Quality of ability animations

George_Black

Agnostic: animations based in detached effects and colours, seeming magic in nature that are not in coordination with the characters body and arms, in order to avoid an awkward look with most weapons.

Restricted use: animations tied to a weapon, that are mostly based in detailed character motion, to match the action performed by the arms holding a specific weapon, usually decorated with flashes.
Similalry, certain magical powers are tied to archetypes (or classes from other games), to fit the lore of the classes power source. Darkness, elemental, telekinisis or terraforming, and cannot be performed unless conditions are met.

Which do you prefer and what are your reasons.
Personally I prefer the second.

George_Black

Also here is an what an ability animation is composed off:
1) Character motion. Arms hands, legs, torso and hips. The more detailed the more attractive the combat of the game.
2) Effect. With weapons it's ususlly shown as a ground impact, or wind disturbance; slashes. It could also be the appearance of tools such as dirt bombs or throwing blades.
In magic... the sky is the limit. Simple fire to summons to whatever the Devs can imagine.
3) Colours. Sometimes there is a thematic colour associated with class abilities in games to give the impression of a hidden strength.
It physical classes it is a subtled trace of their strikes and in magical classes it's more pronounced and based on the source of their powers such as divinity or ice etc etc.


The other component of abilities is ofcourse the function, such as damage or effect number and nature of targets etc etc.
How well is Intrepids art meeting the concept of abilities based on what we have seen?

ThevoicestHeVoIcEs

What I would prefer is definitely different to what we are likely going to get. I have seen Intrepid take few steps in right direction a while back, but I doubt they will push it much further. The vast majority of game designers never do.

I have a fairly narrow view on this, not gonna lie. Game designers should start with the fundamentals, which for me its weapon design (no more silly sized weapons) and the basic animations, attack movesets. Yes even in fantasy games with magic and dragons etc.

For example if I'm swinging a 3 kg greatsword as a trained fighter, that should not look like I'm trying to swing a 30 kg bag of stones. No, I don't expect realism, this is unachievable, but I do prefer authenticity.

Start with fundamentals, then we can talk about the importance of minimising visual and audio noise in games with hundreds of players on the screen for sake of game performance and visual clarity.

When you get the basic animations right we can add some SUBTLE effects to whatever magical powers your fantasy attacks are supposed to represent. Colours first, subtle animations next. light blue = ice, red = fire, dark blue = electric etc. Unless you are throwing some powerful ability with a long cooldown I don't want also to see massive visual and audio obstructions on my screen every time someone presses a button every 10 seconds.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, HEMA and similar resources are plentiful and FREE these days and can be easily used as inspirations by games designers with little background in the subject.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eiBYTAAXMbY

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yFD2DDKY6r4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdEkVKzuptA&t=503s

https://youtu.be/mSQn1ufScSQ?si=Nw_oEd6AKwBjTudC&t=122

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtisxi1dxdY

https://youtu.be/gTVC25hYJaY?si=ottT4bOftkrSbidg&t=65

Noaani

George_Black wrote: »

Which do you prefer and what are your reasons.
Personally I prefer the second.

My understanding is that you prefer melee characters. From that pespective, I can fully see why you would prefer the second.

I personally prefer casters, and also prefer the second.

I don't want caster abilities to be associated with weapons at all - however, I would want that if I was playing melee.

Diamaht

Agnostic. I'm more concerned with information. It's easier to see at a glance.

Arya_Yeshe

The animations are terrible in AoC for now, they have this problem of having the same speed and acceleration from the start to the end, all animation being special effects or model animations look machines in a production line in a factory. It's horrible

Syblitrh

I prefer stylized fluid animation instead of full realistic uncanny attacking approaches. keep in mind they have to respect the time of animation for all based skills in that category, which in most cases is not possible to fill a realistic animation. It will either be speed up which will look silly, or missing keyframes.

Dygz

In Ashes, any Class can use any Weapon, so...
Active Skill animations will probably be mostly agnostic.
Weapon Skill animations will probably be restricted use.