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Star Wars: The Old Republic: On Combat Animations
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Principal Lead Animator Mark How has penned the latest in a series of developer diaries about various creative processes for Star Wars: The Old Republic. How writes about Combat Animations this time.
As with most things Star Wars, the team focused, at least initially, on the "iconic" clash of two lightsabres and working to ensure that this type of combat is brought to the game correctly:
We worked closely with the combat programmers and designers to ensure that the combat visuals do not detract from the gameplay experience. A key aspect we learned early in development was that players do not enjoy having character control taken away from them because of an action or animation. Similarly, we realized that any action a player takes in the game needs to be visually represented in a way that is consistent with the player’s expectations.
From here, How moves the discussion to combat cover and its importance in The Old Republic. The team was determined to make the animations work correct for barrel-rolling behind a crate, for instance. How talks about the length of time this took to function as it should, with the team play acting the way they hoped the animations would turn out.
All in all, it's a great article about bringing great ideas, seemingly simple ideas, to life within the constraints of MMO development.
Read the full article on the Star Wars: The Old Republic site.
Comments
With all the talk and hype Bioware is giving this game, I'm really hoping that they can live up to it and its a success. If GW2 and SWTOR end up being successful (as in delivering on promises) then we may start to see the return of the "good" mmo.
Time shall tell. But I'm glad that they actively thought about how to do the animations (though, I didnt read the whole thing so more may have been mentioned).
Some tasty bits from the Q&A-
"
Q: Are waiting queues cross-server and, if so, also cross-language? - Kisskill
A: No. We believe that fostering rivalries and memorable encounters with recognizable players are important in building a good PvP community on a server. We suspect cross-server queuing compromises these key tenets. Additionally, systems like bolster and same faction vs same faction Warzones (like Hutball) help matches pop frequently and regularly.
Q: How will the Bolster system work? – Kelremar
A: If after a time the Warzone matchmaking system has not found a match of players of the same level range, then it will start up a ‘bolstered match’ where players of varying levels will have their stats bolstered to within 20% of each other. Therefore, player skill disparity withstanding, the lowest level player will be 80% as effective as the highest level player in the match.
"
well... i was in beta and the animation were.... oh i cant say
So there will be same faction vs same faction stuff.
In War - Victory.
In Peace - Vigilance.
In Death - Sacrifice.
i just skimmed this article. so much if and if, and when. just give a release already, 3 years of waiting and u still tease?
Nothing new here?
"LOL"
BG & Arenas mini-games for gear-grinding and most likely a meaningless open-world pvp. I've already played that.
At least it won;t be the better part of a decade... *cough / DFO / cough*
The article speaks the truth! But the Sith say that truth is a lie... You won't know for sure until release. Jedi mind tricks?
In beta.
We like to play MMOs because real people aren't as interesting, real exercise and fighting hurts, and virtual females are attractive.
Is it just me or does it seem like the only characters that get these fabulous animations are Jedi Knights and Sith Warriors? The rest seem bland and boring in comparison.
yes the warzone that can be same faction vs same faction is called the The Pit and and pits players against each other in a game of huttball
It's not just you. And when those animations consist of clobbering the same opponent over the head 101+ times with a glowy wiffle bat, "fabulous" might be a bit of a stretch.
This sounds great. I'm extremely glad they didn't go the "cross server" route for the game. I think cross server teaming and battlegrounds destroys the sense of community that MMOs try to foster.
RIP Orc Choppa
Best combat animation i ever saw. It is so smooth and nice and only one game did that movement in pvp so good-wow. Not to fast not to slow, thats the way how it should be. We already created guild with friends i know. Now we have 23 ''dark side members''
It's Star Wars this time though.
Oh wait already played that too. It got ruined, eventually came back, then got fucking shut down.
Originally posted by Deleted User
So much of the game is centered around forced grouping that soloing is not an option, major design flaw in my opinion.
^
^lol
Luckily you are wrong. There's gonna be objective based world pvp with territory control, as well as open world pvp objectives on 11 planets if I understand it correctly. Also the commendations you get from world pvp will be exchangable for those you get from instanced pvp, meaning you can get the best pvp gear in the game by just doing world pvp.
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/367/view/forums/thread/327014/Best-PVP-gear-obtainable-through-just-doing-world-pvp-Seriously-Sweet.html
My brand new bloggity blog.
I get a good feeling about this game . So much money has gone into development . Its also being done by a company I respect and have yet to see do a bad game and StarWars is proberbly still the biggest franchise on the planet ( although that little wizard kids doing awfully well these days ) . While it could still go terribly wrong I personally really don't see that happening and I think the day its released KOTOR will explode onto the mmo market in the kind of way we only see once in a generation . I love the fact there will 200+ hours of gameplay leveling a character compared to the 20-30 hours it takes to level a character in games like WoW . I'm guessing it wont cater to the instant gratification/easyness of some other games so proberbly wont appeal to all those very young children which is good thing in my books .
Hm. From the article this is of some concern to me...Jedi (and Sith) can stand there and make their cool jump and fantastic slashing with the epic 'Vrooooom' sounds. Pretty much everything they do is attack, attack, attack..and maybe jump over there and attack. Now because they are so uber, as a Smuggler (to be) half my combat course of actions is ducking and rolling?
Would it be realistic for Darth Vader to be deterred by a crate?
Vader: Force lift FTW (and of course the crate then becomes a projectile/ranged weapon) 1K projectile damage.
Solo (Smuggler): Blaster! (Pew, Pew) 1pt deflected damage, 1 pt deflected damage...hmm..where's my crate. Good thing for my target lock while I roll around the room looking for another crate.
The better choice is to provide enough build options to give all characters access to some tanking, healing and DPS abilities and balancing the game so as to allow creative approaches to combat to work as opposed to planting any team that doesn't have a hard trinity setup.
Loads of MMOs pull this off pretty well, the notable exception being the one that has had to resort to cross-server LFG.
I'm glad to be wrong then.
Amazing that they worked so hard on Lightsabers and yet the lightsabers look more awful than I've seen them in almost two decades of playing Star Wars games.
We'll how fancy can you make a stick of light look? Especially when you're limited by a pre-existing IP based Franchise.
A lot of this is almost word for word what other developers like Cryptic (now Paragon) talked about in relation to CoH in '04. I didn't play MxO, but they also had a combat chaining system, which they talked about quite a bit and worked pretty well from what I heard. While iconic lightsaber battles in an MMO are cool, the foundation of the animation system is not something new.
It sounds like Bioware has been reinventing the wheel for what is eventually going to be a pretty standard hotkey MMO with flashy SW graphics. That's kind of concerning.
If you don't worry about it, it's not a problem.