What do you all think of this: an animation update so that all the 3rd person animations match the 1st.
For example:
-Shade’s dual dagger push and stance should be matching the 1st person animations to set it apart from other dual weapons.
-Kruber’s 2nd heavy stab followup on S&S should not use the gauntlet punch animation; instead, it should be a charged stab animation.
-rapier blocking animation should match the 1st person fencing pose.
I agree that 3rd and 1st person animation should match each other as closely as sensibly possible, and that there are things that could be done better on 3rd person, but honestly, the requirements for the visual appearance of the two are somewhat different.
In 1st person, we want to keep the weapons visible (so no putting the Elf’s otherwise nice-looking two-hander stance there), we want them to not block our visibility too much (sometimes quite problematic with shields), block should be clearly distinguishable from the ready stance (this could use a bit of a rework on Rapier), and of course, everything needs to look good. A bonus would be if the stances and movements also looked natural and comfortable (the block stance with Empire Two-handers certainly doesn’t feel like that).
In 3rd person, the requirement for weapons being visible doesn’t really apply, and neither does the visibility blocking. Different attacks should still look at least somewhat different, even if clearly distinguishing them isn’t as big an issue. Block should still be different from ready. What looks good (and natural) is different in both PoVs, and a current issue with 3rd person is that weapons should be different in their moveset and in ready stance in particular, as without reference to compare weapon lengths, it’s kinda hard to tell which weapons exactly your elf dual-wields.
So some thing could be done better, and the 3rd person animations could match the 1st person ones more accurately than they now do, but I don’t expect there to be a complete symmetry.
I really dont think anyone is asking for perfect parity. I think what we’re asking for is 3rd person animations that aren’t just lazily recycled from the first game, which a whole heck of a lot of them are.
Really, you’d need to be a nonexistent strawman to want 3rd person animations to fully replicate 1st person. Saltzpyre would look pretty stupid holding that flail up to his face, I’m pretty sure. Absolutely nobody wants this and I’m not sure where you got the idea that this is what’s being asked for.
What’s being asked for is for lazy garbage to be fixed. S&S charged attacks and push/stab, the elf’s dual weapon stance (arbitrarily reworked in V2 just because the elf is the devs’ pet, but the 3rd person stance is still V1), Saltzpyre’s rapier block stance, Slayer’s dual axe block stance (they literally just recycled the shield), Saltzpyre’s missing falchion overhead animation that was in V1, Spear’s nonexistent pushstab animation… the list goes on.