Into the Fray will be out tomorrow for Albion Online, and one of the significant parts of this overall big update is the rework of the Magic Staff line. Most of the lines will get reworked in this update, with the rest to follow. Today, the dev team is taking us behind the scenes of the visual side of the rework, which aims to make staffs more easily distinguishable, easier to tell apart in battle, and differentiate between one-and two-handed weapons.
The nature of the Magic Staff and how it is wielded is exactly one of the questions the art team had the job of working to distinguish. Not only did it come down to how many hands you’d need for a particular weapon, but they wanted to communicate something with appearance, size, and power level through the visual qualities.
This also comes through in the new animations, which apply to one of the game's oldest weapon lines.They wanted to bring the new designs up in line with more recent weapons, while still changing the look and feel. The visuals aim to create more of a feeling of being a mage, cleric, or a druid being a spellcaster instead of feeling like you're carrying around a big old stick. The Magic Staff line now has about four times as many animations as before.
Creating visual identity now applies to what kind of Staff it is. In the dev blog, they shared that a Nature staff will be made of wood and have leaves in their tier colors while Holy staffs will now have a glowing white circle by the top. New animations follow this lead, so healing spells will be “less aggressive than combat spells, which have forceful and fast motions to target enemies”.
You can head to Albion Online to read the full preview of the Magic Staff rework, including how other developments, like the War Gloves, influenced these new weapon reworks.
