Should PCs instantly unsheath their weapons and instantly don their shields or should having weapons readied mean something? In virtually every MMO we see instantly warping weapons to make attacks immediately. It never made much sense to me. There is almost always a nice animation for drawing and stowing weapons but it is skipped over 99% of the time. Attackers in PVP can sheathe their weapons and look friendly, even though they are planning to instantly strike. Players have out of combat run speed even with weapons drawn.
When summoning a horse from your horse pocket should it instantly appear underneath ready for a properly timed sprint or should it be more like the witcher where you need to mount the horse?
Don't get me wrong, I am not asking for some sort of VR system where you have to pick up every single item for realism and move it into a sack. I just think there is something lost for skipping some animations.
A lot of what happens in game, especially animations, is just an analog of what would really be happening. There's always a balancing act between immersive or meaningful on one side and superfluous or wasteful on the other.
In a lot of games, when you fight, you can no longer run/sprint. This makes sense from a mechanics point-of-view as well as an immersive/animation point-of-view, which is why it gets coded.
In a lot of games, it takes a second or two to mount a horse. Again, this is useful from a mechanics point-of-view, giving a moment of interuptable vulnerability before you make your escape, so it's gets coded.
In some games, drawing weapons *is* animated and has a 'meaning'. My general recollection is, though, that I found it an unneeded annoyance more than a meaningfully useful action. So many times I've been attacked simply because I forgot to sheath weapons, or ruined an NPC interation because I pressed the wrong button and whipped out weapons during a conversation.
Jobeson said:Should PCs instantly unsheath their weapons and instantly don their shields or should having weapons readied mean something? In virtually every MMO we see instantly warping weapons to make attacks immediately. It never made much sense to me. There is almost always a nice animation for drawing and stowing weapons but it is skipped over 99% of the time. Attackers in PVP can sheathe their weapons and look friendly, even though they are planning to instantly strike. Players have out of combat run speed even with weapons drawn.
When summoning a horse from your horse pocket should it instantly appear underneath ready for a properly timed sprint or should it be more like the witcher where you need to mount the horse?
Don't get me wrong, I am not asking for some sort of VR system where you have to pick up every single item for realism and move it into a sack. I just think there is something lost for skipping some animations.
I like what VR has done with "animation hurrying". I think it is a good middle ground to the complaints about animation cancelling while still keeping what is good. Games with no nod to action priority feel really clunky with burdened action. That is because part of the pleasure of tactically working your way through a fight are those quick split second decisions. Take ESO for instance, the entire root of their animation cancelling system was because the original design team never wanted a player to be in a light attack, choose to use a skill, and then have to wait til the light attack finished to use the skill. So skills had higher priority over light atks. Every action in this game followed this logic train to find its priority listing. If a situation arised where you could bash to interrupt another player, they didn't want any action to prevent a player from deciding to engage in their interrupt system. The resulting emergent combat system felt so good to play because the character responded to your desires as they appeared. Of course, effecient players would make sure to account for 1 light atk for every skill GCD. Of course they would weave in bash dmg when it was affordable or appropriate. Of course they would try to time their dodges to come at the end of a skill weave block. This is the nature of anything, progression is a slow march to perfection. Eventually the difference between the best dps in the game and just entry level raiding dps was the number of successful light attacks. BUT that is not an animation cancelling issue. That is a BALANCE issue.
Some animation cancelling issues with actual teeth are things like hiding what is actually happening in combat by quickly cancelling the animations so the opponents can't see which moves are being used. Or the ridiculous choppy movements character make when you forcefully stop short all of their over animated katas.
So to me the animation hurrying system in conjuction with an action queueing feature solves the serious issues while keeping the action feel of a character that listens to you. I think you hit the nail on the head. The real problem comes from things blinking in and out of existance.
Now it is possible to go the exact opposite way and make every action unskippable and filled with gravitas. I personally, do not like it for a few reasons. For one, I don't like characters that are weaker than I am in real life. If it takes my character 2 seconds to draw my sword then for 1.9 seconds I am screaming with rage inside my head. If I swing a weapon and then just stand there for a full second after like a muppet with no hand then I have a real hard time engaging with the "action" of the game. For two, if every action leads to a animation lock out then action can be punished. This leads to a pvp setting where inaction is the norm or people just trade low risk quick actions. I would rather people be free to try things and then have combat branch in a natural reactionary way. I don't mind an appropriate action animation tacked onto everything but please try to at least set the timeframe to accomplish actions with at least a base level of atheleticism and preferably an olympic level of atheleticism.
IMO:
Given latency is used abusively and/or punitively by most MMOs, I would prefer animations don't block the character's actions or my response time as a player.
Nothing worse than trying to move or reposition, but you can't because the client absolutely MUST complete an animation before giving you movement control.
Especially annoying with things like annoyingly-long forced duration interactive animations when unintentially interacting with the environment because of a bad UI or highlighting system.
Beyond that? Do what you wish, aesthetically, graphics are my last concern, including animations. :)
I think weapon sheathing should have an impact over the first seconds of fight, but also make travelling a bit slower : You shouldn't be able to run full speed with weapons drawed and you shouldn't be able to attack instantly with weapons sheathed.
On the same scope, I'm totally against having actions answering immediately because your character shouldn't be able to bypass what he is currently doing just because you press a key. Either abilities should be put in queue or unavaliable untill the character is done doing his current action (special attacks/spells I mean).
While it's convenient to allow crucial abilities to be bypassing everything, it was mensionned above that it creates emergent play which could be good but in this regards it breaks the design of "crucial abilities" and holding things for the right moment. Animation cuts and bypasses are making the game more forgiving and break the logic of a character beeing plunging his sword then instanly bashing and striking vertically as the bash cut every animation play out of the equation.
If you have to interrupt and skip your better be observing and holding enough ressources and some animation windows to do so or you will fail.
vjek said:Given latency is used abusively and/or punitively by most MMOs, I would prefer animations don't block the character's actions or my response time as a player.
Nothing worse than trying to move or reposition, but you can't because the client absolutely MUST complete an animation before giving you movement control.
I fully agree for the akward movement locking animations. Very annoying to force some sort of kill animation and be locked out of reacting as needed. I would hope they know to avoid the movement locking animations like this. Equipping and unequipping weapons though is a thematic choice everyone simply ignores. If you see a player pulling out their weapon you know battle is likely coming. If you are running around in a town where players are just charging around with their weapons out it is out of place. There are no reasons to ever holster or draw your weapons in most MMOs.
MauvaisOeil said:I think weapon sheathing should have an impact over the first seconds of fight, but also make travelling a bit slower : You shouldn't be able to run full speed with weapons drawed and you shouldn't be able to attack instantly with weapons sheathed.
This is exactly what I was going for. In combat running while sheathing the weapon if you have a long way travel wouldn't even be a big hit, doing it for 1-2 seconds would be laughable but something you would see people do it to save a quarter second. You would have people running around with weapons out all cautious and slow potentially in some areas, never trusting anyone, but that in itself is a good thing in my eyes. That fear and sacrifice for safety is a good thing.
I don't think that there should be a delay when a character draws their weapon. I do think that there needs to be an active choice when engaging in combat, though. If something comes up and hits you, you shouldn't automatically draw your weapons. The player needs to choose to be in combat. This choice can be made by enabling their auto-attack or using a damaging ability.
I also think there needs to be some benefit to having your weapons drawn. If something comes up and hits you, and you don't have your weapons drawn, then you shouldn't be able to block or parry attacks.
Isao Machii drew and cut a BB pellet out of the air. The pellet had been fired at him from 70 feet away and was travelling at 200 miles per hour when Machii drew his sword and cut the BB out of the air. It took a slow motion camera to catch the action on film because it happened so fast. This is just a real life modern sword master. This is not even a fantasy sword master in a land of heroes and magic.
Running while holding something creates assymetry which leads to ineffeciency in running. But it is arguable that it isn't a drastic of enough difference to need a mechanical system to represent it in game. Real fighters can only fight for about 3 minutes before needing a break to catch their breath. We aren't reaching for that realism in game.
It is just wierd to me that when calling for realism it always seems that the things people actually can do in real life are the things that get omitted. We are left driving embarrassingly slow uncoordinated warriors who simultaneously can hold their breath for 12 minutes and have four times the cardiovascular endurance of a Kalenjin marathon runner.
Gottbeard said:Isao Machii drew and cut a BB pellet out of the air. The pellet had been fired at him from 70 feet away and was travelling at 200 miles per hour when Machii drew his sword and cut the BB out of the air. It took a slow motion camera to catch the action on film because it happened so fast. This is just a real life modern sword master. This is not even a fantasy sword master in a land of heroes and magic.
A guy primed to do a specific attack in the perfect stance, with his hand on the sheath and another hand ready to draw the weapon is someone readied to attack...
If you want to position your cloak out of the way and face eachother like some quick draw western scowling with your hand nearly touching your weapons then I would agree people are not really slower than readying a weapon. If that is how PCs should move around the world I would be not really complain about the animation skipping, but it clearly is not the case.
I would say Witcher 3 did it best. Draw your sword quicker than humanly possible, but you still need to actually do it. Mount and unmount your steed, don't simply warp onto it. Swapping to range weapon? That will cost you the initial animations to swap weapons.