Ability effects remove vision of weapons

George_Black

I have noticed how the whip or the lance abilities cause the actual weapons a character is holding to dissapear from both hands.
What is your view on how those certain abilities look?

Personaly I find it weird looking for non mage classes.
I plan to play a fighter/fighterish class, holding two swords.
If my fighter/fighterish and dual wield abilities cause my weapons to dissapear during casting time that will look very ugly.

In Stevens recent video you see the shield and sword dissapear when the character casts whip.
Would it be possible to
a) have the left hand holding the shield and sword while the right uses the magic whip?
b) shield on left hand, sword hilt on right, whip coming out of blade
?

I will mention some instances from a game I critisize very much, just to highliggt that it is possible to keep weapons visible during ability animations.

In dual wield eso there is a throwing dagger ability. Each time you throw a dagger, the character holds on the left hand both swords.

Another ability uses a crossbow that appears out of nowhere, however the left hand weapon is still visible during the crossbow shooting animation.

On the contrary, you have a cool looking dragon knight with a nicely designed intimidating shield and sword. As soon as you cast flame whip the weapons dissapear. It looks bad.

How would you feel if your warrior and warrior weapon abilities caused weapons to dissapear from your hands during ability animation?

DrEpoch

I never thought of this, but after seeing it. Wow. Yeah it looks awful.

Plateau

.

Wong

leonerdo wrote: »

Yeah it's pretty janky-looking. It's a tough problem, and the easy solutions kinda suck, like making the character put their weapon away first (long, mostly-wasted animation), or just never giving duel-wielders skills that require another hand...

Making the spell effects/animation USE the weapon rather than replace/overlap it is probably the only way to make it look and feel good. Like a lot of things though, I think that falls into the category of "polish", which means we may not see it fixed for a while (or ever).

Completely agree. We are currently barely in Alpha, so animations, skills, skill effects and everything else will not be polished. I'd say, reserve judgement on things like that for later stages of the development.

Wandering Mist

This is a question I am asking for the next Q&A. It's possible they are just doing that for testing purposes, and will be changed later on down the line. Right now weapon-swapping seems tied to the abilities themselves, which seems rather odd to me.

Wong

Well, there is a disclaimer from Steven that we might see things in the Alpha that are there just for testing purposes. I don't think that's one of them and it will get polished out in time.

Jahlon

Keep in mind these are really the first pass animations. The rest of the detail work you are talking bout will come in after they are sure they are happy with the animations overall.

Onald

I also find this breaking the immersion, especially when wearing a shield. In the Q&A they said that there are skills that keep your weapon such as some of the tank abilities.
It seems to be the most problematic for casters and that there is no way to predict what weapon(s) they are wielding. I've watched a part of the @Jahlon recap of the stream and the amount of animations needed are insane. I agree that if so many animations are needed, resources are better spent on other parts of the game.

However, I don't understand why they need to make a new animation for each weapon type. I have no experience in game-development so maybe someone could explain it to me.

For me it seems you could animate most caster ability (EDIT: Except maybe the hand-held things like the lance and whip) as if they were wielding a long stick (or staff) as well as a shield to prevent weapons/shield moving trough the rest of the character. Then use this animation for all other weapons, including 2h weapons which the character would hold like a "staff" while casting. Seems you could just copy paste a lot, but not sure if there are other technical difficulties, like that they need to animate the weapon movement again for each weapon type?

Wong

To add to that. Steven addressed that same issue in the last gamplay 'stream'/video which is on youtube that the effects will be toned down down the line bacause they are a bit excessive at the moment. It will get fixed, so chill out and enjoy the ride. :-)