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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
I think this is something that falls into "polish" and doesn't need to be perfect in a1.
That said, I would like to see that characters can turn their heads in the same direction that players turn the camera. It's a pretty big part of body language - where the head is pointing vs where the chest is pointing.
I mean, you can't honestly expect them to be finished yet. As I have said, they NEED the animation artists to be on staff for the last push before release, which means they NEED to have work for them for the next 2 - 3 years until that crunch, which means the animations as we see them today still have 2 - 3 years worth of work to be done on them.
So again, honestly, what do you expect Intrepid to say that many of us here haven't already said?
I never expected things to be finished...
But if these animations are the style they are going for, the animations are goofy and over the top which is a bad direction in my eyes.
What I want them to clarify is the style of animation they are going for. Is this over the top and cartoonish animation the style they want or are they just experimenting with different styles to see what fits best?
I think that's what most people have issues with, not that it's not "polished" or "unfinished" because no sane person expects it to be.
My personal feeling remains that I would like to know what their basic philosophy is about animation.
However, in the end it's only a desire, so a more constructive approach would be to provide more detailed feedback in the Alpha 2 stage.
That's what I mean.
I hope that when alpha 2 is released, there will be some sort of format implemented to collect feedback for each game system and for the animations.
For some reason some people like you get offended on the behalf of intrepid, on a topic that does not even exist.
None says that this is a finished product. None doubts that the animation will improve through the years.
I dont get it where you read this between the lines.
Steven stressed that constructive criticism is valued and that´s reason why they decided to go for an open development process. So let´s engage with that opportunity.
Secondly it is not common for game companies to build up art assets with the intent to dump them entirely.
It doesn´t matter how often Steven says combat is an iterative process, the current itteration is a result of them having not a producer for a long time and completely neglecting the combat design process for 4 years.
The animations we currently see are not an iteration, they are gonna be dumped. They serve no base to build from.
The reason why i think that´s the case, is because they are mostly static animations.
Intrepid has yet not used any modern system on how to approach combat animations.
No splited body with independent uppper body casting, no dynamic range adjustments , no momentum, no coherent direction,hardly any hit feedback.
I mean that´s completely okay.
But then criticism is appropriate, as we don´t now their future direction on those things.
Tht Criticism towards horrendous quick time event they had in the pax arena test also worked.
So you are essentially saying the community should not have voiced their oppinion on that abomination of combat system.
Also im positive that the direction is gonna shift when they fill their senior combat designer position that they currently listed.
You're right, but you are forgetting that it is fairly usual for developers to use stock animations early on in development in order to make sure systems and other assets are working as intended.
To your more broad point in this post, I am not "offended on behalf of Intrepid". Rather, when I see people pointing out that the animations are not up to par yet, I am simply adding to the conversation the actual reasons as to why that is the case at this point in development - so that people actually understand that this is normal. While some of the people that post here may already understand this (many, many posters here do not), one needs to remember that you do not need an account to read these forums.
It is the people coming along that only read the forums that are the reason I will always point out the blatantly obvious on topics like this, and it is the people that complain about that blatantly obvious fact being pointed out that are unreasonably offended.
To your last paragraph, the senior combat designer works with animators, they don't make the animations. The technical animator position they are looking to fill is the one that has the actual impact on animations.
I don’t like this line of reasoning, and I don’t think it’s okay. Diminishing someone’s feedback by telling them they don’t have to play the game isn’t helpful. They want to play the game and for it to be a success, hence the feedback. I don’t mind disagreements, but the sentiment of your comment just poisons the well. Not good for the community.
Everything else I’ve seen from an art standpoint has been fantastic, so I’m not terribly concerned about the first/second pass at animations. That said, I’m not a game dev/animations artist so I really don’t know how difficult it is to clean up animations at a later date. If I were running the business, I would ask my team to get placeholder animations done and then have focused iterative improvement from there.
As far as I know the animation department at Intrepid is a one-man army right now, so I’m not surprised to see work that feels clunkier/less polished.
I would love to see animations that are more fluid and immersive. I don’t like long animation locks/forced immobility during casts. Hopefully we’ll be able to cancel those somehow. I can easily see this game being one I go to in order to escape the worries of real life for a short time, so the more immersive, the better.
I’m extremely excited for this game and have full faith in Steven’s leadership and Intrepid’s ability to deliver on their promises. Even if it takes longer than we would want!
For some reason, people don't seem to like being told that. Or more to the point, people don't read properly, assume what it is that is being said, and then begin an argument based on their assumption.
Now, I'm not totally sure it's what you say that people dislike, I think it's your dismissive attitude. They possibly attribute it to a case of choice-supportive bias, which I can understand. This is most likely the reason they get annoyed with you.
I dont care if people get annoyed with me.
I care that people will instigate an argument without reading the posts they are arguing against.
As to why Intrepid posted the videos, there are several reasons. People want to see the classes, there is much, MUCH more on display than just animations, the game is in alpha and they expect people to know it is all a work in progress.
I mean, early videos of the game had literally everything as placeholders. The UI we have is still a placeholder. The abilities we are seeing are likely still place holders.
If Intrepid wait until things aren't placeholders before showing the game, they wont be showing anything until mid beta.
My main concern, as others have pointed out, is some of the over the top animations. As a tank class, I kind of expect some of the animations to have more weight behind them. You are suppose to be some sort of heavy armor class but leaping in the air doesn't really make sense.
Now if these were animations for maybe a light armor, elven class it would make more sense but not a dwarf. However, I think they mentioned there is no plans to have race specific animations at this time. I'm glad to see they changed up the Fireball cast animation.
This is a thread about the animations and not about how the combat plays. A melee overpowering a caster class is a combat balance problem, and not an animation one.
I could see myself setting up quite a fluid combat with the correct keybinds for the mage. Steven is just really, really bad atm. He has CC but missed it or freaked out and didnt cast at all. He keyboard turned and basically was worse than an npc in that fight. Like Dewan58 said, this thread though is about the animations themselves and I believe they have done a good job working towards better iterations.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased they adapted the fireball animation.
Well actually the mage could move and cast, you literally just watched a bad player (sorry Steven) get destroyed by good players and came to the conclusion that the class Steven was playing was bad because of it.
I could see what Steven was trying to do: black hole + spam spells, and it was good to see him trying to tele out of the fight.
Really interested to see how combat develops from here!
Edit: Sometimes the mage moves and casts because of the black hole effects. Though when the other dev switch to mage you could see the lightning wasn't static. Makes me hopefully for a lightning Bard/Mage.
I just rewatched the footage and yes, when casting you are slowed by what looks to be something around 50%, but being slowed while casting isn't something crazy. It's possible you mistook the slow effect he had on him during the duels right before he died at one point as a casting slow when it is pretty clear if you look that he was not casting anything and literally just backing up.
Now I agree that the tanks had a lot of CC at lvl 10 compared to the mages, but this is also only lvl 10 combat. Lvl 50 mages might have a much more comparable toolkit to lvl 50 tanks in that way.
And even if they were, they wouldn't be balancing combat for another two years...
They're not balancing anything right now, abilities having too much damage/duration or whatever is not important as of now.
The fact that fireball did not even do 100 damage and melee swings did roughly 300 says everything.
Yeah people have to understand that the first cracks at these abilities are just how "powerful" the designers project them to be in comparison to other abilities within that sole archetype. Once they have an idea of which abilities will be big hitters, fillers, etc. They will start balancing the damage and healing across the archetypes.
I still think the animation are drawn out too long atm. The entirety of the fireball casting animation took about 1.5seconds, somewhere around 0.8 seconds seems to be a better spot for me.
But this also depends on the alternatives the mage will offer in his class kit.
But more importantly they announced a dev discussion on combat! Now the experts of this thread can show stupid intrepid how it’s done.
Well i‘ll probably spam them with animation references and some class kit mechanics.
What does the VFX have to do with goofy animations?
Oh, I know. Most of the stuns were knockdowns from what I could tell. And like I said, hearing the devs speak about fluidity and animations not taking player's control away from them. It made me very happy and hopeful. Especially since they listened to feedback threads like this in that regard. And much like animations in many cases, when talking about crowd-control. The same is true. Less is more.