Animation Lock: Why don't you like it?

[VoltaAsura]

Ifrit and his cracks for example.
If ur stuck in animation-lock, you dont get out of the cracks before they erupt. Thats one of the problems we had with it.

I had this issue before I got an SSD. Once I upgraded, load times increased by quite a bit and it was no longer an issue for me.

[VoltaAsura]

I agree that the game is too flashy and the effects are too big, I would also like to add that even giant powerful looking mobs shake and twitch from regular attacks as if they're weightless balloon animals.

That was in alpha, it has been mentioned on the forum and a dev commented that they are looking into changing it for beta....
also the flashy graphics thingy has its own thread...

just sayin

[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!

[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.

[Kikosho]

I never had a problem with Animation Lock since it was a gameplay mechanic, no arguing around that. The problem with it reared it's head when SE decided to change boss encounters. There were no complaints over the locks, least not widespread with the original 5 NMs we had, since those mobs followed the tank and spank route of XI. It was only during Ifrit that this came about and alot of the hatred for animation locks came from actually having to adjust your skill use to counter what the boss was doing as opposed to just spamming away as was the norm prior. Using a skill meant that you were locked not only for the duration of the skill but also were in a different spot server wise which lead to multiple deaths. The unbearable at times lag of 1.0 just exasperated this issue.

Like someone mentioned earlier, Tera has animation locks but it isn't an issue for 3 main reasons. Not everything has animation locks so you could buff on the go or bind on the go for example so it has smart uses of when to lock and when not to lock. Animation length is also not extremely long and while there are a few long animations, those animations could be shorten by using another skill prior to it. Animations themselves can also be canceled by dodging or blocking out of it. You still have to commit when you use a skill but the due to low root times and being able to dodge out of it (there is still a CD on dodge so you had to be mindful), it became a non-issue for PvE and PvP.

All in all, I have no problems with animation locks (I do play lots of Street Fighter >.> ) as long as it's done smartly and within the context of the game.

[Miliant]

Characters shouldn't be locked during battle at any time, and especially in a game that aims at having any kind of real pvp. Anyone that has pvp'd past ballista in any MMO knows that being locked in place equals a swift death.

[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.

[Shougun]

Animation blending > animation lock.

Animation lock = stupid.

ON ALL POINTS.

Playing a game with a forced lag.. lol -_-;

[Kikosho]

It's not forced lag, it's you committing to a skill and getting punished for it if you choose incorrectly. The problem with it in 1.0 was that you essentially locked yourself in position for a long time due to animation length + combo length. All they needed to do was add something that allows you to cancel the current animation should you need to, but on a cooldown, so you can choose whether to continue your skill for damage or move out for survival.

[Yrusama]

you know what's good way to prevent spamming too? TP. if you could spam skills, you'd run out of TP within a few seconds, then you couldn't spam anymore. problem solved.
GCD is probably just there so PS3 users who need to navigate skill bars, can stand a chance in PvP for example, or don't fall behind to much in DPS department in raids etc.
Animation lock doesn't prevent skill spamming at all.

You almost managed to make the cooldowns into a good thing. Almost.