I am all for oldschool gameplay for sure. The pace of combat group-centric style and progression of older mmorpg's such as EQ is better in my personal opinion... much more rewarding. One thing I have grown accustomed too, and something I think younger generation gamers require, are fluid animations.
Without fluid animations, people won't play, only perhaps some of the oldschool crowd. A lot of non-AAA mmorpg's seem to lack in this department, it is much more important for modern gamers than some people realize.
Started playing mmorpg's in 1996 and have been hooked ever since. It began with Kingdom of Drakkar, Ultima Online, Everquest, DAoC, WoW...
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Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
In EQ I played my bard in first person because it was more fun that way. It made it easier to run over zone walls and fall through the world that I did many times in EQ. I did go back a few years ago to EQ and run around in my bard in 3rd person and his run animation was bad but it didn't really bother me that much.
It won't matter how great the general graphics are if all the movement and combat is jerky and disjointed.
I think WoW is a perfect example of this. Fluid animation, imo, is one of the biggest contributors to the success of WoW.
However, graphics - particularly animations - are rightly considered important since these are what we will notice as we watch our tank forget to taunt! Simple, yet fluid, animations will be more than enough for me!
Cannot wait to see more streams ...
... to compare the animations of course!
I think this is a really important aspect to a successful mmo and should not be downplayed or overlooked.
The way mmo's were: Community, Exploration, Character Development, Conquest.
The way mmo's are now : Cut-Scenes,Cut-Scenes, solo Questing, Cut-Scenes...
www.CeaselessGuild.com
To be honest this seems very typical of western dev team. Short on staff, short on money, short on vision, yet trying to sell what is basically a niche indie as a AAA title...
When it took ESO years to introduce basic features I lost any faith that western studios are truly committed to making this genre of game anymore.
Camelot Unchained looks like shit as well in all of the play vids or screen shots. I could jump in my way back to 2005 and be super excited about it or Pantheon, but in 2017 this game looks old before it has even left the runway.
Eq2 (outdated as hell) , swtor (albeit improved later on and why Sorc is more popular than Sage by miles) , Eso to some exent , is true that animations are a bit meh ....and dont forget Rift ugh ....
however animations arent everything (b&S , Tera as examples)
Also, in addition to gameplay over graphics, I'd also vote for a smooth, polished game that runs well on machines that don't have to be top-end (not garbage either, but have some sliding scalers for mid-tier machines).
And, the Pantheon developers have continually discussed that they have been optimizing performance at each stage (and have learned the importance of this from VG's launch). The graphics and animations could be the best, but if the game runs like crap, I'll only be staring at pretty screenshots.