The richer and more well rounded the entire game world is the more inclusive and immersive the final product will be. As such non combat animations are also very important to a high quality game and time spent on emote animations can be nearly as important as clean combat animations.
Thankfully new animations are one of the easiest things to add post launch. As animations do not have anything to do with the actual game system once they are completed they can just be wired in. For launch I could see sticking to one basic set of combat animations for all races that looks very polished and a handful of the expected emote animations that are frankly short and simple to create.
Its much better to have a new players first response be “World looks great and the game play is smooth, too bad the animations are a big generic.” vs “I can't get over how my character holds his kukri backwards and cuts through his own head every time he tries to swing it.”
I'm sorry, but I can in no way agree with that emotes are of equal value to combat animation. The smoothness of gameplay and impact of abilities has a lot to do with the animation attached to them. And we can wish the they don't come at expense of the other, but the fact is that time spent on one reduces time spent on the other, I HIGHLY doubt that VR has a emote animation team only dedicated to that. I'm not saying to not have emotes, but I'd rather have higher quality and quantity of combat animations than another emote. It is a game about being murder hobos, just like D&D, and a lot of time is spent doing combat, having good combat animations and system in general is very important.
On the topic of adding animations post launch, I would say this is much easier to do for emotes, having played your character for months, getting used to the feel and then having an animation suddenly change can be jarring. Emotes are are a better candidate as adding a new one does not change any existing ones.
So if one have to come at the expense of the other, it should be emotes that get the short stick imol.
Oops, I deleted my long reply... basically I was just going to say that while I know next to nothing about game animation I have been watching the evolution of the cycles and body mechanics in the pre-alpha streams and I am confident that the animators are not going to neglect any part of the game. While I understand that time is finite and combat is a main focus (as it should be), I like the social animations I've seen so far and I don't believe they would release a modern mmo wthout a solid emote system. The importance of combat might mean they take more passes doing that, but I'm sure they are working crazy hard on all aspects of the animations. Sure emotes and so on can be expanded upon through post launch patches (as other mmos have done), but I see them taking what time they need before release to flesh everything out.
I don't know, I'm just really excited by the glimpses we've gotten so far. I'm still reading past dev posts and all the old newsletters. I just have so much faith in the team right now that this is going to be something really special.
Mayceus said:Now, I am not saying that we need every single race to have different animations for all of their skills, however too see every race and both genders able to at least hold their weapons and auto attack differently may seem like a little thing, and yet it feels quite big to me at least not only from a lore stance, but as a detail stance.
So long as it's a purely aesthetic difference, I approve. I love race-unique animations.
