Combat Animation Memory Reduction

colossalvoids

We are implementing some backend changes to reduce the size of combat animation files to lower their impact on the game’s memory. Specifically, you should experience the following:
The animation visuals after these changes should be virtually indistinguishable from the existing animations within the game.
There will be no impact to light attack weaving or animation cancelling – they should work as they did before.

Thanks for not listening for the feedback from the pts and going through with it, it's definitely "virtually indistinguishable" if you're not looking. No developer or paid tester has equipped a weapon set or used a barswap, let alone made at least a rotation with those on, that's for certain.

L_Nici

my favorite part is the "no impact on LA Weaving or ANimation cancelling", let me tell you there is a huge difference. LAs especially on 2h are almost faster than on DW, the weaving is insanely fast now. Also the faster Weapon swap allows to cast skills way sooner than before

Gabriel_H

L_Nici wrote: »

my favorite part is the "no impact on LA Weaving or ANimation cancelling", let me tell you there is a huge difference.

There is no difference to the underlying mechanic of animation cancelling. It's simply the visual that has changed.

L_Nici wrote: »

Also the faster Weapon swap allows to cast skills way sooner than before

It doesn't. The skills cast at the same pace but before you wouldn't see the skill cast animation until the swap animation had finished. The faster swap now gives quicker certainty the skill was cast but it's simply perception.

LatentBuzzard

colossalvoids wrote: »

We are implementing some backend changes to reduce the size of combat animation files to lower their impact on the game’s memory. Specifically, you should experience the following:
The animation visuals after these changes should be virtually indistinguishable from the existing animations within the game.
There will be no impact to light attack weaving or animation cancelling – they should work as they did before.

Thanks for not listening for the feedback from the pts and going through with it

SkaiFaith

Gabriel_H wrote: »

L_Nici wrote: »

my favorite part is the "no impact on LA Weaving or ANimation cancelling", let me tell you there is a huge difference.

There is no difference to the underlying mechanic of animation cancelling. It's simply the visual that has changed.

L_Nici wrote: »

Also the faster Weapon swap allows to cast skills way sooner than before

It doesn't. The skills cast at the same pace but before you wouldn't see the skill cast animation until the swap animation had finished. The faster swap now gives quicker certainty the skill was cast but it's simply perception.

So... They finally fixed the clunkiness of the animation's visuals? Seems like a plus

colossalvoids

LatentBuzzard wrote: »

colossalvoids wrote: »

We are implementing some backend changes to reduce the size of combat animation files to lower their impact on the game’s memory. Specifically, you should experience the following:
The animation visuals after these changes should be virtually indistinguishable from the existing animations within the game.
There will be no impact to light attack weaving or animation cancelling – they should work as they did before.

Thanks for not listening for the feedback from the pts and going through with it

More like the last.

SkaiFaith wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

L_Nici wrote: »

my favorite part is the "no impact on LA Weaving or ANimation cancelling", let me tell you there is a huge difference.

There is no difference to the underlying mechanic of animation cancelling. It's simply the visual that has changed.

L_Nici wrote: »

Also the faster Weapon swap allows to cast skills way sooner than before

It doesn't. The skills cast at the same pace but before you wouldn't see the skill cast animation until the swap animation had finished. The faster swap now gives quicker certainty the skill was cast but it's simply perception.

So... They finally fixed the clunkiness of the animation's visuals?

On the contrary, it's now even more apparent and junky. There's a PTS feedback thread for it so easy to find how it performs and looks from there, if you're on console or have no access to the game.

Gabriel_H

SkaiFaith wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

L_Nici wrote: »

my favorite part is the "no impact on LA Weaving or ANimation cancelling", let me tell you there is a huge difference.

There is no difference to the underlying mechanic of animation cancelling. It's simply the visual that has changed.

L_Nici wrote: »

Also the faster Weapon swap allows to cast skills way sooner than before

It doesn't. The skills cast at the same pace but before you wouldn't see the skill cast animation until the swap animation had finished. The faster swap now gives quicker certainty the skill was cast but it's simply perception.

So... They finally fixed the clunkiness of the animation's visuals? Seems like a plus

Basically, yes.

Previously bar swapping would give rise to the appearance of a skill not casting, any reduction in that is a big plus.
As far as animation cancelling goes - originally an unintended mech - again any reduction in th disparity between how it looks depending on the weapon is a big plus.

I honestly don't understand what the complaint is.

DexterMorg4n

What stands out to me is that, despite the official statement, the animation has changed. And it’s clearly not for the better.

Take the animation for the Traveling Knife skill (Scribing skill) with the Multi-Target script:

At range, the animation plays normally, but when you’re close to enemies, it gets cut off completely. So you never really know if the skill went off, because if you judge it by the animation alone, it looks like you’re swinging at nothing 90% of the time.

And when the animation is cut short like that, there’s this awful delay between the moment your character hits an enemy and the moment the actual impact animation shows up. (And no, it’s not latency or anything like that.)

I used this skill as my spammable on my sorc, and now it’s just trash. And I don’t think it’s the only skill affected by this animation issue.

I'm saying this without any hostility, but whoever thought this was a good idea clearly didn't test it in real gameplay conditions, or they just don't care about their players and the feedback they get. Or maybe it's just incompetence, I really don't know.

If you really want to reduce server load, stop pumping out tons of furniture and mounts with useless effects. That would actually be progress.

Morvan

They kinda look more clunky now, almost like my character is having a stroke during casting, so it's for sure weird, especially on 2H, I think the problem is not even the speed, but the transition from an animation to the other, maybe? It's like my character is constantly breaking from a position to a totally different one.

Also, everytime you hit something with 2H while in 1st person it forces you to 3rd person.

As for now, I'm not feeling any difference in weaving whatsover, so I think the change is entirely visual, need to test more to be sure, but they are DEFINITELY not "virtually indistinguishable", the difference is obvious, and it's not even close to subtle.

lostineternity

My character moves and attacks like having a stroke.
This is so bad, I can't believe zos you did this.
ESO animations were outdated even 5 years ago and now it's like the level of Oblivion from 2006.

Are you proactively trying to make game worse???

lostineternity

Morvan wrote: »

They kinda look more clunky now, almost like my character is having a stroke during casting, so it's for sure weird, especially on 2H, I think the problem is not even the speed, but the transition from an animation to the other, maybe? It's like my character is constantly breaking from a position to a totally different one.

Also, everytime you hit something with 2H while in 1st person it forces you to 3rd person.

As for now, I'm not feeling any difference in weaving whatsover, so I think the change is entirely visual, need to test more to be sure, but they are DEFINITELY not "virtually indistinguishable", the difference is obvious, and it's not even close to subtle.

It feels exactly the way how when I played with bad internet connection (like 20% packets loss).
Character starts moving with a few first frames of animation - freeze or lag - and then you see the final state of character after animation. Everything in between just got ripped and deleted.
It feels so laggy and clunky. I can't believe someone even tested it. I am not even talking about high APM scenarios like combat. It looks bad even when you barswap out of combat.

Yudo

Attacks happen before the animations happen, not only is this bad experience, but in pvp you get hit and cannot read animations to know what to avoid and when to block. This is bonkers!!

Morvan

Been playing a few hours, and god, it looks so much worse than I thought, in combat especially, with the new animations going and receiving impact from attacks my character starts strobing like a tube man.

Marto

Here's my feedback on each of the changes I've noticed:

Increased weapon switch speed:
I don't like it. It's too fast compared to even the shortest animations in the game. If you're going to speed up the swap animation to make it feel better, it should be a much smaller change.

One Handed and Shield:
- The increased speed of the swing looks unrealistic, breaks immersion, and doesn't match other skills in ESO. It's bad.
- The end of the animation has some really ugly choppiness. It's not good and needs to be updated.
- The position of the weapon hand after a missed strike is really awkward.
- Non-missed strikes end with the weapon in a very elevated position. I looks silly and bad.
+ I can feel some added snappiness

Two Handed
- MASSIVE downgrade from the previous version. Fixing this should be your priority.
- The increased speed of the swing looks REALLY bad, like it's missing frames. The start and end are very choppy.
- The legs change position way too fast. It looks realistic.
- The way the character snaps when doing a swing from left to right feels downright instant. It breaks immersion.
- The position of the weapon after a missed hit is inconsistent between left and right
- The follow-up animation after finishing a successful hit looks very choppy.
- The character "trembles" a bit before starting a heavy attack, it looks bad
- Heavy attacks have way too much acceleration.


Dual Wield
- Overall, a downgrade from the previous version
- The transition between ANY movement state and the idle looks really forced and artificial. The blending is aggressive and ugly. I think you should try to retain the previous idle.
- The increased speed of the swing looks bad, although not as bad as the other ones
- The position of the weapons after a successful hit looks too close, like the swing ends too early.
+ The position of the weapons after a missed hit looks fine
+ Heavy attacks look unchanged

Bow:
+ Virtually unchanged. If there's a difference, I can't see it.

Flame and Ice staff:
+ Virtually unchanged as well.
+ I can feel some extra snappiness when weaving. It's good.

Lightning staff:
+Virtually unchanged.

mandricus

I’m one of the few who actually bothered to comment in the PTS thread about the introduction of this so-called “feature,” fully aware it would be an utterly pointless exercise. I didn’t crunch the exact numbers, but I’d say about 95% of the feedback on this animation change was negative. epic-buttrk even went through the trouble of making a long, detailed video explaining every single issue with the new animations — and, naturally, was completely ignored.

We were easy prophets, really. We said this change would cause a mess and spark a general outcry, and—surprise!—that’s exactly what happened. Yet, as usual, our feedback went straight into the void. Today is release day, and of course it’s been shipped exactly as-is, meaning we can officially bury the issue for good. Because we all know how this goes: no matter how much negative feedback piles up (and I’m sure this thread will soon stretch into the usual multi-page saga), there will be no rollback whatsoever.

So here we are, stuck with a “feature” literally nobody asked for, implemented for an “optimization” nobody needed, and justified by reasons that remain, at best, mysterious. “Memory optimization,” they said — a wonderfully vague phrase that sounds like a convenient way to avoid giving any real technical explanation. And despite repeated requests for a proper clarification, we, of course, never got one.

Why am I not even remotely surprised?

tomofhyrule

I will say that I commented on the PTS thread as well and I said it didn’t look too bad, but I was specifically comparing to the last time they tried in U46, where half of the animations actively had the weapon clip out of the character’s hands. I also only tested a few swings at nothing to make sure that the weapon stayed in his hands. And also that the animation for Mages Wrath was still the same (the last version changed it to the pointing one instead of the reach upward)

As for the unsheath animation, using the unsheathe key did keep the normal speed while unsheathing with a click is sped up… or at least it was on version 1 of PTS. The fact that you could still use the normal speed one made it easier to handle.

But the main thing they should do, which would help this all be swallowed, is to say why this was necessary. I can assume that since this is for memory reduction and they’ve said in the past that old hardware limitations was preventing the addition of new animations, that this may be a sign that something with new animations is coming in the future and they need the space (and I hope to Hircine that it’s a new Class and not just more mementos)

SolarRune

First trial i tried after this change was vAA - and on the first boss the Lightning staff HA was not working - animation was right but not firing - and no RO proc for the group - hope it was a one off but very frustrating

zaria

lostineternity wrote: »

My character moves and attacks like having a stroke.
This is so bad, I can't believe zos you did this.
ESO animations were outdated even 5 years ago and now it's like the level of Oblivion from 2006.

Are you proactively trying to make game worse???

An khajiit sitting on an bench in Oblivion,

Note the tail.
No idea about the face? Who is Oblivion bad, they might added another face as he was the only survivor after all other was killed.

Morvan

It's bad dude, my character can't stop tilting while receiving damage.

Vaqual

This looks so cringe. I can't believe you really brought that to live. On the last big patch of the year. I can't believe it.

...

I can't believe it. Do you not have eyes? This is so unnatural. Most mobile games and mobas have better looking animations.

Rkindaleft

SkaiFaith wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

L_Nici wrote: »

my favorite part is the "no impact on LA Weaving or ANimation cancelling", let me tell you there is a huge difference.

There is no difference to the underlying mechanic of animation cancelling. It's simply the visual that has changed.

L_Nici wrote: »

Also the faster Weapon swap allows to cast skills way sooner than before

It doesn't. The skills cast at the same pace but before you wouldn't see the skill cast animation until the swap animation had finished. The faster swap now gives quicker certainty the skill was cast but it's simply perception.

So... They finally fixed the clunkiness of the animation's visuals? Seems like a plus

LOL it might be a plus if that's what they actually did, smooth out the animations and make the attacks look less clunky, but from a visual standpoint, all this change did was cut out some frames from the LAs, which means that weapons like 2H look even worse and choppier.

People do want the animations to look better, but nobody asked for them to look worse, and this is making them look worse, and I don't know why they seem to be so insistent on making changes nobody asked for.

Asdara

its horrendous, and its not like we had a place to test these change RIGHT
Like a place where we could provide feedback before release RIGHT

BardokRedSnow

Technically speaking the animations were better before for two hander, but it was never great in the first place ngl. Now though from a pvp aspect, two hander's light attack weaving feels much improved, especially for my build when I weave whip with it. It isnt as clunky and doesnt make me wanna swipe it out for dual wield at times.

I was dueling a very high damage fighter in cyrodiil and was able to match his light attack weaving and trade blows to get him into the pyreburst heavy and execute health range, normally doing that with a high damage dual wielding player while im using a two hander is really hard, especially since im playing on a controller because Im a weirdo.

Now I can do that no problem. I like it, smooth gameplay is more important than anything else imo.

tomofhyrule

One bug I found though:

The sneak strafe animation for ice staves is bugged. Other staves work fine, it's only ice staves that instead use the unarmed forward sneak

colossalvoids

Known Issue: There have been some reports of 2h weapon animations looking jittery.

And that's all lmao. Mind you, that's some reports dating back September.
Your lower part body movement with a beam up is fine apparently? Wall of elements into barswap also mayhaps, basic dw position seems completely fine and their light attack also not an issue, same as many other obvious instances that would be apparent if any testing would be done instead of relying on PTS to willingly ignore it all in the end.

Yudo

Marto wrote: »

Here's my feedback on each of the changes I've noticed:

Flame and Ice staff:
+ Virtually unchanged as well.
+ I can feel some extra snappiness when weaving. It's good.

Lightning staff:
+Virtually unchanged.

Not true, anyone parsing for 10s will be able to tell the difference immediately. Just go to a dummy for a moment and light attack weave. You character does not move during the attack, then decides to have a spasms when its already over. It is complete out of sync and clunky now. If you think staff is unchanged, god I cannot imagine the rest.

Despite U35 and U46 they thought, well hey at least they like the combat of ESO lets change that as well.


Here I cast light attack and ele weapon


Here the light attack animation fires, around 0.4s after.


Any consecutive weave behaves like this, only the first one is normal.
They have introduced like a delay of half a second. There is latency as you can see, because they reduced the frames of the animation without thinking about this part.

It IS more clunky. And don't get me started with block and faster bar swap animation cancels because my character is making moves as if he is Dr. Strange.

Morvan

The team is investigating this. We will have more information once we know more. We will be disabling the additional animations as we investigate.

@ZOS_Kevin Does that mean you guys will revert to the old animations on an incremental patch?

Morvan

Yudo wrote: »

Marto wrote: »

Here's my feedback on each of the changes I've noticed:

Flame and Ice staff:
+ Virtually unchanged as well.
+ I can feel some extra snappiness when weaving. It's good.

Lightning staff:
+Virtually unchanged.

Not true, anyone parsing for 10s will be able to tell the difference immediately. Just go to a dummy for a moment and light attack weave. You character does not move during the attack, then decides to have a spasms when its already over. It is complete out of sync and clunky now. If you think staff is unchanged, god I cannot imagine the rest.

Despite U35 and U46 they thought, well hey at least they like the combat of ESO lets change that as well.


Here I cast light attack and ele weapon


Here the light attack animation fires, around 0.4s after.


Any consecutive weave behaves like this, only the first one is normal.
They have introduced like a delay of half a second. There is latency as you can see, because they reduced the frames of the animation without thinking about this part.

It IS more clunky. And don't get me started with block and faster bar swap animation cancels because my character is making moves as if he is Dr. Strange.

There is a lot of problems, people think it's only affecting 2H, but there are so many broken animations, your character has a spasm when casting Wall of Elements for example...

I don't think I've ever been this bothered with a patch, not even U35 had this effect on me, it's like the Jabs/Flurry downgrade but this time for every single combat animation, I'll really miss how Dual Wield used to look like.

The_Saint

Morvan wrote: »

It's bad dude, my character can't stop tilting while receiving damage.

https://youtu.be/5gUZmYKcnZc?si=Xozuwvsfh7_ISba8

Jaimeh

Yudo wrote: »

Any consecutive weave behaves like this, only the first one is normal.
They have introduced like a delay of half a second. There is latency as you can see, because they reduced the frames of the animation without thinking about this part.

It IS more clunky. And don't get me started with block and faster bar swap animation cancels because my character is making moves as if he is Dr. Strange.

I agree, it is more clunky and I also feel the delay, which throws me off and makes weaving and the rotation feel unstable/unresponsive after a while. And that was just fighting one of the new delve field marshal mobs, I can't imagine how unplayable it will be in trials. @ZOS_Kevin this needs urgent attention.

colossalvoids

Morvan wrote: »

The team is investigating this. We will have more information once we know more. We will be disabling the additional animations as we investigate.

@ZOS_Kevin Does that mean you guys will revert to the old animations on an incremental patch?

You could do so manually with some polymorphs, won't mention which ones but some are still have old animations, for comparisons or play, luckily.