PTS Update 48 – Feedback Thread for Combat Animation Memory Reduction

ZOS_Kevin · September 15

This is the official feedback thread for Combat Animation Memory Reduction improvements. Specific feedback that the team is looking for includes the following:

Did you find anything about the flow of combat to feel different than what is on Live?
Can you still perform animation cancelling effectively?
Did you notice any broken or unusual combat animations?

smallhammer · September 22

Just a simple question: Why do we have animations at all, in combat? When one of the main "skills" is to cancel it?

Morvan · September 22

Skills can cancel LA animations, but skill animations are still performed just as fine.

smallhammer · September 22

Yes, I was thinking about LA animations.

MincMincMinc · September 22

Its been fine that LA animations get canceled since they are so much less impactful as compared to active skills...........However this is only true assuming no proc effects. In reality we see enchants, poisons, proc effects, status effects, etc all able to trigger off of animation cancel-able triggers like Light attacks and medium attacks.

This is a main point I always bring up when it comes to the Off-Balance system being a terrible design. Why have a main counterplay system trigger off of invisible medium attack weaves not only animation cancel-able but also from any enemy. It just breaks down the GCD ability system.

tomofhyrule · September 22

I definitely have not noticed any problems with the animations like we had the last time this was tried earlier in the year. Everything looks and feels the same as in live now.

The unsheath speed also works well. I did at first think it looked a bit goofy being sped up that fast, but the fact that we can still unsheathe at normal speed with the unsheathe key is great. The sped version working just by light attacking does make combat feel better.

epic-buttkkr · September 23

Ok so in regards to the combat animation memory reduction,
I have tested it and Yes, It still interacts and affects my ability to light attack weave and cast my skills.
The polymorphs still retain the old animations and I used that as a side by side when comparing parses.
I was using Torc of the last ayleid king to minimize the variables that procsets introduce when parsing.

DPS on average was about 5-8k higher with a polymorph, than without, And this was with me aggressively weaving my skills.
I recorded the parses also using OBS and had a Controller overlay to see if I was missing any skills, and reviewing the footage, I was missing a considerable amount of skills and light attacks. I could feel this as well when parsing. The flow of my skills and basic attacks felt out of sync and off.

On top of this, These new animations just look bad. The visible stutter and stiffness my character has makes them feel janky and incomplete. Its pretty immersion breaking tbh.
also the offset idle poses for my character when holding weapons are bad. its a 45 degree tilt when just holding weapons and not doing anything. It looks out of place. If you heavy attack or cast a skill and let the animation follow through, you can see your character stop in the old idle position and then suddenly twitch rapidly to adjust to the new idle stance. It just looks bad.

Unarmed sprint animations just speed up the speed at which your walking animation plays, which makes my character look like he is tweaking out. plus when going into an idle stance from unarmed, you character assumes the idle pose of the bow, despite not holding a bow.

I have spent probably more time than I should have, testing these specific changes, about 5 hours, give or take and recording the whole thing. I made a video about this as well, since this update, as a whole, scares me.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9OhWCEffjOE&t

This is not to mention my concerns regarding the constant CRASHING that happens on the pts while interacting with these new changes.
Also now with week 2, there is a new bug that is affecting PS5 Controllers if you are using a gamepad. Its an issue I have seen before, its just strange to watch it come back.
Please Consider Shelfing these Animation changes

MashmalloMan · September 23

I played maybe 60 minutes, the game crashed 4 times while weaving. Completely random. For context, crashing on live and previous PTS for me is next to unheard of.. like once a year so this is very odd.

Idk what you did, but these animation changes feel rough, like an alpha, work in progress.. except, this game is 11 years old and there's nothing wrong with the original animations.

Have you ever asked yourself if a 1% performance boost (probably even less) is worth it for the -100% negativity this will receive from your playerbase? This is the 2nd time you said we won't feel or see any difference, yet it's extremely obvious it's been messed with.

@epic-buttkkr did a side by side in their video and you can see it's night and day.

Most of the weapons were passable, but 2H is beyond saving. It stutters like crazy. The others are okay, but they don't feel or look smooth, many of them stutter randomly too, as if they're missing key frames in the animation so the characters weapon jumps from position to position.

Also I can't quite explain it, but sometimes skill casts don't happen when you expect them too randomly. The same way it was a problem with U46 pts. I don't know how to replicate it, but it feels off.

YandereGirlfriend · September 23

Well, that is fairly alarming!

ESO_Nightingale · September 24

i just watched @epic-buttkkr's video.

Guys how do you push this onto even the PTS? this is absolutely unacceptable. do better.

i feel like the joke is on me because there's been nothing i considered worth testing this patch so i haven't even bothered downloading it.

this needs to be reverted immediately. and i mean it. the animations look awful and they're game-breaking.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · September 24

@ZOS_Kevin it would be a good idea for the combat team to address the changes to animations and points in the video people are mentioning. It's not a good look for these bugs to have not been addressed since the last combat animation iteration.

Video for reference:

https://youtu.be/9OhWCEffjOE

ZOS_GinaBruno · September 24

Hi all, thanks for the feedback thus far. We have confirmed there is an issue when using a PS controller on a PC that is causing decreased game performance on the PTS, and we're actively working on getting this fixed as quickly as possible. Our theory is that this may be contributing to other issues some of you have been seeing such as missing ability hits and weaving issues. For those that have noticed a performance hit, could you confirm if you were using a controller or mouse & keyboard (and if the former, what type of controller)?

As for the handful of polymorphs that don't have the additive animations enabled, we are working on fixing those as well.

Thank you!

Sadras · September 24

I haven't done any serious combat testing, but just in case this contributes: I played with a PS5 controller (the standard type), and I had a few crashes and disconnects. I just put it down to the test servers and didn't think any further about it because I haven't done a lot of PTS testing yet, but crashes were also mentioned above in the thread, so just in case it's connected...

DarkPassions · September 24

Not sure if this is related, but I’ve noticed lately that when being knocked back by a boss lately, my character just freezes and kinda… floats backwards until they reach their knockback destination and then just kinda flops onto the floor?

BasP · September 24

I think I've only been on this PTS four times now, and luckily I haven't experienced any crashes myself yet. The performance was really bad yesterday, though - I couldn't finish any parse and it did feel like I was close to crashing a couple of times (the game didn't register any of my inputs for 20+ seconds or so and all I could do was run around during those times).

Edit: I just saw Gina's post. I use a mouse and keyboard, which explains why I didn't have as much issues as some of the others in this thread.

I also think that some animations - especially the two handed animations - look worse, though. I didn't really pay attention to the animations and only parsed with a dual wield front bar at first, but after reading epic-buttkkr's post and watching his video I tried some parses with a greatsword too. It really looks janky.

When last year's letter mentioned that you were working on "improving the overall feel of combat with animation, FX, and potentially audio work", I hoped to see some actual improvements. Some of these new animations have the opposite effect, though - overall, it feels and looks worse.

As for whether I could still perform animation cancelling effectively - maybe it's a nocebo effect, due to having seen this post, but it does seem like my weaving is slightly worse. I've never been a top parser, but overall I'm missing a bit more light attacks than before and skills not firing seems to happen a bit more often too (though the latter is, admittedly, still a rare occurrence for me).

FuryOfTyphon · September 25

Don't mean too sound disrepectful. But please don't work on fixing those aswell.
The animation changes look horrendous.
Why are yall trying to "fix" something that isnt broken?
The animations have worked perfectly fine for 11 years, and do not need to be changed to achieve a 1% increase in performance. If you can even call it that, considering it looks like they are directly linked to all the crashes.

Please watch epics video and seriously rethink this change.
Nobody asked for it, nobody wants it, and its not going to make the company money.
So why are you wasting your time and resources trying to push this through?

SkaiFaith · September 25

"Nobody asked for it, nobody wants it" - extremely false.
Fixing the animations was one of the most requested items when they reached out to us asking what changes we want to the game.
Players feedback was that combat feels floaty, animations lack weight and they look janky due to animation canceling. It was not requested to get rid of weaving or animation canceling, but it was requested to make it less janky.
Players WANT combat and animations to get fixed.

I'm not commenting on the status of their work on PTS - if it's bad it's bad. But it was necessary to remember that yes, it is important to many of us, it's not a waste of time/resources.
Thanks devs for working on this; personally it's all-year that I'm waiting to see the fruits of your work...

MashmalloMan · September 25

I did not use a PS controller, it's XBox supported yet I still experienced crashes during weaving with no noticable performance degradation and no double input like Epic described. To me, it appeared as if the crashing was due to the new animations because it was always when I was weaving.

I have an RTX3080, R7 9800x3D, and 32gb of RAM. Run the game at 1440p, max settings, DLSS Quality. Like I said, I seemingly never crash. It's maybe once a year, if that. So 4 times in an hour is very alarming.

While I appreciate the comment as always, more communication is always great. It appears you've ignored the feedback about the animations looking bad which defeats the original stated intent that they should look and feel exactly the same. Very concerning.

While I will be taking a break until I see what you're cooking for U49 and beyond, I fear releasing this to live will drive away players permanently. Take caution and perhaps, scrap this for the time being until it's 100% exactly the same.

Maybe consider doing a week long test for these changes on live, hell even over the weekend would be great. The problem with PTS, especially with this "minor update" is you don't have enough players to give you the valuable feedback you need. I don't even know if it felt this bad week 1 because I didn't bother logging in, you can tell based on the activity of this forum and players on PTS that people aren't testing as much as they usually do.

MincMincMinc · September 25

I partly want to raise the alarm of why we are cutting out portions of active skill animations cast by the player instead of reducing particle effects and ground stamp effects. How do those compare memory wise?

In terms of animations+particles there seems to be a lost art where the combat used to be so clear. You could see what enemy character animations were doing to know what skills are going off. More importantly you'd have things like old dizzy Loooooong windup into a knockup CC. Now adays these crucial effects like stuns are sometimes not tied to any animation at all. Leading to confusion and people thinking cc is unresponsive and untelegraphed. Other times cc has a very minute animation, while DLC proc sets and skills that are insignificant blow us out of the water with particles.

shadoza · September 25

My gaming friend has the performance issues. He uses a Logitech through steam. The longer he plays, the worse the performance. I have to wait for him when we are playing together because his character doesn't move.

Ragnarok0130 · September 25

@ZOS_GinaBruno the polymorphs using the old animations wasn’t the reported issue in the video,; the polymorphs using the old animations was the workaround for the broken new animations that are themselves causing issues. In fact the point of the video was please to showcase how the new animations are breaking the game and causing issues and shouldn’t be added into the next patch.

Please for the love of Tiber Septim listen to the community when it comes to animations as it has a huge impact on all aspects of the game. Templar players still want the option to use the old animation and spear model for jabs and this should be doable given that ESO has many similar customized actions available for skills in the crown store that are fare more elaborate than the old spear model and animation, but ZoS hasn’t one time recognized us raising the jabs model/animation issue for the past 2+ years.

MashmalloMan · September 26

@Ragnarock41 Nice catch.

Epic: "It's good we have the Polymorphs with the old animations to properly compare because I seem to parse better without the new changes."

ZOS: "Don't worry, we'll get rid of that."

colossalvoids · September 26

I'm sorry but you're fixing... What? An actually proper working animations and the only way people were able to play normally after this "not noticeable" animation optimisation?? This can not be serious or I'm missing some English language skills to distinguish it's talking about fixing animations outside the polymorphs. ESO already had ones of the worst animations aRPGs had seen for wielding weapons but it's getting significantly worse for the sake of some smallest performance gain none has noticed on PTS, it can't be right.

StihlReign · September 26

Alternate Universe.

ZoS is going to 'fix' the polymorphs to remove the comparison to new animations. Wow.

mandricus · September 29

It's pretty clear that devs want to go with these new animations. What is absolutely not clear is WHY they want to do it so badly. When we are talking about "memory optimization" I have to suppose we are talking SERVER SIDE not client side.
Would it be so hard to explain clearly WHY you have to implement this change? "Memory optimization" it's definitely too vague and does not explains at all why you want to do it so badly despite everyone saying that you should leave animations as they are today.
If it's client side: it's Our ram, our hard disk, our memory, and we are saying that we don't care.... So why do you care so much?

Morvan · September 29

Just revert this change ZOS, they look and feel terrible to play.

Morvan · September 29

A prophet?

TenebrisEquitem · September 29

Using an Xbox controller and the game inconsistently freezes within about 1 to 10 minutes of playing.
It's not a hard crash to desktop, it simply freezes and the game's CPU usage drops to 1% and requires having to close the game through the Windows task manager. This happens while riding a mount, walking, fighting, etc. so it's not exclusive to combat or weaving. This has been happening since 11.2.0.

This does not happen while using the mouse & keyboard (even while using the mouse & keyboard on gamepad mode). The moment there are inputs coming from the controller, the game is prone to crashing.

Kram8ion · September 30

Sounds like you’ve already decided they’re all broken anyway and idk why you’d ask for feedback at all?
Seems lopsidedly an unpopular idea

epic-buttkkr · September 30

I am not the best with mouse and keyboard, as I have natively learned ESO on Controller, coming from ps4/ps5, but I decided to do some tests using Mouse and Keyboard regarding the combat animation changes, once more for week 3.

I Can confirm the crashes happen very rapidly when attempting to use a controller, within around 3 minutes still, and using MnK, I experienced no crashes. (tested for 2 hours)

As for parsing on the dummy using MnK, I still miss skills and light attacks. Again, im not the best with MnK, but I have done a few parses before using MnK, enough to know if I'm missing weaves, and attacks felt just as the did using controller. Out of sync and off. watching my character, and pacing my weaves, I watched my character on multiple occasions pull his weapon back as if about to do a light attack but then immediately cancel the light attack for a skill instead, (as you should be doing with weaving) however, the light attack never registered and dealt any damage. It would just go into the skill. I tried Wrecking blow (has a cast time) and also Blood for Blood (instant cast) as my spammables to see if there was any difference, and got the same result.

Cant say anything on bash canceling using MnK as I still would need more practice with that before I can be certain in my test results. (AKA im not good at all at bash canceling using MnK)

When the dummy would go into execute, I would sometimes have to mash the execute button multiple times before the skill went off, not sure if its pts lag or related to the animation changes, but I would end up light attacking twice before the skill finally fired off.

I also I tested the changes to the Huntsman mythic and put it on my 2h heavy attack ganker (New changes to mythic are VERY good) And multiple times when lining up the heavy attack combo, specifically after doing the fully charged heavy attack, Follow up attacks would not come out. There would be a pause before the skill decided to finally fire off. (about 3/4 of a second to a full second) Tested this with both my controller and MnK, again same issue.
Cant really chalk this one up to lag because I know what lag looks like when using heavy attack proc sets. On pts, There is a visible delay in when the heavy attack lands and when the skill I press finally decides to fire off. (Im normally Mashing the skill like crazy after my heavy attack anyways, So im sure in some instances, the skill was just not going off)

Lastly, If you REALLY Want to keep this animation reduction, First, Obviously please fix the issues with weaving and canceling skills that come with these changes as they are not quite where they should be for a live release, and secondly,
These animations need some SERIOUS polish. The Visual stutter on some skills (Race against time) and basic attacks such as with bow, unarmed, 2h, and Sword and Board are quite noticeably, VERY BAD and Jittery. They are not smooth looking at all, and feel very incomplete. They are no where near up to snuff in terms of the live server counterparts.

This is also not to mention the OBNOXIOUS canted tilt on all idle stances for every weapon.

I will say, You did a Very good job touching up on Dual wields Heavy attack animation from the last time you did these changes in update 46. It looks good. There is a bit of a stutter at the end of the follow-through, but comparatively to other animations, ill let this one slide, because it looks almost identical to the live server animation.

I am not sure that the amount of trouble that these animation changes are causing is worth a minimal performance gain, especially when we are introducing new stuff like skill styles and Apex Mounts with new flashy effects that will make you go blind. I DO Appreciate you wanting to fix performance, but I don't see how basic animations are such a big part of that picture.
Especially when we have other issues that need attention.

Again, Please Consider Shelfing these changes.

MincMincMinc · October 1

The amount of work they made for themselves with this seems questionable. Basically every skill animation needs to be gone through now. Worse off each skill animation transitioning to other animations can 10x the workload.

How does surprise attack animation look back to back spammed?
How does it look with light attacks inbetween?
How does it look with bashes after?
Light and bashes
mediums?
heavies?
Each weapon light/med/heavies/bashes?

There just isnt enough dev time and pts active members who even care to test and showcase these issues for them to ever get fixed. I think you and maybe one other member were the only ones to even check and report on this aspect at all.