Question about the spell graphics.

ylanois · July 2007

I have a question about the skills in this game. When I first started playing this, I was in love with the game. I was very impressed with the various choices you had in choosing your class. After a while and trying a lot of them out, I have to admit I was a little disappointed in the graphics for a lot of the skills. Although a lot look nice, like the leaves that swirl around the Warden when he's casting, the spells effects seemed to be repeated for a lot of the classes, just with different names. Another thing I thought was strange was that the ice spells were all lightning bolts that came down on the enemy and another spell (for the summoner) which was called Dust blast (or something like this) was a red sword that appeared in front of the enemy and slashed it (this skill was also repeated for the Templar, just with a different name). The animation itseld for the spells weren't bad or anything, but it didn't seem to make sense at all with the name. My question is: Has anybody else been disappointed by this? I haven't found another thread discussing this, which is why I'm asking. I'm not bashing the game, I still think it's great. It's just something that bugged me.

Jarlath · July 2007

I agree to some extent with you. I think different races and different classes should have different movement and casting styles, and emotes etc in the same way that they're physically different.

Most people dont mind it though and I don't see why SoE would go out of their way to fix something people aren't that fussed about.

bahamut1 · July 2007

I totally agree with you. I would love to see a huge ice comet come out of the sky and pummel the mobs. I would like to see some more variety on spells that are similar, but named differently.

However..., you knew it was coming... It takes a lot of programming to come up with ~40X24 classes=960 spell effects for all the spells. They usually come up with a hundred or so, and tailor them a little differently here and there for levels and such. Coming up with 1000 different spell effects would be pretty big, so that's why you see them repeat for the same archetypes.

I do like the ice spikes that pierce the mobs, and the boulders gating on top of the mob and pummels there heads. There are some pretty cool effects.

EDIT: Yes, I realize not all 24 classes cast spells, but the same crew comes up with spell and skill effects, so they are working on animations as well as the particle effects.

M1sf1t · July 2007

The biggest issue is that different spell effects going off in a 25 person raid or in a heavily populated area would bring your computer to a screeching halt. The spell animations are kept limited so that your computer does not have a ton of undo burden placed on it trying to fetch a ton of different spell effects for every person on your screen.

In other words it's done so for performance reasons.

quaiky · July 2007

like previous poster told they are sticking with a limited number of spell and casting animations mainly to keep the the data that is needed for them limited. this game has 24 classes and each class has more different spells than in mayn other games so you would need a lot animations if you made all unique. that would be a lot data that your computer would have to have ready when he is in a raid or in another area with many players of different classes that each are fighting.

also design time for art department is also an issue here, but i think client performance is the bigger one cause the game should run on as many computers as possible so you have to keep animation data as well as number of polygons and some other values as low as possible.

That said yes some spells could be assigned graphics that fit the spell better, for most of them its ok, but some animations feel a bit wrong. For most of these you could even use another existing animation.

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