Guild Wars 2

Given recent comments from various devs (Colin, mostly) that it simply isn’t feasible to program interactive chairs that work with all races and sizes, we might want to brainstorm other means of achieving the effect.

One idea would be to do something like in Aion where sitting makes your character deploy a small stool and sit on that. This would just be a new animated emote, maybe /chair, and perhaps the style of stool/chair would vary with race. Or even be selectable, so /chair gets you something with a back and arms and /stool gets you the, well, stool. It won’t help with sitting in booths in taverns, but would still help immensely with the current situation.

Another idea, in parallel, would be giving a choice of sitting postures. Maybe just put in a /crosslegged option as that lets one sit in a much more compact fashion. /sit would still do what it does today; adding postures helps one sit appropriately on the terrain.

Along the lines of new seated postures — in Age of Conan there is a /lean emote (not sure that is what it is called). If you do that near a wall or other vertical surface, you lean back on the wall with your arms folded and your legs shifted or even crossed a bit. I know GW2 collision detection has you stopped before you get fully to the wall, but the effect would still be handy if only from certain angles.

I think it’s Age of Conan that also gives you a different seating posture if you sit on an edge, so your legs bend at the knees and your feet hang down. That would -almost- make sittable chairs, albeit requiring very precise positioning by the player to trigger the effect.

Champions Online has two different sitting animations, /sit and /sitchair. The latter causes your character’s legs to hang down as if they are sitting in a chair, of course. Having these two different animations available (to be manipulated by the player, to make their character use a chair/bench/stool/edge properly, which took a bit of finagling) always made roleplay or taking interesting screenshots look really natural (once you finally got them seated correctly, that is).

Of course, if you use /sitchair while just standing on the ground, your character’s lower legs disappear into the terrain and it looks odd. But that’s not what the emote is for!

Champions Online also had a great variety of possible character body types, from large beast-legged men to thin, fae-like characters. I understand variety in racial appearances is the major issue preventing GW2 from having seating function well, and GW2 runs on a different engine than CO, so the physics and animations work differently.

I’ve always really liked CO’s emotes, though, and I thought their /sitchair should be mentioned as something to look at while we’re on this topic.

I fully support the idea of emote variety!