New EQ2 run animations incomming

[Kraks]

Originally Posted by Gallenite

Equally reasonable question.

Because the kinds of improvements to gameplay, feature set, and performance that our players care about are a hell of a lot more important to us as devs than being buzzword compliant.

- S.

Scott, I'm telling ya as a long long time player of EQ1 and EQ2, the graphics engine has got to improve. Going away from the horribly clunky Cloth Sim is a great step.

After playing a bit of WoW, I can tell ya that EQ2 raids die when you have to turn down 90% of the "flash and fizzle" effects just to run half decently. Those effects are what make wizards awe inspiring in movies, ya know!

Please please please, continue to tweak the entire graphical engine with a long-term goal to have it so the average machine can play with all the particles turned on for raids.

Nobody cares about cutting edge graphics if you can't actually use them.

[Kolle]

Yeah my computer can run WoW raids with 39 others around just fine. I don't have to turn anything down. I built it a couple years ago and I didn't use the best parts even then. EQ2? If I said outloud that I was considering running medium settings for a small raid my computer would probably decline and show me a doctor's excuse.

[Coladar]

I know a few people were like "There's nothing wrong with animations, you people are seeing things." While playing the last couple days, I paid close attention to my two characters while running to see exactly what it is about the animations that make them less than stellar to my eye.

Basically, the Male Iksar animation is perfectly fine. Extremely well done, actually. My only complaint is that the tail doesn't seem to be in motion while running, it just keeps it's normal left right, left right, constant swinging.

The Kerra Male animation sucks though. Arms move way, way, way too fast. The legs... Well, I guess it's more the feet. His feet seem to hit the ground ten times a second, just highly unrealistic leg/feet movement to my eyes. In addition, he's hunched over like the hunchback of Notre Dame. Finally, same deal with the tail. When running, the tail should be flopping all around, back-front, left-right. Instead, it's got the same gradual left-right movement it does while standing still.

Does any of this shit really matter? No, I'd rather they put the effort into improving gameplay, content, fixing real bugs, but (hopefully) these animation changes will make improvements, which is always a good thing. There are no animations so bad that I actually notice it out of the blue and say, "Fuck these animations suck horribly", so if they stayed the same I could care less.

[Abalieno]

Originally Posted by Kraks

Scott, I'm telling ya as a long long time player of EQ1 and EQ2, the graphics engine has got to improve. Going away from the horribly clunky Cloth Sim is a great step.

After playing a bit of WoW, I can tell ya that EQ2 raids die when you have to turn down 90% of the "flash and fizzle" effects just to run half decently. Those effects are what make wizards awe inspiring in movies, ya know!

Redoint the UI layer would also help, as it lags the game quite a bit without any apparent justification.

[Ungoliath]

Originally Posted by Gallenite

Sorry it took so long to grab this one. Short answer: Yes.

I can't release details here before we do so on our own boards, but the idea is to start getting detailed info as to what's going to be happening to fix a few combat imbalances (impacting both pvp and pve in different ways, and to different extents) out there as soon as we can, which I agree hasn't been soon enough.

- Scott

That's really great to know. As the first primary mage on Vox to 50, I retired after one month there, after predicting the futility and frustration that out of whack melee resistances would bring. I look forward to seeing some caster/melee balance and hope your team can also find a way to prevent bell/zone and respawn point campers.

I believe Schatze's idea of consolidating also has some merit though it might be tricky due to the Role Playing/Exchange nature of the 3 pvp servers.

Certainly, I can't imagine pvp being very entertaining if the population is extremely low.

[Muligan]

Someone already mentioned this but, I was glad someone has noticed that while animated cloaks are cool and everything SoE really need to balance PvP. They've really struck gold in this and I don't believe they even realize it. With a little creativity and naming styles they could make all classes available to all sides making it more appealing to player either faction. (This is in regards to the statement made about hardly having enough Qeynos people to raid). This is very true on Nagafen server as well. Freeport owns all the fun and offensive classes. With Mystic being the only necessary raiding class we own that they don't, it's too bad SoE may let this slip through their fingers.

PvP came at the perfect time and gave a great subscriber boost to the EQ2 playerbase. It's kind of like making a great piece of software and being just a couple of fixes away to breakthrough but your team says... "Maybe if we change the color of the box, it'll do better."

Cloaks are cool, new races are cool, new town... cool. Tweak PvP and enjoy you millions.

Take care,
Muli

BTW-i'm curious how the new city will impact the factions as well.?

[Ravensign]

What kind of context does PVP have in EQ2?

Is there anything similar to WoW BG's or World PVP Objectives or DAOC's keeps and etc?