No deathanimations!

[Repefe]

Give me the name of 1 company that recruit 10 new people just to get death animations working. Just 1 company, wont ask for more.

Dunno, I just hope there will be something cool about the game and that not every surprising feature will be turned down "because it's too time consuming to make".

[anotherdeadhero]

Would have been nice, some more flavor for the ARPG. Hell cut a few more things, take out random events and we got D2 again.

[ownager]

When you have the kind of income blizzard has, its very easy to implement these things, all this says is they are lazy and either dont want to hire more devs or devote a bit more time to the game.

People often think that an increase in developers results into a decrease of developing time. This is only partially true. The more developers you have on a project the more project management is necessary.

Think of this extreme example : A Project consists of 1000 lines of Code. You have 1000 developers, every developer could write his line in lesser than a minute. Project done in 1 minute ? Well, i guess you see the point. It would take endless meetings to get the lines of code into the right order, and just think of the debugging : "We have an error on line 728, ask Dev 728 => 728 says : I base on the work of 711 ... "

Every new developer has to be instructed. It isn't like you start working on a project like D3 and you are able to deliver results instantly. Also, the more developers you have, the more meetings you need to hold to get everything done. There are tools to help you with that , but they do not replace communication. All in all, it certainly depends on the kind of project. An artist to create a death animation could be successful in rather short time i think.

[Repefe]

People often think that an increase in developers results into a decrease of developing time. This is only partially true. The more developers you have on a project the more project management is necessary.

Think of this extreme example : A Project consists of 1000 lines of Code. You have 1000 developers, every developer could write his line in lesser than a minute. Project done in 1 minute ? Well, i guess you see the point. It would take endless meetings to get the lines of code into the right order, and just think of the debugging : "We have an error on line 728, ask Dev 728 => 728 says : I base on the work of 711 ... "

Every new developer has to be instructed. It isn't like you start working on a project like D3 and you are able to deliver results instantly. Also, the more developers you have, the more meetings you need to hold to get everything done. There are tools to help you with that , but they do not replace communication. All in all, it certainly depends on the kind of project. An artist to create a death animation could be successful in rather short time i think.

This gets spelled around over and over, but fact is there are ways to make it work and Blizz hopefully does not employ incompetent ppl who would prevent that. It's what programmers do ... make things work, no bullshit, no excuses. If it was too time consuming to do, they shouldn't have mentioned it. The routine where Blizz promises/hints something will be in the game and then backs away saying it would be too time consuming to implement is getting really old.

[Deleted]

Would have been nice, some more flavor for the ARPG. Hell cut a few more things, take out random events and we got D2 again.

Totally! It's not like there's anything else different in Diablo 3 at all! Just death animations and a couple little things. I don't know why we don't just have Diablo 2 HD as this guy says!

[Imnick]

This gets spelled around over and over, but fact is there are ways to make it work and Blizz hopefully does not employ incompetent ppl who would prevent that. It's what programmers do ... make things work, no bullshit, no excuses. If it was too time consuming to do, they shouldn't have mentioned it. The routine where Blizz promises/hints something will be in the game and then backs away saying it would be too time consuming to implement is getting really old.

No, Ownager pretty much had it right.
Programming isn't like building a house, you can't just have more people carrying more bricks there are things that only one person can work on at a time. Multiple people using one keyboard won't make for better code, nor will multiple people trying to code the same part of the game that the same time.
Everything in the program also needs to link together, so you need the programmers to know large parts of the system intimately even if they are not working on them. Teaching new recruits to do this quickly takes more time than it saves by employing them.
Too many cooks etc

[Tokas]

Don't add them -> Why are you so lazy Blizz?
Add them -> Another setback? Just release the game already!

that's what makes this forum so fun to read

---------- Post added 2012-01-31 at 04:16 PM ----------

sauce

LOL good one

[Restos3]

It doesn't matter.
People will complain either way.
Death animations -> OH MY GOD I have seen those a million times already, Blizz should remove them!
No death animations -> FFS Blizz, you greedy bastards can't even put this awesome feature in the game?!

[anotherdeadhero]

Totally! It's not like there's anything else different in Diablo 3 at all! Just death animations and a couple little things. I don't know why we don't just have Diablo 2 HD as this guy says!

Why even post, that's what I wonder about these forums sometimes. Maybe I should have said generic arpg instead of D2. Maybe this guy should have gotten laid last night who knowsss.

[Howard Moon]

The death animations (or "deathanimations" as it is now apparently a word) were kinda neat, but not a deal-breaker at all for me. From the sounds of it, they might add em on a future expansion, who knows.

[stumpy]

From the the comments on Flux's attention-whore post on Incgamers:

You’re making a mistake in believing that because we are so advanced with today’s modern new-fangled technology, animation work must be really “basic”. It isn’t. In our industry, we often joke about how uninformed people (you, for example) think there’s some magical “make-cool button” that we push, and our computers magically spit out refined, high quality work. I regret to inform you that this is not the case.

Take the death animation mentioned in the article from the siegebreaker biting a character in half. To animate this scene there are several factors that add to it’s complexity. The monster has to reach down and grasp the character- is it a stout barbarian? or a hunched over witch doctor? It would need to reach down differently to grasp each. Then each character model would have to be appropriately animated to be torn in half- if it’s carrying a sword, what happens? does he drop the sword? what if it is wearing fist weapons? what if a shield is on its back? does the shield stay attatched to the upper half of the corpse, or the lower half? by now you should see how this process can continue ad infinitum.

So, all of that trouble just to have one fancy death effect. What happens if there’s a dozen different bosses, and each has multiple special death animations that need to be done? And as Bashiok stated, after the insane amount of work is put in to do all this, everything needs to be tested. Test out all the class/race combos running through each sequence with every combination of weapon and armor type, make sure it all works the way its supposed to.

And what do we get after all this effort? A cosmetic effect that doesn’t alter the gameplay at all.

The last time I even thought about the death animations was four years ago - the last time they were seen or mentioned in any way.

[Lolitar]

Not that I care in the slightest about death animations blizzard needs to stop being so fucking lazy, they rake in millions each month and they can't even add all the animations?

Oh and don't spoon feed me the blizzard can't just throw money at problems crap it's just plain laziness on there part,I can't even think of a game without death animations in the past 10 years..

[BatteredRose]

Not that I care in the slightest about death animations blizzard needs to stop being so fucking lazy, they rake in millions each month and they can't even add all the animations?

Oh and don't spoon feed me the blizzard can't just throw money at problems crap it's just plain laziness on there part,I can't even think of a game without death animations in the past 10 years..

I can think of several.

OT: OH NOES NO DEFF AIMUNASHUNZ?! If that's a game-breaking thing for someone, I have nothing but pity for that person.

[Repefe]

No, Ownager pretty much had it right.
Programming isn't like building a house, you can't just have more people carrying more bricks there are things that only one person can work on at a time. Multiple people using one keyboard won't make for better code, nor will multiple people trying to code the same part of the game that the same time.
Everything in the program also needs to link together, so you need the programmers to know large parts of the system intimately even if they are not working on them. Teaching new recruits to do this quickly takes more time than it saves by employing them.
Too many cooks etc

Funnily enough extreme programming advocates programming in pairs as one of the metods to improve productivity and quality of the developement. Two people using one keyboard figuratively speaking do make better code from time to time. As for all these generic fears of increased management ... this is what happens if you do it wrong. And teaching new recruits does take time, but is ineffective only if you are close to deadline. Meaning if D3 is to be released in next 3-5 months recruiting new ppl now will not help ... because Blizz should have hired them 2 years ago.

[Imnick]

Oh and don't spoon feed me the blizzard can't just throw money at problems crap it's just plain laziness on there part,I can't even think of a game without death animations in the past 10 years..

I think it's laziness on your part as you were clearly too lazy to read.
The game has death animations, there are no longer going to be thousands of death animations with different ones for every enemy type.

Stumpy's quote put it better than I could

You’re making a mistake in believing that because we are so advanced with today’s modern new-fangled technology, animation work must be really “basic”. It isn’t. In our industry, we often joke about how uninformed people (you, for example) think there’s some magical “make-cool button” that we push, and our computers magically spit out refined, high quality work. I regret to inform you that this is not the case.

Take the death animation mentioned in the article from the siegebreaker biting a character in half. To animate this scene there are several factors that add to it’s complexity. The monster has to reach down and grasp the character- is it a stout barbarian? or a hunched over witch doctor? It would need to reach down differently to grasp each. Then each character model would have to be appropriately animated to be torn in half- if it’s carrying a sword, what happens? does he drop the sword? what if it is wearing fist weapons? what if a shield is on its back? does the shield stay attatched to the upper half of the corpse, or the lower half? by now you should see how this process can continue ad infinitum.

So, all of that trouble just to have one fancy death effect. What happens if there’s a dozen different bosses, and each has multiple special death animations that need to be done? And as Bashiok stated, after the insane amount of work is put in to do all this, everything needs to be tested. Test out all the class/race combos running through each sequence with every combination of weapon and armor type, make sure it all works the way its supposed to.

And what do we get after all this effort? A cosmetic effect that doesn’t alter the gameplay at all.

[Wynnyelle]

I don't care. Do what you gotta do to make the game ready for release and I'm cool. Player death animations aren't really necessary at all. I probably won't even notice.

[Maelle]

To the batmobile... must cancel my copy of D3, I was only it buying for the death animations.