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Looking Unique (Animations)
Shroom_Mage
Member UncommonPosts: 863
Even in game where there are a lot of different clothing/armor/costume options, characters often look fairly similar. In a lot of games this is due largely to the fact that you can't change their body size/type, but there's still more to it.
There's something that I haven't quite seen implemented yet that would really top it all, and that's character animations.
Typically, every character uses the same (often boring or repetative) animations as all other members of the same race. I noticed in the E3 video, characters often did backflips after attacking. While this certainly looks heroic, it'll proabably get pretty lame once you've seen everyone do a backflip about a hundred or so times. Even weirder still is when you decide you want to make a big, hulking, knight-type character. I think there are two really great approaches to this.
In the first approach, you character's "animation set" would be chosen as part of creation. Each set would include idle animations, combat stances, as well as walking and running animations, and more.
In the second approach, you character's animations are determined by your stats. This way, only a character with high agility might be able to do that backflip, and someone with high strength might flinch a little less when hit with an attack. As you might have already figured out, I haven't really put a whole lot of thought into this approach.
Anyway, having multiple animations sets for the same types of characters would be a neat idea, if it's not already too late to implement. In particular, I think this would be useful for idle NPC animations. In most games where NPC's spend the vast majority (if not all) of their time just standing around, they all stand in the exact same way, but if you look at a real group of people, they all stand differently.
Just an idea I've had.
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
Comments
That sounds fantastic. I don't know how possible it would be to do (would they have to create animations for every possible combination of clothing/race/gender?). Assuming the engine is able to be updated with new emote animations based solely on race/gender combinations, it'd definitely be terrific to see a wide variety of postures and movements available. I always liked the /mood setting in Star Wars: Galaxies, as well as the way that certain words would trigger animations when they were spoken or emoted.
Ah! Paranoid! Best one by far IMHO.
Too bad about the rest of the game now though. Sad.
HJ-Royce
Simutronics Staff (GM)
http://www.play.net/hj/
or you could go even further and design you own emotes in a menu were you have the possibillity to pull and twist you rag-doll characters limbs and save postions and tie them to commands and actions.
would prolly be misused but that kind of freedom would be really fun to play around with and would enable players to get really creative and swap "emote packs" or just make some genuinely different acting characters
If anything, though, I think they should at least allow us to choose an idle animation. In most games when a group of people stand around in conversation (or anything other than combat, for that matter), they all stand in exactly the same way. The idle animation (or rather, just the position in which the character stands) should be selectable in some way, if anything.
A few games do have emotes that let you stand with your arms folded or something, but their "stance" emotes always disappear when the character takes a step, forcing you to put in the command over and over. Someone might want a character that always stands a little sideways, for example. To do this, the player shouldn't have to enter a command every time they stop moving. Maybe being able to toggle these sorts of emotes would be a good idea.
Also, making the characters move their hands when they talk (like in WoW0 is a really cool idea. I especially liked the way the animation was different if it ended in a question mark or exclamation point.
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
Just to add to this, another thing I would really, really like is a selection of voices for my character. This doesn't have to be anything extravagant, but in just about every MMO I've played, your character has some stock sound clips (read: one per gender) for things such as getting hit in combat. A few choices of pitch and timbre would really go a long way. A few sliders to really customize that part of your character would be one step beyond fantastic. I don't know if I'm unusual in this, but the ability to put custom voice mods in Baldur's Gate 2 was one of my favorite things about the game. Since Hero's Journey is largely about creating and maintaining one's original vision for their character, this is one more thing that would go above and beyond the MMO status quo in that department. Just a thought.
EDIT: I just wanted to clarify that I'm not looking for any customized clever character sayings for things, since I firmly believe that a character's speaking voice is best left to the imagination. The little grunts and yawns, however, can often be a reason not to choose a particular race for one reason or another. Perhaps you see your character as a strong amazon warrior, but she squeaks like a mouse whenever she's struck in combat. Score- Stereotypical Cuteness: 10, Suspension of Disbelief: 0.
Planetside and Neverwinter Nights are both good examples of this idea. Both these games give you a different set of stock voices to choose from for either male or female and healthy range in both. (Although, planetside was not as varied as neverwinter nights.)
Having at least a few different choices for voice for male/female categories can only add to the quality and diversity of gameplay
"I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed person."
I like that voice idea. Neverwinter Nights wasn't bad with their voice set options, but they had one very very serious flaw... They were all human voices! A couple of them could double for other races, but if you were a dwarf (and wanted to sound like one), you didn't get a lot of choice.
I think the semi-custom voices would be good. Like, leave out the all the "Strike at them!" and "I require assistance," and leave it at just grunts and what not.
One of the things I didn't like about WoW were the human male voices. Every human male had a very soft voice, despite having wrists the size of my head. When they got hit or died they would just moan a little. "Ah... oh..." What if you wanted some berserker guy who would yell and roar in battle? "Rrr... RAAAHHH!!!!" Or maybe even an old wizard... "Oh! Oof..."
Good ideas for the voices are noises for...
Jumping, attacking, getting hit, dying, laughing, yawning, landing from a high place safely, landing from a high place not safely, drowning (not the same as dying), and greeting.
If anyone's played recent Zelda games, they'll know how each character makes a noise of some sort when you first talk to them. I really like this because it gives you a perfect idea of the voice and tone of the character, but doesn't run the risk of poor voice-acting. (Although I must say, EQ2 surprised me with the voice acting. It surprisingly didn't suck. Even so it's a whole nother story with NPC voices.) Things like "greeting" could be something similar to what's in Zelda. Maybe just a "Hey!" or "Hmm?" or something even less. Other types of noises (which would be different emotions, such as Smug or Contemplative) would be good to add in. I also think there should be a difference between laughing, giggling, and chuckling. In WoW, as a dwarf, you could type /giggle, but you laugh loudly and slap your knee instead.
It'd be great if they had three or four voice sets per gender, per race (but not sub-race). With three each that'd be 24 different voice sets, which wouldn't be that hard if they consisted only of various noises. Additionally, though it's not necessary, you could change the pitch a little bit to make it sound different enough to be unique.
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
all of these ideas are really getting me tingley about what they could introduce into the uniqueness of my hero. having my brute stand around, looking impatient, arms folded, possibly tapping his foot every now and then, throw in a *sigh*.
Then there's combat (*drool* at the possibilities). huge barbarian throwin his weight around with say the old ball 'n' chain (LOTR anyone? yes, it was awesome <-- fanboy) would definately set me apart from the paladin running around healing everything (*smacks paladin after healing me*). then when the huge rock golem decides to see what has been taking huge chunks out of his leg, he pivots and smacks me into a wall...but i dont go in the corner and cry, i let out a huge wailing battle cry, drop my ball 'n' chain, pick up a spear (it was there, i swear) and go rambo on his ass. then i used the rocks from his corpse to build my hut *flex*.
anyway...if you could do half of that in a game where otherwise my orc makes the same stupid grunt after getting crit on...well
cheers
]
[edited for divia's viewing pleasure
Is spelling fanboy like fanboi some weird japaneseyish kind of thing..
I've been kinda turned off to the japanese since I read about kancho.. uggggk.
They just get weirder and weirder... kinda like Michael Jackson.. although I guess they both probably started out really weird.
blah.
HJ-Diviana
Hero's Journey GM
Hero's Journey Official Site
Hero's Hall
Ah I remember that about Baldurs Gate series. The voice of your charecter and sex portraying your peronalities. It was quite simple actualy. Anyways a good idea to add to a game like HJ.
One thing to think about when remembering all of your favorite single player games is that they were short, most average less than 40 hours of play time. So those different voices didn't really have a chance to get old. Comparte that with the 300+ days I have on more than 1 MMO character and no matter what some of it will get old. Heck even some of the NPC group members voices and sayings in Baldurs Gate series got old by the end (though I have to admit some never get old "Ahhh darkness, good for sneaking up on evil")
The same goes with animation, unless you can change the animation around fairly frequently they're going to get old as the weeks go by and adding new animation isn't that easy. First someone has to actually go through and create the animation, then you have to code it so that the animation gets tied to specific commands or actions in the game, then you have to bundle that up so it can be sent to the client.
I'd really like to see a game that allowed you to do custom animations and custom voices but until we get VR suits and real time voice software that allows you to actually speak but modifies the sound thats transmitted to fit what you want your character to sound like and some really huge internet pipes to send all that data down I don't really see it happening.
Yeah, the lack of personality in animations has annoyed me for quite a while... Like, you're supposed to be some haggard little dude, but you walk strait backed and aroggantly. What if you want to play as some hunched over little old wizard? Anyway, I think it'd be awesome if they worked out a system that maybe had different sets of animations available at character creation. Or, like, you could set your mood to "Extremely Pissed Off"(Or XPO
) and you'd move in a way that conveys more power.
I like the voice idea, too. Like, in CoH my character, who's supposed to be a robot, just sounds like an ordinary human...
... I haven't played the games that were mentioned, but in Monster Hunter (PS2) you were able to choose different voices. I liked that, but some of them just sounded crazy.
Anyway, here's hoping that'll be, at least in some way, implemented.
This game needs to facilitate roleplay. the huge problem with the games out now are that they get old quick, and the ability to roleplay is non-existant. there needs to be tools to roleplay like many of the suggestions in this thread, merely offering roleplay servers is not enough!
Unique animations for standing, idling and emoting is essential... and if this game is anything like their text based game i'd have to put money down that Simutronics will do this better then everyone out there.
sure its harder to code animations and tie them to commands but holy pickles they have "an army of GMs" i cant beleive if you had 2 er 3 full time programers, that they couldn't knock out a couple animations a week... seriously why not!?
and how about alerts? me and you are standing there debating about animations and suddenly a small alert pops up exclaiming that *ShRoOM has just stuck his tougue out at you, How rude!*. because honestly a little animation for that isnt really needed... but all these little gestures like, dismissively waving your hand and so on... are huge on roleplaying.
the big games out there are missing this and the second ANYONE (hopefully HJ) implements a varied and extensive system of tools to roleplay, your going to see an exodus...
Simutonics has the ability to do it, i think we'll see them slowly adding to the gestures and voice... and in time it will be impressive, but id hate to see them drag their feet on something that is a cornerstone in their other games.
also, a game thats not about flashy shoulderpads and has roleplaying tools ... would keep the little annoying twerps away. so many people b|tch on all the forums here on MMorpg.com and alot of the best posts concern roleplay and a dislike for the anoying playerbase of Gankers and 12 year old mentalities. people are leaving games after a year or so because it getts boring, and theres no substance to them. Roleplay is whats lacking, because after a while... you can only handle so much combat...theres got to be another reason your in the realm aside from trying to kill things for Phat LewtZ... Hero's journey isn't the hottest talk on the boards and a part of me is happy about that... i see a sharp parrallel of hype and unbalanced games... HJ in my opinion is the only one trying to hit the core of the reason we're on here doing this... To Roleplay
...something every other game has forgotten, or lost.
Be one with it.
Well having 2 or 3 full time programmers dedicated to attaching the code to the new animations created by the 5 to 10 full time animators doing nothing but creating emotes might do the trick. Problem is that the people with those skills tend to like to get paid, and paid well, for their hard work. So are you willing to pony up the extra money in monthly fees to pay them? Are there enough people out there willing to pay to make a game profitable?
As for MMO's not having the tools to roleplay, that's just not true. I've at least tried every major MMO that's come along in the last 7 years or so and everyone of them had the tools to allow you to rollplay. They at least have the same or better tools for roleplaying that any text game has.
Don't believe me, log into EQ and type "/em stick's out %? tongue at you, How rude!" - I'm not sure what the macro for character sex is in EQ anymore but there is a %something you can add that will say his/hers etc. - and what appears in your chat window is "Soandso sticks out his tongue at you, How rude!". Every other game has a similar system so the tool is there. The problem is it's a graphical game and if there isn't an animation to go with it people tend to dismiss it.
Over and over I see the argument that what's lacking in MMO's is roleplay but every game out there gives the players the tools to roleplay and the players CHOOSE not to use them. Then what you have is people clamoring for someone to FORCE roleplay.
My question is how do you do that? Who's definition of roleplay do you use? What determines if a character is roleplaying or not?
For example I've seen RP threads where people want to ban all OOC chat because it detracts from RP. I was thinking about this at my pen & paper D&D game this week when we were chatting about CoH, WoW, EQ, one of the players week as an intern in the ER, while the DM was drawing out a room for an encounter for us and checking some stuff in one of the books etc. All of this stuff is why I drive an hour every week to play games with these people. It's all about having a good time and not about staying in character for the 4 to 6 hours we're playing.
I've also seen more restrictive games at GenCon and such where everything said at the table must be in character. While I found it interesting to watch those games, much like I find it interesting to watch a play or movie, I didn't think it would be fun to play, it seemed to much like work to me.
Over the last 6 or 7 years I've probably averaged 15 to 20 hours a week in one MMO or another and if I had to stay "in character" that whole time I'd have left the genre long ago. In fact I've only known 1 person that stayed completely in character all the time and that person was a professional actor and used the game as a form of practicing different roles. I know of one other that had developed specific mannerisms for his character and always stuck to those (referred to himself in 3rd person etc.) but even he would talk about out of character topics on non OOC channels.
So I guess my question is, besides tons of animated emotes, what tools do players feel they need to encourage more roleplay?
Several games have RP servers and "rules". EQ, EQ2, WoW, etc... Sadly, in each of those games RP, even on those servers is sparse. In CoV/CoH Virtue is the Unofficial RP server" and it's not to bad, but most RP events are planned and/or scheduled out between any Supergroups wanting to do a heavy RP session. In ALL the previous games (And yes, I've played them all) there was little or no random RP ie. come into a area and just run into someone who RPs with you and you have a little fun.
The only exception to these was SWG. I was part of a huge RPer community and town. It was easy to have random unscripted RP at any given time. OOC was allowed as long as it was denoted as such and we as RPers, had a set of guidelines for general and scripted RP. Nothing crazy, mostly common sense stuff. Much of that was facilitated by the Town we built and it not being in an instanced "housing area".
As for why RPing seems to fail in MMOs generally? It's hard to say why exactly, rather I believe it to bemany things.
I have a large group of friends who play games of all sorts and we all usually are MMOers. Some are RPers, some aren't. One thing I find interesting is that they all will usually head to an RP server if it's available. Why? They all have different reasons they site but one reason always comes up. "RP servers have tougher naming rules and it's usually enforced". People get sick of seeing YoYoDawg BawlSak and usually get sick of the people who name themselves such.
Let me give an example of were this is very abundant. WoW, which is a very good game, fun to play, interesting visuals, excellent backstory, etc.... The maturity level in WoW is just above Convicted Sex offender (No I'm not saying the player are Sex Offenders). It's very very low, so even on an RP server it can be hard to get into RP even on the RP servers. And please, try not to RP on a non-RP server with the l337 dudes around. That maturity level and general boredom with the game's quests is why I don't play anymore.
Also, I think people definitions of RP is different depending on what RP experience you have.
For me, I've RPed pencil and Paper since I was 12 and trust me that's a very very long time ago. My longest campaign I ran was almsot 10 years running. I completely invented my own modern horror world (and Fantasy world) and ran it. The Modern Horror ran 10 years with a core group of 4 players (The fantasy one ran 8 when we all stepped away from it to focus on the Modern one). I have over 1500 RPG books in my collection and played pretty much all of them. Therefore my opinion of what RP is might be different than what someones opinion of it might be who's only ever played MMOs and RPed in them.
Sadly, to many Old School RPers (Long time players of Pencil and Paper RPGs) tend to look down on the new group of MMO RPers and I think that's tragic. I've seen it played out over and over on many forums for the MMOs I've played.
Anyway, I probably could could speculate on this for hours but I'll end there.
So a stricter naming policy would help?
I have to agree that WoW is a bit to...lets just say loose...with their policy.
The problem with this is twofold. The first is that unless you have a strict set of guidelines in place and a GM staff to run around enforcing those you're going to get some names that slip through. We've got some really good programmers working on the team but even so I don't think you can come up with an automatic system that will catch everything.
The second part is coming up with those guidelines. For example I had a two characters in the original EQ that were a pair of Dark Elf brothers, one a cleric and the other a necro. The cleric was Yarnot Daidyet and the necro was Arntya Daidyet. Some people like amusing names like those and others say they're not RP. I also played with a regular group that used version of the names of the Scooby Doo characters. We actually played them in character and spent most of the time hunting in zones with a lot of undead. That was RP but it can also create problems because technically the Scooby gang isn't right for a fantasy universe and of course the game companies don't like it because it puts them at risk of the copyright holders coming after them.
This is why most games have opted for RP servers, they can try and concentrate their GM staff on those servers to monitor these elements and at least check up on player complaints more quickly. As you noted though it still doesn't FORCE people to roleplay.
I really can't see any way to force roleplay in an MMO, its to big and you have to many different players.
And before people start pointing out Simu's other games I know they have a strong RP community there but they're also games that are over 10 years old and started out in a different era. They had a high initial barrier to entry when they first started. How many people, as a percentage of the population, even had a computer much less online access 10 years ago compared to today? Of those that had access to both how many were into RPG's and could afford the high monthly fees to play a game on the computer? These barriers meant that it was mostly like minded people at the outset and by the time more people could join in there was already a well established community that was pretty good a policing itself. There were also more options so a lot of the L33T types went off to "prettier" pastures.
You kind of saw this again in SW:G. There wasn't a lot of "content" when that game first came out so it tended to attract those that were more into building and shaping their own world - the roleplayers and crafters. While I feel that the recent changes to the game were, in the long run, good for the health of the game I can see why most of the people that had played it for the last two years were upset - sadly I think those changes were at least a year to late to save the game but thats another issue and I've rambled on long enough
Having played UO, I think I can agree with everything that Sisca has said.
The strictest of RP simply isn't fun. I started playing the game because I knew a guy who played it and he told me about how amazingly awesome the game was. He described it by explaining how you could be absolutely anything you wanted to be, and how you could get your own house, and how you could run player cities.
Well, this all was possible, but only through RP. So, early on I learned that this was an overly pretty painted picture for UO, but I did join his RP guild. I had some fun there, but the guy was what could probably best be described as a power-gaming, player-killing, role-playing nazi. He was a great guy in real life, but he role-played a total a-hole, one of the worst on the server. Basically anyone who had heard of him hated him, including most of our guild. Our guild role-played the citizens of Nu'jelim(sp?) because it was otherwise a completely desolate city. As an example, he had some players role-play the guards of the city. Making them wear uniforms was a neat idea. Having them patrol at certain hours every day and write reports of what they saw (which was the same every day: nothing) was taking it a little too far. To make a long story short, I eventually decided that I wasn't up to this "hardcore" roleplaying and quit the guild. I still roleplayed, but only when situations called for it. I didn't struggle to RP even when discussing something decidedly OOC.
As for WoW, well, their "RP" servers were a joke. The extent of RP that went on there was trolls adding "mon" to the beginning and end of every sentence that they ever said. People there just didn't understand what it meant to roleplay. They thought that saying "ranks" or "seasons" instead of "levels" meant you were roleplaying. In my book, even acknowledging the existence of levels is OOC. And that's what General chat was for. Of course, that was another nightmare. Some people insisted that General chat was to be IC, but all this meant was that everyone must always put OOC tags around everything they said, because they never went IC anyway.
I would like to say, though, that I think I liked CoH's level of RP. Maybe RP isn't quite the word for it, but I found that in that game more than anywhere else, players were very willing to come up with truly unique characters, to the point of typing out extensive backstories for them. I think EQ gave you a space for a backstory or profile of some sort, but it was rarely (if ever) used.
Giving more tools not just specifically for RP, but for defining your character, allows some players to play the character they imagined in their minds. When people can be who they want to be, RP sometimes comes naturally. So far, HJ seems to be one of the better games in this category, but I think that animations would really add to this. Like someone said, if you want an old wizard, you're liable to look more like Zeus because you just can't get him hunched in quite the same way.
Choosing an animation package at creation would be great, but it's difficult to patch in later. Patching in moods that include things like idle animations would be much easier, and still allow for similar uniqueness. ("That guy always seems to be angry.") I don't know how models have been designed or if they'll be able to share animations at this point, but that would be a huge factor in whether or not this is possible.
Could any GM's share whether or not the different character models share animation skeletons? (If that's the right term.)
"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
i hate having to constantly reference SIMU's text games but when you created a charachter you were led through a sort of guided tutorial when you hit the town in gemstone, i know alot of MMo's basically do this but HOW gemstone did it felt like a well crafted and important part of the game. finding and going to the raging thrak to get the experience boost for hearing about proper game ettiquette never forced anyone to roleplay but it sure did facilitate it... and you couldn't just wait for him to be done by getting out of your chair and getting a sandwich either, because he tested you. at the end the whole thing was immersive even though you were tlaking about OOC things... it made sense to get experience because you actually did learn something.
im a big fan of subtle guidance and i happen to beleive it works if its not done in a sloppy fashion.
vaired animations are important for facilitating roleplay, its obvious... whats not important is crap that appears in a text window. your suggestion with EQ and all that is nice... but anything in a text window with other OOC text isn't immersive at all. Simu made alot of official actions and verbs for its text based games, and if you thought of any they didnt, you could /act them... but it didnt appear all that official either. i think an official text verb list as well wouldn't be too much to ask since they've already put so much time in developing that product/all those verbs for their other games, why not incorperate a verb list into HJ? have verbs appear in a seperate and official plaque or window within the playing field and not offscreen in some text box.
other forms of subtle guidance could take hold in clothing where most cloths at a shop at a certain town that caters to a certain race look relatively of the same style, of that races tastes. if you want varied wardrobe that would be a reason to travel to a more diverse city.
encourage other players to encourage other people to roleplay, that could simply be done by saying thats what happens in the game already.
keep offering EXP bonuses for people who are obviously roleplaying like SIMU did in the text games.
Make in game changes seem (whenever possible) immersive, if your changing a spell... release documentation about how the Archmage university decided to tweek the spell a bit.
make enemies talk and seem prejiduce, judgemental, alive... in alot of games ive played, most monsters say nothing, and when they do they pretty much say one thing. If i meet up with a troll, and he taunts me by calling me a "pussycat" because im a suwari, or an orc exclaims that he will enact revenge upon my human soul with the same wrath that humans showed his birth village then i would be surprised. i think that a world that seems more alive, and less obviously mechanized by programs, adds to immersion--->facilitates roleplay.
when you ask how, i say the answer is in the subtle and little things, big things are great... but to me, its seeing little nuggets of wisdom, excitement and care in a game that causes me to appreciate it, interact with it and eventually become loyal.
Be one with it.
Ok on to your comments.
"Varied animations are important for facilitating roleplay...whats not important is crap that appears in a text window"
See this is the problem. For Simus other games all you have is what appears in a text window and so that's perfectly acceptable but for any graphical game that's no longer good enough. What people don't realize is that coding in the text for a text based game is much easier than actually creating animations - and making sure those animations will work across a variety of model types - and then tying those animations to specific commands (or verbs).
At one of the recent IGDA chapter meetings we had the design team from Wideload games doing a post mortem on Stubbs the Zombie. He happened to mention that at least 30% of their animation time was spent just getting the run animation right (I think he said on Halo they'd spent at least 50% of their animation time on it). Getting this right was more important than getting a lot of the other animations right because that's what players spent 90% of their time watching. This is literally weeks of work by a team of animators.
Now put that into an MMO. Getting the run animation is just as important since players will be seeing an awful lot of it but so is getting a lot of other animations right. This takes time and someone that's not only a talented artist but also skilled at using a complex animation program to first build it and then spend a lot of time just tweaking it.
Personally, I'd love to see each character have their own, unique, set of animations but I just don't see how you get those in game with the current technology. The good news for HJ fans is that Simutronics is building this game and since they've been running these MMO's for over 10 years now they know that they have to continue to grow and expand. This means that they built the system from the ground up to allow new things to be added over time as painlessly as possible. So who knows what can be added as time goes by.
As for the rest of your comments. Those I agree with 100%. It is the subtle things that can make the world more immersive.
i understand the animation problem. is there anyway tog et the text actions out of the text box and over your players head or something similar? SIMU has such a huge repository of verbs have they even thought about using them at all? fuse text a bit with the MMO... and not just in the text box but on the screen in the playing feild so i dont have to keep looking off screeen to see whats going on.
Sisca, how much effort will HJ put into emotes? have they stated that they feel its a big part of the game? i realize its complex, but to what degree of dedication does SIMU have to animated emotes?
Be one with it.
Oh! How wonderful...I was just discussing this with my SO the other day and my thoughts on the subject are still very fresh. I'll probably be repeating things some others have said, but I wanted the chance to just write my thoughts down.
The subject came up because I was wondering why people in text-based RPGs like Gemstone seem much more inclined to begin to roleplay than in graphical RPGs, and at the end of the conversation, one very definite conclusion we had is that eloborate and intuitive animations for expressing mood, hand-gestures, etc. are crucial to successful RP. And the second is that if the MMORPGs are ever going to be "next generation", they NEED to re-embrace their RPG roots.
Why do I think the last? Because what keeps people playing these games is interaction with real people. Community. Some games try to produce this by limiting one's ability to solo, forcing people to group and thus interact. But this has many many weaknesses that I'm sure you are familiar with (there are thousands of message board debates that cover the subject better than I could). I believe that creating community and interaction by having a vital, active "in character" world is the true future for good MMORPGS.
And the reason animations are crucial comes back to what has already been said in this thread. That textual descriptors are grossely inadequate when you have an otherwise graphical world. People instinctively want to look at the people, not the text box. And when they look at the people, they see a blank stare and a stiff puppet. They do not perceive the "real" person. It is VERY hard to use your imagination when you already have that graphical world. Text-based games are like reading books...we are used to coming up with our own mental images.
So not only good animations for emoting, but a set of different animations to choose, and the ability to set "moods" on characters, and greater logic on how animations might automatically kick in. Maybe letting characters write macros for themselves, such as "if another character stops and stares at my character for too long without saying anything, my character will give them a dirty look".
This might not be something that is possible yet, but it should be the vision of what is to come. Because without the ability to make our characters come alive, we cannot fully engage other people in interesting and engaging RP. And without that engaging RP, a game is only so many buttons and numbers.
ZenJosh: I'm not an animator so I don't know what the plans are for what animations will be going into the game. As I've said before the engine is built around making it easy to add new content so even if there isn't the wealth of emotes you're hoping for at launch there's nothing to say that they can't be built up over time. So to answer your question...I just don't know at this time
Foxeye: I agree that what these games are about is community. I think that many of the newer games have forgotten that. Those that haven't have tried to force the communites by forcing people to group to advance and that doesn't really work either.
I personally feel that those arguing for enforced roleplaying as a way to build communities - I realize you didn't say this so this isn't aimed at you
So what I think you need is to provide the players with the tools to build communities and then give them an excuse to do so. For example provide good tools for finding a group, provide good guild/clan management and communication tools, a good friends system so you can locate those people you grouped with last week that were such fun etc. Then you need to create an excuse for the players to find each other.
Sure the easy way to do this is to force people to group to complete tasks, and that may be appropriate for some tasks but I don't think it has to be for every task. If you're going to require a group, or multiple groups, to complete a task you should let the players know that going in to that task and it can't be something that they feel is critical for the advancement of their character.
But there are other ways to encourage players to form communities. For example, my wife was a trade skiller in EQ1 from the outset, we haven't played EQ1 in at least a year and a half and yet she still visits the forums at eqtraders. This was a community that built out of the common interest of discovering new tradeskill recipies and decoding the recipe books. The Safehouse started out as an EZBoard message board aimed primarily at rogues and since most of the people who tended to play rogues had a love of exploring and finding new quests it became the place to go to find quest information. When I first started playing EQ1, back in 1999, I played a monk, at that time there was a monk message board called The dojo where monks would gather to ask questions and post stratagies and tactics for pulling - this was when a good feign puller could mean the difference between Fear being a challenge or a disaster - and how to go about practicing things like feign pulling.
So if you give the players something to talk about, something that sounds like it should be important but there's nothing spelled out, get them talking to people and they'll join forces and go poking around looking for more information - both in game and out - and pretty soon you have a community of players.
As I've said I'd love to see a system where you could have tons of animated emotes and could even build your own but, sadly, the technology just isn't there yet. It's definately something that I think everyone building these types of games would love to have though so, yeah, it's a goal to shoot for down the road.
I love e-motes and animations. The more the merrier.
And I agree that you can inspire and stimulate people to build communities within a game without requring them to do so in order to achieve their goals. I like to solo and I also like to group. It depends on my mood and my time constraints. I prefer games where I have choices!
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Ah! Paranoid! Best one by far IMHO.
Too bad about the rest of the game now though. Sad.
One of my favorite parts of SWG was that characters would "auto-emote" while speaking. Made them seem more alive.
Hmmm, doesn't WoW also have that functionality, to some extent? Like, simply typing "!" in chat produces an emote?
OK, my input -- although this may be far too late to bother with in HJ, it seems that some emotes should be "succeed/fail" types.
Example, the backflip emote mentioned above might be more "entertaining" if there were a chance of doing it correctly or "failing" and doing a prat-fall.
This way, some special emotes might have "branching" effects to make them more unique.
As I recall, in the now-defunct AC2, humans would "tuck and dive" when they jumped into the water. Moreover, by fooling with the direction arrows you could make rather complex spins and spirals while diving. This led me to finding some giant tree (forgot name) that had some puddles of water around it and running way up to the top and, after positioning myself very carefully, I would dive off and see how many flips I could do. No falling damage for landing in water -- but it was pretty easy to miss the water entirely (splat, ouch).
Strange that I got such pleasure from such a simple thing as "diving into water" but it really was fun.
Also, in AC2, playing various kinds of musicial instruments with other people so that you could form a band and try interweaving various melodies and rhythms was pure joy, as I recall. SWG also had the ability to play music (and dance, of course).
Will be interesting to see what the creative minds at Simu cook up for emotes and/or music.
~ Ancient Membership ~