Almost four months ago I created that thread as a suggestion in relation to character animations:
So today I launched the game for the first time since a few weeks. It downloaded this latest update and then I started playing around. I did not notice it at first glance, it took me about half an hour of doing quests around until, at some point, I went to Lion’s Arch and just looked around as I often do…
And whilst doing so, lo and behold, I noticed it, and told myself “Hey! Wait a minute! That wasn’t there before! They just added this!”.
Have anyone noticed that, now, when your character doesn’t move and you hold the right-click on your mouse to rotate the camera how your character’s head and neck also move to correspond to the rotation? In other words, your character turns his/her head to look at where you rotate the camera?
That’s exactly what I suggested four months ago!
Before this update and since the game’s launch, when you’d hold that mouse button and rotated the camera then only the camera itself would move, while the character itself wouldn’t move at all, which at the time felt – to me – rather odd.
Now, with this said, I do not know if my suggestion was coincidentally read and considered by one of the staff of the dev team at the time. Maybe this is just a coincidence after all and my thread was forgotten the same day it was created. But regardless of my suggestion itself being the catalyst of the animation update I would like to thank ANet’s dev team, or perhaps more precisely the animator(s) whom are responsible for the animation update. Sincerely guys, I am grateful!
It seems perhaps like a rather small maybe even unnoticed update (I think it’s not even listed as an actual update in the release notes!) for the majority, in comparison to the actual “game-play” related updates that were more important (with reasons, of course, not saying they were not!) but even a “small” update such as adding new animations like that, to me, greatly contribute to the level of potential immersion, not even for “role-play” purposes but even just for visual aesthetics during game-play per se, it’s just now more pleasant to me to do something as simple as idling in Lion’s Arch and making my character look at what I am looking. I feel more “connected to” my character now (I guess it is related to role-play after all!).
But, since I decided to post this within the suggestions board I would like to take this opportunity to… well, to perhaps add a little little something to my 4 months-old suggestion? Pretty please? Hehe. Well, while the animation is great I also noticed that if you rotate to a full 180ยบ to look “behind” you then the character’s head/neck’s rotation will stop and the character will revert to “default” (looking in front) viewing while the camera remains rotated behind the character. In other words, what would be “needed” to “complete” the new animation would be to make the character itself (not just head and neck, but also body and legs) to “turn around” to look behind and keep the animation corresponded to the camera’s position as long as the right-click on the mouse is being pressed. So that if I release the click whilst looking behind then the character will automatic reposition towards that direction.
Well I’m not sure if that was clear (and, sorry English isn’t my native language, not sure if this is actually clear) but I anyway, regardless of my “suggestion” this new update is great, thank you guys at ANet!