So... EQ is 20 years old and still has expansions and level increases... tons of DBG store items coming out all of the time.... Its all such a blast to still experience Time-Locked Progression Servers (minus the bots), live servers are still pretty decent. What about character animations? Some of them look good/great but, others just look very odd. I'm speaking from a Luclin (new model) perspective I dislike the geometric, pixel look. Some of the animations still look like they were half-way completed: When playing as a Bard and using the Ogre animations... the breastplate will jump off of the character playing wind instruments. Trolls only use one arm to swing a 2-handed weapon, Dark Elves and Wood Elves do that weird posture with their elbow when idle, there's gotta be a few people who can agree with me on this... No doubt hundreds more who can point out more odd character animations that could be fixed. I wonder how troublesome it would be to change any of that. Lots of effort went into changing spell effects and the models altogether but, they could still use some TLC...
Human female running animation cracks me up. I don't think this is something worth spending dev time on, but there are certainly animations that look, um, less good than others. Bendy plate armor when characters do their hair whip idle animation is also amusing.
I beleve the limitation is the engine the game runs on. It is 20 odd years old after all. That being said, one of the oddites that still bugs me is the animation for arrows being shot from a bow. The arrow comes out of the bow in the bottom quarter of the bow, not the middle.
20 years later and still so much to do... Will velious armor textures ever be fixed for the SoL models ? Which other gods beside Bristlebane did play chess on the giant chessboards ? It´s so mysterious ! It´s not only a timesink for us players.
I'm not sure if it is just me or not, but I've always thought that the Luclin models had worse animations than the original models.
One of the limitations is that there is no per se game engine EQ runs on. EQ predates such; that's a term predicated on a modern paradigm about which EQ knows naught. It was built from the ground up! Less "cut from whole cloth" than "woven from raw fibers". The "game engine" of EQ is ... EQ.
never really cared for the newer animations as they always look like there out of breath. Only have on for my chars so I can see heroic armor graphics on chars. Andarriel
Did the Luclin models ever get updated at any point? I turned them off about a week after I got the expansion so I don't remember exactly how they moved. I just know that the swimming and flying kick animations in particular were comically bad and looked unfinished (like the rest of the expansion).
Nothing has been done to them. People have been saying things like that about them for years. Lots of the animations look half done or poorly completed and could use some help. I understand it if DBG is just letting EQ run out of fuel even though they're raking in tons of money with krono.
I don't get the impression, even removing PR framing, that DBG is simply letting the game die. Character models are just not a priority fix as the return on investment doesn't win out over other concerns. I think they've said as much, pretty plainly. Maybe Absor in the FoH AMA?
Yes, we were told the cost of redoing character models was too high and there would probably not be any return on that investment. So instead they came up with heroic armor ornamentations to cover up the pixelated models. And they have made improvements to the texturing of luclin models a few times that I've seen but they still need a ton of work.