Animation Principles in Star Wars: The Old Republic

Intro

    I recently started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) and instantly fell in love with the game. I played a lot of it this past week, so I decided that I would use SWTOR for this blog post. After reading chapter 3 of the book, I noticed how all of the principles are considered carefully not just in SWTOR; but any game I have played in the past. Some of these things mentioned I had never even thought to consider; which I thought was really interesting.

How SWTOR Utilizes the Principles

    If you do not know already SWTOR is an MMORPG that has 6 different classes to choose from on either side of the force you choose to play. With that being said, each class has its own abilities and skill they can use. Building off that, the classes that wield lightsabers have some pretty crazy abilities that I think demonstrate the "Slow In & Slow Out" principle. the Sith Warrior class has an ability that allows the player to leap to the enemy and delivery a fury of attacks. This results in a "fast in" being the leap and a "slow out" after you defeated the enemy; this is similar to the cannonball example given on page 33 of the textbook.

    The class I am currently playing in SWTOR is the Sniper sub-class of the Imperial Agent class. As this character, I am constantly going between cover and popping up to shoot enemies in the head. With that being said, I think they did a really good job in the "Pose to Pose" animation aspect of the game. "Many animations blending together creates a better and more fluid game character than a single beautifully animated animation" (Cooper, 2019 p.g.31). I think this is especially true in this case because all the movements are so fluid and visually appealing. 

    The abilities I have on the Sniper are all almost instant, with a few abilities that require some time before it fires the shot. This is a good example of the anticipation principle because you have to charge up the ability and when it fires it could either hit, the enemy could dodge, or they could absorb the damage. So, between the time when the bullet leaves my gun and when it hits the enemy I get this "what's going to happen" feeling go through me.

    Going off the last paragraph, the timed abilities also have a secondary action that happens when you activate them. "Secondary actions are used to complement and emphasize the primary action of the character" (Cooper, 2019 p.g. 36). the secondary actions are very helpful with these abilities because it makes me feel as if I am actually locking on to the targets head and proceeding to take it off.

    Lastly, I think SWTOR does a good job with principle five; the follow-through and overlapping action one. I say this because, while playing you can just spam abilities, but it will not you use another ability unless the action you are doing is complete. I think this good because it keeps the player from pretty much folding their character by going through so many animations so quickly.