Feldon Between the avalanche of news about Free-to-Play, the new UI, and Guardian tweaks (coming approximately one month after GU57), it’s been easy to overlook the new Spell Animations which went to Test along with GU57.
In short, all particle systems and related animations associated with casting spells and combat arts have been revamped. This means every animation such as roots or chains coming out of the ground, explosions, streaks of light, glowing colors, and pyrotechnics for all of the spells and combat arts of all 24 classes have changed.
Reaction on the EQ2 Forums thus far has been mixed.
Across the board, all spell animations have been substantially reduced and subdued. Animated roots and chains coming out of the ground have been replaced with a glowing yellow effect on the target’s feet. Ice comet has been replaced by a few wisps of blue light. The most prevalent descriptive word used for these new effects thus far has been “bland”.
While some viewed the original spell effects as “over the top” and “overly fireworky” (is that a word?), others have described the new effects as “flat 2D” and “boring”.
Beyond having a more subtle overall effect, there is another upside to these changes: The new spell animations should result in smoother animation for those with good graphics cards. Thus far, these particle system effects have been coupled to the character model, preventing GPU optimization.
Just as moving to Shaders 3.0 (and rewriting the Shaders 1.0 pipeline) has allowed your graphics card to do more of the work of displaying EQ2’s graphics, these new Spell Animations should hopefully make them bearable even during raids. Currently on even the most advanced hardware, raiding requires disabling or reducing spell animations just to maintain a viable framerate.
Spell animations are intended to scale with the Tier of each spell.
Not sure I’m terribly happy with this. I liked the brilliant displays. During raids I could always toggle on my reduced particles if I really needed to (which wasn’t often, TBH). At least I had an option. If bland goes live, what options do we have?
Set off fireworks?
What is going on over there at SoE? I was optimistic about the new SP, but this recent combination of changes (F2P, StationCash on merchants and in-game currency displays, along with making the graphics (spell animations) more bland…) has left me with a really bad feeling about the direction of the game. I’m going to miss my high quality game…
I never had a problem with displaying spell effectsin full 24 people raids.
Just tune them down a bit, set it to one spell effect per char / NPC and they are not taxing at all.
Funny about this change is that one player claims he hast fps problems WITH the new, bland, wow-style, boring spell effects (which I don’t like at all 😉 )
i always had to turn off particles during raids anyhow cause things got too “fireworky” for me too.. glad they are changing this
My PC runs all the effects fine; I have them cranked up, I solo most of the time and group once and a while. They are a lot of fun and, in my oppinion a large part of a the glam of the game.
From what i have tested out. I have see a smoother sense of action created from my playing. Also the effects seem decent, though my opinion that some spells/ and arts should be just a tad more reflective to what the spell or com-art does.
I like the chains coming out of the ground. I like the fireworks. If I wanted bland effects, I’d just turn off the particles. Which was always possible. This only takes away; it adds nothing. It’s not an improvement.
Having particles turned on to high in a group (or heaven forbid a raid) environment always just wound up looking like a firework and laser light show (which as an added bonus, made it impossible to see what the hell you were doing.
Good riddance, imo.
Complete waste of developer time when most replacements are shoddy.
was expectintg them to go the other way, psychadelic overload, this is. . . . unexpected.
TBH would have preferred they just swap the current effects over to GPU instead or maybe even as well as the blander versions..
The whole point was to dumb down the graphics enough so that the servers could handle the massive influx of people. Like FreeRealms.
Yes, the old graphics were laggy, but now they’ve been reduced down (even at Master level) to just repetitive sparkles and flashes. I used my spell graphics to tell what I was casting before. Now they all look the same. It’s laem.
doesn’t make sense to me that they supplant fireworky with an option very close to what is already available.
if this was server side stuff i could understand, but this just provides 2 options that are more similar. bland and off
‘fireworky and off’ is a superior set to ‘bland and off’.
I hate these new spell effects, to be honest. They look underwhelming, to say the least, and just plain boring. The effects were a big part of what made me enjoy EQ2.