FF14 has some context sensitive emotes and characters that range from being below the waist height of a normal human to ones that are about half as tall again as a human.

All CoT would have to do to have similar emotes is essentially tag each character with what height bracket they fall under, then when an emote is used targeting another player it'd read what bracket they fall in and play the appropriate emote. One or more height brackets above? Character goes on tiptoes to do emote. One bracket below? Character bends down to do emote. Two brackets below character crouches to do emote.

Or you could even do it simpler if the game can tell if you're looking up or down, then you can just use that to judge if a character emotes upwards or downwards.

FF14 does a lot of things really well, and their emote system is one of the best I've ever come across.

Edit: there's also the option of just adding in emote:tall and emote:small varient of any multiplayer emotes and letting people sort it out themselves.

blacke4dawn wrote:

Brainbot wrote:

Lothic wrote:

Fair enough.

To be clear I'm not "anti-grappling" here. I'm merely cynical enough to realize that everything else being equal the Devs of CoT would more than likely tackle providing kissing emotes that they could sell in their store [b]BEFORE[/b] they tried to implement a feasible set grappling animations for general combat. This is simply a matter of "low hanging fruit".

I didn't think you were anti-grappling and I agree that if the devs were to tackle the interaction between models problem an emote like the interactive kiss would probably come before a grappling set.
But I was saying I think the likelyhood of either is unlikely at best based on the devs input in the grappling threads.
If they weigh in and tell me I am wrong then OK but until then that is what I base my conclusion on.

The way I understood it is that it's not just an animation problem for grappling but that it also has a little mechanics tied into it. Take a wrestling/grappling move like suplex or similar that would actually move the location of the opponent. MWM would have to either make it so that the enemy springs/teleports back to its actual location after the animation finishes or those animations could only be used with powers that have the appropriate knock effect.

Realistically though getting dual (or possibly even multi) character interaction emotes would be one step towards getting a grappling combat system since the basic system for character-animation interaction would most likely be the same (basing that one MWM's love for making system as flexible and widely usable as possible). Even though both a very very unlikely I would say that until we get such emotes we shouldn't have any hopes for grappling.

Another problem I can see with a true grappling power is that it would also prevent the enemy from attacking during the grappling animations, essentially allowing a character to lock down a single enemy.

Though a way around that could be to have the attacks the grappler uses not be grapples initially, but each attack having a control effect rider, then when the enemy is fully controlled (stunned/held) instead of them being controlled if the grappler hit them with the attack that made them fully controlled they'd do a grapple animation to the mezzed target. Essentially trading a proper Mez effect for extra damage. Though then this would be a full powerset instead of an aesthetic which goes against the decoupling design. Or at least I can't think of how to make it not just rasslin'.

Hah! Who made that image? I was just in that Cedarville last weekend.

Huckleberry wrote:

Hah! Who made that image? I was just in that Cedarville last weekend.

According to the Buzzfeed article I linked to it was from the Flickr of someone named “Kate Ter Haar”.

notears wrote:

You know what would make a good valentine's day gift? Neon Hearts as an aura/ power effect... now THAT is something I would pay for!!

Also pixel/voxel (dunno if that's the right spelling) hearts, they can also come in neon.