Generally alright. It gets better as it progresses in the game which makes sense. Unfortunately held back by animation and visual direction making scenes fall flat at times. I already yapped a bunch about this before so I’ll paste it here.
Issue two is that AO lacks something i think it really needs, and that is a talented dedicated animator. I don’t mean a modeler or a builder who happens to be alright at animating on the side, I mean someone whose job it is just to animate cutscenes for story and side quests and bosses and animals. That is the issue i was talking about earlier in the review. In a story game, the visuals and visual direction are as important as what is being said by the characters. Imagine how much better the cutscenes in chapter 8 and throughout the entire story would be if they were full screen and had more movement than just characters rotating and nodding and moving their mouths. Imagine if in the skyhall throne room, you could see Allanon and Lucian fist fighting, or before the Fenrir assault, you could see Nilah tracing the plans over a physical map of the nimbus sea. For the darkness talent, imagine after you got the 3 castaways to sacrifice there was a cutscene where you were in the sacrifice chamber of makrinaos with the 3 castaways blindfolded and Cazal hands you a knife and tells you to do it. Then you walk towards them and it fades to black. Instead of that you get a popup that says “Castaway Sacrificed” and that’s it. Or in the shipbuilder quest, you get an action cutscene in the final part of you and the navy commander tag teaming the pirates, fully animated with impact frames and everything, instead, all you get is him at the end saying that the fight was cool. These kinds of scenes stick with a player more and makes the quests memorable. Animals also suffer from this animation issue. The animal models look amazing, but their movement doesn’t feel smooth at all. Take a bear for example, imagine if instead of standing still after rushing past you, you saw it clawing at the ground and then jumping at you again. That kind of animation would match the quality of the models. Voice acting isn’t feasible for a roblox game with this much dialogue, but a person whose job it is to just animate definitely is. Vetex please hire an animator.
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