Reason for Animation decline?

I hope one of the devs can answer this.

So the current gen console clients won't see any benefits at all aside from a few tweaks to loading and stability?

It's going to be the exact same thing when the PS4 came out. Everything should look a little crisper and run a little smoother. That's it. Temper all expectations.

We also used to have animated npc comms that are now replaced with static images:

OMG!!! This is so true! How in the world has this game regressed so much? It's like after Sony sold S.O.E this game just went downhill ever since. I wish that never happened.

Honestly, I think a lot of it is just was just a balance pass at one time that choose to standardize a lot of the animations; I wouldn't be that surprised if using a power with two different weapons used to cause the power to have slightly different cast times or something like that which could alter the dps of that power depending on what you have equipped.

Some of it is probably to reduce how resource intensive the game is and to keep the game file size low since I imagine fitting it on console drive space could be a problem at some point compared to PC since I think it's quite a bit harder to expand your drive space on a console and I doubt the Switch has any where near the storage space that Xbox or PS have available to them.

The game is still held back by what they had to do to make it work on PS3, too, I imagine a lot of the legacy codes makes things difficult.

I think I remember that, from way back when, when I was still on PS3... I remember thinking they looked like claymation.

I don't remember what was their reason to change it but oh my god I hated the change. Now I have Batman staring into my soul.
Bring it back!! But make it look good lol

I agree 100%!