that move and that spot on the ground.

(I think we actually agree on the basic idea here. We might just have different ideas of where to set the margins)

The worst animation lock situation is when the animation isn't *your* animation. In FFXI, cures and buffs can lock the target in place *if* they aren't already playing another animation. That is not realistic and should not exist, because if it was realistic that the glowy auraness of the cure spell required the recipient to stand still once it takes effect, it wouldn't ignore that stipulation just because the target happened to already be moving. In some tense situations, this lock can get you killed depending on whether or not you get locked by the cure. Animation lock created a lot of other stupid situations in XI as well- like when you get up from a raise and you're playing that "rise to your feet" animation, if someone cures or buffs you, the animation starts over, and you remain locked in place even longer than if nothing was cast on you. Not only was that likely to get you killed again in many situations, but it also looked terrible visually. If you died again right after accepting a raise, you wouldn't play the death animation until your character finished playing the raise animation. In real life, life and death wait for nothing, so how is that realistic?

I can't argue with what were obviously animation bug/limitation issues in FFXI. Raises caused all sorts of havoc with animation priority in that game and some of the weird stuff that happened was almost comical.