NB cosmetic issues V3

Vaqual

Hello and welcome to the newest version of this thread. I want to talk to you about my issues with the design of a few NB animations. The word "jabs" activates the sentry guns. I will bring up the same points as always, as I have come to recognize this as my great purpose on these forums, but this time we have illustrations (poorly cropped, as netiquette demands it).

Introduction

The greatest evil in the world of immersion breaking animations are skills that hide weapons without transitions. Hiding the weapons is way of making ability animations """"""compatible""""" with all available weapons and probably shaves off some degree of computational complexity. Technically this would not even be the worst idea to exclude weapon specific motions for general use abilities, if it wasn't done in an impressively cheap way. I know that all classes are plagued by this, most of all Necro and Warden, but it turns out that I do not care about those. This is why I will only argue for NB abilities in this thread. Feel free to add your own thoughts regarding other classes as well (remember the jabs thing). Funnily enough, I started as Necro main, until I realized after 6 months that I was not running a single class skill on my bars, because I hated all of the animations. The "old" classes luckily offer enough abilities to completely avoid the most atrocious offenders, but sadly there seems to be a positive correlation between ability power and unsightliness. This is why I will bring up this topic until it either gets improved or I lose interest in the game. And I like the game, so there might be a couple attempts until that happens.

Chapter 1: Why?

As I have hinted at in the introduction, the purpose of this system is clear to me. However there are two massive grievances I have with this:

1. Hiding the weapon without transition just looks cheap. ZOS keeps adding glow and particle effects left and right, but it wasn't possible to let the mainhand vanish into red mist before/during the execution of a swift stroke with the ghostly red blade? Or to let them magically melt into said blade, which dominates the NB look? These transitions could be sensibly implemented, they could be quick, and compared to the amount of effects the arcanist has going on it coud probably be done in an aesthetically subtle and resource friendly way.

2. Whether the weapons just vanish or they vanish with glitter, doesn't matter if you are trying to play a non-magically inclined character. It looks absolutely immersion breaking either way. I get that this is the players own fault for picking a spell on a non-mage character. But why then would a Stamina and a Magicka version of the same ability both look like a magic spell? The best example here is Veiled Strike:

It exclusively requires the offhand, which is anyway free for half of the available weapons, but also it is just an excentric swipe with a magic blade attached to the hand. This would also work with a shield, bow or offhand displayed. There is no reason why it has to look like this. Or at the very least: There is no reason that both morphs need to be like this.

This question could also be asked about Assasin's Blade:

The character performs a jab. Like, the thing that people do in fights. Also with with weapons. Even blunt ones. It is fine to add the magical blade extension if it helps, but what is the need for hiding the weapon here? Aligning them with the hand? Are weapon types oriented so differently (business-end towards enemy should work)? Even if they were held sideways (according to hand orientation) and the character would stab with the magic blade it would still be sensible.

With Ambush, Soul Shred and Death Stroke it would admittedly more difficult to find a sensible animation for all weapons, but here we can still easily improve the weapon vanishing/reappearance part of the animation, making it more believeable and selling the invisible-weapon moment as part of ability not as a testament to to cheapness/lazyness/ancient sumeric proto-hardware options. Because looking at the game, overall performance and the extravagance of add-on classes, it is hard to believe that these abilities have to look so bad for performance purposes.

Chapter 2: The Irredeemable

If there is one ability that can make the difference between S-tier and and fun-build for this class, it is the stinky red bow Grim Focus/Assasin's Will, the supreme overlord of ugly, immersion breaking skills. This ability is very good. It is hard to say no. But it directly snipes the R out of MMORPG. When you slot this you choose gameplay over roleplay. This is the ability that they would add for an ESOxFornite crossover (no wait that happened already - or was it a bad dream?). Let's look at it (no, not the glow, that happens here: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/641376/grim-focus-permaglow/p1):

"Oh, but this looks harmless, it is just another vanishing red ghost weapon."

If you are brave enough to select the wrong weapon, you will get to enjoy all of its horrendous features:
1. Weapon, held in the right hand, vanishes to be replaced with a bow popping up in the left han
2. Bow is held sideways after firing magic projectile (the things that do not really need to be shot by bows)
3. Bow in the left hand vanishes without trace only for the weapon to show up again in the right hand

I managed this entire text without swear words, but this is where you can imagine them. And I know they just reworked one of the morphs to give more passive WD, but functionally they are still almost identical. Reworking one of them into a empowered melee hit could bypass all the hassle of coming up with a better animation, while opening up space for more interesting/diversified morph options. There are many suggestions already available on these forums.

Chapter 3: A shared pain

Apart from poorly transitioned animations, there is one thing that catches the eye when you cycle through your abilities: The skills that trigger stone age-tier glow effects. If you use Drain Power and you are unlucky enough to hit an enemy, you are rewarded with this:

I think this was intented to give the blade a cool powerful moment, shining in the light, just as you slice your enemy apart. Too bad that it looks bad even by 2005's standards and covers up almost the entire weapon texture. Also very nice of ZOS to make it so that full uptime of the related buffs can easily be maintained. Not very nice that you get the "glow", too. Due to the differences in flavour there shouldn't be a "one-size-fits-all" solution for transitioning weapons into and out of hiding that is applicable for all classes, but for this issue, which can be encountered on class and non-class skills (e.g., Forward Momentum/Rally, even inconsistent with weapon stowing after double cast or bar-swap in case of Rally), there is an easy solution: Just disable it. Or at least give us the option to turn this glow off, so that the players who inexplicably like those can be happy, too. To me, it looks just straight up worse than no effect (weapon enchantments fall into the same category, but luckily they can be supressed by Crown Store-Weapons). And less is good for the servers, right?

Conclusion

Even if this achieves nothing, at least it gave me hope for those few moments between making this post and it going into the darkness of page 17 of Combat & Character Mechanics, sorting by new. I think the message is clear: These abilities could easily be given a much nicer and more immersive look. This would be good for the game, resisting aging for a bit longer, without introducing invasive, much disliked changes like the jabs rework. I am sure your intentions were good and - if you ask me - the old jabs animation wasn't that hype either. I see how players can grow to like even bad things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome), but, dear devs, do not let that discourage you. Just engage with player feedback, you have as many shots as you decide to take. Just don't do it in a cheap and uninspired way, do it well. You can do it, most of the game looks absolutely good. And please: do not make the decent looking abilities "flashier" (don't hide the weapons).

TL;DR:
You are not getting a TL;DR this time, I spent too much of my evening on this. Go read it properly.

I know I said "jabs", don't try to be smart.

Edit1: typos
Edit2: scaled images

DrNukenstein

Here's what I really like about those animations. There is no cast time. You push the button and it happens. You can basically have a 2h front bar with any weapon you want, but with no cast times (aside from the ultimate), which is great and a big part of the classes identity.

Pizzazz adds a minimum .3 second cast time. Therefore, I would never want these skills to get jazzed up to make them more fun in overland questing.

*Source: tentacle arm has a .3 second cast time and is single hit, but with pizzazz.

Vaqual

DrNukenstein wrote: »

Here's what I really like about those animations. There is no cast time. You push the button and it happens. You can basically have a 2h front bar with any weapon you want, but with no cast times (aside from the ultimate), which is great and a big part of the classes identity.

Pizzazz adds a minimum .3 second cast time. Therefore, I would never want these skills to get jazzed up to make them more fun in overland questing.

*Source: tentacle arm has a .3 second cast time and is single hit, but with pizzazz.

Even if they just pop a little cloud of red mist where the weapons used to be it would be a great improvement. I am not asking them to extend the animation duration to fit a great spectacle. I am asking for purely aesthetic improvements to make what we already have look better. Or avoid the hiding altogether.

Edit: Thanks for leaving a reply, you also wrote something when I made this thread the last time, you are a good soul.

Vaqual

I think the suggestion where the weapon is just being kept is pretty straigh forward, butI feel like I should elaborate a bit more regarding the option where animations would just receive an immersive visual upgrade.

The goal is to provide a game related explanation how and the why the characters weapon just vanished into another dimension. There is pretty much no way to explain this without magic, so this should only be applied in those instances where keeping the weapon is absolutely not feasible. You might argue, that implementing exit and entry effects for all weapon types for all abilities would end up multiplying the total number of abilities x number of weapon types. But actually I think a feasible solution could be to separate the actual skill animation and the weapon exit/entry effects (see figure below) into parellel effetcs that react to the same cue. The reappearance effect would then just start with a time delay to sync up with the end of the animation.
This should be possible, like a direct damage ability can already trigger the ability animation and e.g. a proc set animation. So there would only be a need for 1 generic set of animations per weapon per class/skill line (or small pool of sequentially/randomly selected animations for each class/skill line). Ability duration would not change. This system could then be expanded to fit also individual weapon skins, if that proves to be interesting.
It would still not be ideal for players who wish to play in a "non-magical" way, but it would be more immersive.
In the best case this would be implement in a way that it can be toggled in a menu, for players who do not want additional visual clutter. I am personally not very fond of too many particle effects, but the need for immersive animations is greater.

Jazraena

Everything in here. Everything.

I'd also love to highlight this though:

Whether the weapons just vanish or they vanish with glitter, doesn't matter if you are trying to play a non-magically inclined character. It looks absolutely immersion breaking either way. I get that this is the players own fault for picking a spell on a non-mage character. But why then would a Stamina and a Magicka version of the same ability both look like a magic spell? The best example here is Veiled Strike:

Let me play non-mages without gimping myself. And no, weapon skills that set the ground on fire or have floaty knives aren't non-magical either.