Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

I recently went back to Vanguard. I must admit the game is much cleaner now. But it still has one fatal flaw to me, Combat Animations.

Lets face it, the majority of our gameplay will be in combat. Combat animations for some reason used to be overlooked. However Star Wars Galaxies showed us that our avatars could spin or twirl their swords, pistols could be used to whip an enemy across the face, and a jedi could do some amazing maneuvers.

Age of Conan goes even further (as it should being a next-gen MMO). Decapatation maneuvers, slashing across the body, hammer-like slams, cool deaths from a caster's fire spell, etc give us even more exciting combat animations.

Going back to Vanguard, it was painfully clear I couldnt settle for the boring-bland combat animations. The melee classes all have the same generic slash. It was very uninspiring. The casters had a generic small energy ball tossed at the enemy that again was very uninspiring.

The core game mechanics are there. The quests are decent. The graphics arent half-bad (i had everything maxed, not as good as LOTR or Conan but nice). But I cant get into the combat with those awful animations.

No two weapons have the same animation, and the animations in game are certainly not "slash"

As for conan's "kill shots" I for one am glad, once you see it a thousand times it is just as boring with the added bonus of being tacky on top of it.

Oh and you can twirl swords/ any one handed weapon, monks can twirl their staff, and abilities have unique animations.

I wonder if many of the people who post here actually played the game.

Yeah I was going to say the same thing, my druid twirls his weapons in hand all the time when in combat, no idea where you came up with the characters do nothing.

Originally posted by Murugan

No two weapons have the same animation, and the animations in game are certainly not "slash"

 

As for conan's "kill shots" I for one am glad, once you see it a thousand times it is just as boring with the added bonus of being tacky on top of it.

 

Oh and you can twirl swords/ any one handed weapon, monks can twirl their staff, and abilities have unique animations.

 

I wonder if many of the people who post here actually played the game.

Every weapon has a different animation? What crack are you smoking buddy? I can assure you that there are alot of weapons that share the same animation. Heck most of the combat animations are the same between different weapons.

Oh I'm sorry no let me clarify every individual weapon out there, crafted and dropped doesn't have its own unique animation (like most other games do right?).

Weapon types have unique animations, there are animations for daggers, focus, axes, hammers, swords, (short swords are different from long swords), spears, great axes, great swords, staff, bladed staff, martial sword, hand to hand weapons, and ranged weapons.  Oh and with shuriken and bows you can actually see the projectile unlike other games where you have a simple animation.

I'm not sure on the number but each class has various combat animations from abilities in addition to several auto attack and intermediate animations.

Anyways they are redoing character models in the next update and will likely have to tweak animations for that, so what you see in game (while I have no problem with it) is only temporary.

I've never really seen the big issue with the combat animation.  I think there are definitely some animations like cloaks, jumping, etc that can use improvement.  However the combat animation seem pretty good to me.  I mean you can say they aren't much better then some other game but they sure aren't bad....  My bard looks great when he is fighting, he has numberous animations for his weapon attacks and even some spell like effects. 

I guess though there might be certain attacks that have poorer animations of maybe certain classes...

And no it doesn't have fatalities.  But then AoC is the only game with fatalities and it only has them with huminoid mobs.  Frankly I didn't much like them either as while the long animations played which did look cool, you however had no control over your character and sometimes the facing at the end of the animation was wrong.  Animations were neat.  Didn't Matrix do something like that?

I think one of my favorite things about Vanguard is the way the combat feels kinetic. After playing DAoC for years combat in other MMOs has really been lacking. I tried playing LotRO but the combat there, you just swing over and over, no real reaction from the enemy, you NEED the words to tell you if you block.

In Vanguard, I feel more so like I'm hitting the mob. His animations will be interupted when I bash him, and best of all, when I land the final blow, he gets smashed backwards and falls down dead. Synched perfectly. Casting animations aren't all that impressive, but what I've seen from melee is good enough for me.

Sometimes I feel like im playing another game....cuz in MY game the animations are fine, not the best but nothing to post about, they could fix as someone already said the cloak animations...but seriously even the jumping is fine for me, I actually like the animations for each action...its pretty cool.

Hell, I couldn't stomach the combat animations of Vanguard even when I only had Dark Age of Camelot and even City of Heroes to compare it with. Even then I thought Vanguard was far inferior. Now after playing Age of Conan predominantly, I definitely believe animation revamps should be towards the top of SOE's things to do for the game.

Poor animations were always what killed Vanguard first and foremost for me.

I can understand complaining about how the characters move about, walking, running and jumping etc.  I would agree with this, most move about like they have a broom stick up there backsides, but combat animations are pretty good. 

Once you get in your teens with the amount of skills on offer the combat animations shine through.  Roll a monk or disciple there animations are a joy to behold. You get to see flying kicks, sweeping kicks, spinning  weapons and if you go with hand to hand weapons you see them perform loads of different martial art moves.

Watching Dread Knights swinging around big two handed weapons, the animations give you the sense the weapons are heavy, not like in other games where it looks like they are swinging  twigs about.

The above is just my opinion, I will not disagree with you.  To me animations are like art, graphic's, books, music etc.  It's all in the eye of the beholder, people have different perspective's on what they enjoy.

Peace