Everyone thought the prospect of individual flight animations was the bee’s knees (or wings). It was tested for a bit, and everyone bitched about not being able to choose an alternative — at which point it was pulled …
… and may not be back. Castle quotes the Animators:
HereÂ’s the deal. Originally we wanted to put alternate flight poses in purely as additional flavor. Nothing more really than the alternate idle cycles that are already in game, like crossing your arms, putting your hands on your hips, etc. This is why there were random to begin with. When we put them up on the training room, it became clear very quickly that you guys saw them as more than just random variations. For a lot of you, these poses defined your character’s attitude and style in a way that was outside
of your control. In reaction to that we tried to make them selectable in the only method that we had, which was to make them sequential rather than random. We weren’t really happy with that solution, and a lot of you guys weren’t either. So we took a step back and re-examined it from a broader perspective.Here was the opportunity to give another layer of character customization to everyone. Rather than implement the quick and easy solution, we wanted to hold off on it until we could implement the right solution. It wasn’t because of people whining about them on the forums, those people had legitimate concerns. There were issues that we couldn’t resolve in time before Issue 8 was going live. Instead of holding back Issue 8 to resolve them or just leaving them in the state they were in and impacting a good number
of players in a very negative way, we pulled them out of Issue 8. We haven’t completely shelved the idea of a custom animation system, but in lieu of the Inventions system, Task Forces, and other things that we’ve been working on for Issue 9 and Issue 10, a custom animation system has a much smaller impact on the game as a whole. Because of this, it’s gotten pushed back in the list of priorities. I can’t say when we’ll do it at this point. I can’t even say that it’s something even possible or feasible to do at
this point. I can pretty comfortably say that there are things coming in Issue 9, 10, and beyond that are much more exciting and will impact everyone who plays the game.
Or maybe they will …
However, there is some good news here. We didn’t think it would be possible to create these alternate flight animations as an emote. Emote animations have to be limited in what they can interrupt as well as be interruptible by core animations, such as movement or attack powers. I had a flash of insight the other day about this though, and I believe I have figured out a way to set these up so they can be triggered via an emote but still function in the way they need to. I’ve tested this internally
and it seems to work fine, but I can’t test all of the permutations. We’re treading into somewhat risky waters by allowing an animation to trump a core movement animation. The way this will work is if you turn on flight and start flying forward (using autorun works best in this case), you can enter the emote name and your character will transition in the alternate fly forward animation. I think this resolves all of the issues we had with it originally. It won’t interrupt hover, what you see on your system is
what everyone will see on their system, and it’s completely optional and selectable by the player. You will be able to use the one you like or not use it at all.We won’t be re-adding the banking animations which were basically an attempt to do a flying strafe. We also won’t be introducing the no-strafe movement on player characters. This is only the alternate fly forward animations.
Which would still be cool …