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Originally Posted by Gallenite I'm glad you mentioned this.
I don't think it is. It's one of our longer term projects. No releasable details yet, but since Smed directly addressed character animations here originally, I'll say at least this much about it:
What we need to go through to make both armor/wearables and animations for 40-some different race-gender pairs across both US and Alt models isn't really tenable in the long term. Fixing that is something we'll be talking more about over the next year.
In the interest of efficiency, this project supercedes making a couple thousand new animations for the existing character system.
Doing that much animation work, just to have to throw it all away when the system itself is fixed (and delaying the system fixes by months in the process), wasn't really the best option for us.
That's not to say there won't be incremental animation improvements in the meanwhile like the tweaks that continue to come out with updates. Just not any massive-scale replacement. Hopefully the reasoning above explains why we think this is the smart call.
- Scott |
I understand your reasoning. But I still think it is the wrong thinig to do. One of the major drawbacks to EQ2 at the moment is the animation system. You are making great strides in gameplay, accessibility, and design - but that doesn't matter when it is a complete pain to look at. Animations have always been rough even on high end computers with animations full on. They are herky jerky and almost robotic looking. It needs priority. You have enough content at the moment. If you took 2 months and dedicated the time to a new animation system across the board, you wouldn't lose much in terms of relativity when you have a seperate team working on an expansion.
When I ask people about trying out EQ2 now, (And you should conduct a poll on this somehow) one of the major drawbacks is the animations are simply too clunky and a pain to look it. Considering that no matter how many positive changes you make to the game you'll * Always * be looking at the world/animations - I'd say that needs to be priority 1 above anything else at the moment.
The only problem is that this fix doesn't generate initial revenue like an expansion or adventure pack. Don't worry about it. I think you are losing opportunity costs on not having those subscribers more so than releasing an expansion 2 months earlier. Get the animation work done and it will pay for itself.
