If you don’t want the majority of players to use them fine. Don’t put them in the interface, but at least give us a console command to toggle them back on. They’re already there for goodness sake. All you have to do is flip a switch.
Edit: If you’re wondering how hard this is to do, take a look at this. These are the classic Tauren animations and they’re in the game RIGHT NOW.
I’m just asking for the option to turn them on that’s it.
Except some of the classic animations like the ready bow has been overwritten? And some of the abilities needed to be reworked on because they have little code things to tell the PC to do what animation?
I don’t think it’s easy as “flipping a switch”. (and i’m no code expert either).
Did they ever give an explanation as to why they homogenized the animations?
classic character models are still in retail as well. some of the children are like 3 polygons total
I mean it made sense for monks, because you are learning it from the pandaren by doing the same moves as they do. Granted, it’s a little too samey, making the students (non pandaren) who learn this look like masters already, but i let it pass because of that.
The rest of the animations, i’m not sure why. My guess would be to save money and resources, but my counter guess to that is it would take money and resources to make them all the same. Or maybe it’s to save on time.
Sweet lil polygons. I love them so
Yeah monks I can somewhat understand, but damn the racial animations were some of the most flavor you could get in this game lol. So depressing they removed it (melee).
Casters somewhat retain their racial flavor identity but melee is stuck with a 9 iron approach shot
Yea, Legion’s animations kinda ruined it for me too. It just looks goofy.
Caster animations are solid enough i suppose.
Literally the reason I main feral since then lol.
I have a frost dk alt though, they gave them an ALPHA animation for obliterate so I’m happy.
Clarity would be my initial guess but the benefits of that and the dozens of other ways to get that useful information is present.
When a player is casting a “strong” spell you generally see the animation sequence regardless of race / class that it looks powerful; at the same time that information is conveyed via “Player is casting X” and the one time you get smacked by that informs you it’s something that’s powerful.
The other reason is potentially re-use and using GPU instancing; better performance to use the same animation data across an entire race vs having a variety of race + class combos.
Something like 150+ animations for a single race, if every race was completely unique it would be in the thousands; good read on this technique is here https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/04/16/animation-instancing-instancing-for-skinnedmeshrenderer/
Not saying WoW’s client does the “exact” same thing, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t something similar.
Insightful take on it, I appreciate it.
But my simpleton brain just sees it as taking the easy way out xD
You aren’t wrong… per-say; I would kinda argue it’s neither easier or harder than making a bunch of additional animations.
If we had unique animations for each race and gender (and there exists some obviously because not all rigs are the same) it would be a lot of up-front work from their animation team but any new additions would be easier to do (you just modify the rig and add the new animation).
Trying to re-use means having to use a standardized rig and your animation needs to support that rig; this means more QC involved and when you need to add say… “swimToFlyAnimationA” it needs to look similar to ALL of the other playable races (since that’s your artistic direction).
If it were me in their shoes I would wager it was done more for performance reasons but as I said before I could see it being done by-choice as artistic direction; only their team knows the real reason.
Agreed, and here’s why…
Healing Wave: the water swirling around the caster looks super neato – and it would be nice to have the water swirling around the recipient as well… but the two little splashes of water that jolt to your healing wave target really irk me. The same could be said for Prayer of Healing.
Healing Surge uses the racial casting stances… but with the Healing Wave water animation. Kinda neato, but again with the two splashes that drift to the recipient…
Chain Heal and Lava Burst share a casting stance, and I don’t like it. I’m not redirecting lightning here… no need to use the Water Tribe’s techniques.
I wanna be clear here. I’m not asking Blizzard to make the old animations work for the new spells or anything like that. If there isn’t an animation for an ability then simply don’t play it. The deathbringer’s will transformations still have the classic animations in them and they are perfectly fine. Sometimes the animation is to just stand still instead of an attack and there’s a certain charm to it.
I think they removed the ability to do it because they liked the new animations better since they put time into them (people value things that they put time into and new is usually perceived as better). And that’s fine if you don’t want to put it in the interface, but giving us an option like /console classicAnimations 1 WOULD BE AYE OKAY WITH ME
This is completely client-side. No one would know you’re using classic animations. They will see the new animations.
There’s a negligible performance differential and it’s likely a gain in performance to use the classic animations.
There are people who enjoy the golf swing more than their racial strike animation?
No way. There’s just no way. Aesthetically speaking each racial 2h strike is infinitely better than the tiger woods pga tour
I don’t think “all” of the classic animations are still in-play; I think just enough to handle a few NPC’s and toy’s that transform you (ie. when you become an Ogre or umm the Bird guys from WoD).
Edit: Should note if you want classic animations you will also need classic models, since the old rig is also needed.
They’re in the game though is my point. They’re just not being utilized. It’s not like they need to patch them back in and even if they did need to they already exist. It’s trivial to add the option in and it would make a lot of people happy.
Nah they’ve already rigged the new models with the classic animations. I didn’t even think about that though. That would be a nice option as well /console classicModels 1
The switchboard some of you people think Blizzard has must be massive.
“Sir, mages are underperforming again, should I flip the switch?”
“Oh, looks like the world boss is dropping its mount at 100%, flip that switch!”
“I can’t see anything! This room is so dark? How do I turn the light on? Good lord, Bill. All you have to do is comb through literal days of nonsense to find and correct the typo to turn the light from off to on.”