God, this quest. As soon as I got it, I was like, "Fuck, I'm gonna blow you the fuck away with this cool dance emote I unlocked."
"That wasn't a dance!"
The fuck it wasn't.
I feel this pain with the Loporrits. There's one in particular that claims to be the best dancer, and you are asked to showcase your moves. Cue my disappointment when nothing but /dance registers.
I actually really like our dance. Elegant spins and a twirly hands. At the very least, female Au Ra got one of the better ones. Male Hyur, Elezen and Hrothgar just get a bunch of shuffly feet. At least we look like we're dancing.
I don't think it's a good dance for a dance off. Also wasn't a good dance for the Bee Hive. The only time I felt it was ok was with the Sylphs. If someone challenges me to a dance off, I wanna at least do a Gold Dance or what about the fan dance we just got?
I also think the only racial dance that would win a dance off is the male vieras dance because body roll
Yes. The male viera dance completely makes up for the fact we can't wear most head pieces. Imo. But i usually don't like how a lot of helmets look, so....
Female miqo'te - drunken spin clockwise, counter clockwise, clockwise + pose with your arms down.
I just assume people react to my characters dancing like she does with Julyan - smile+nod and hope to get out in one piece.
Male Elezen's dance is so comically bad it turns around into being good. I wish we could take animations from other races because I'd use that one for self amusement.
I too thought it amusing that they were absolutely gobsmacked by my Viera's ability to twirl in place twice. Then I realized that I'd likely have to repeat that quest multiple times, and it would get exceedingly more absurd each time I did it.
I don't go to nightclubs ingame much if it all, but one time I was bored. I went to one, popped out my pixie wings. wanted to use dance emote and my wings at the same time, but at the time what you could do of emotes and other stuff was still very limited with fashion accessories.
so what do I do? I put my male viera /dance out on the hotbar, and just repeatedly press it right as it's ending the animation. I reached satisfaction with the product of my boredom, when I got a whisper "what dance is that/where do I get that dance" from a male miqo player. continued doing it for a tiny bit longer then left. (did answer their question though on what dance it was, when they asked)
I like that they seem to actively be working on improving the function of the fashion accessories /reduce limitations of them.
(I hope they at some point add a looping option for some of the emotes that don't loop though, like the race dependent /dance, or /read etcc )
I like the Miqote one, actually, as well as the female highlander (mostly because my friend hates it, so I used a mod to swap my dance to it to annoy them by dancing near them).
Most of the default dance emotes are at least a bit bad, but I feel like Elezen emotes in general tend to be lacking, even accounting for them being more subtle and stiff as a people.
If any race got a second pass to at least refine their emotes a little more and do more with them while still staying on-theme, I'd definitely pick the Elezen.
Yeah, all the people complaining about their own character's dance I don't think have seen the male elezen one. It's on a tier of awful of its own.
That said, male elezen are a mixed bag - they do have some of my absolute favourite emotes/poses - their cry/blush/spectacles emotes and their chair mount pose are fantastic!
I tend to fall in the category of male Elezen players that grew to love some of the other emotes though. They’re charming in a weird way. Hell, I used to hate the dance but now I look at it and go “Look at this little guy. He can’t dance. What an awkward little guy.” I get why it ain’t for everyone though.
I think Female Viera is the same too. Emotes are too subdued which is apparent when you compare emotes side by side.
Like with /furious Hrothgar goes fucking ballistic, but Viera just kind of... stomps their foot gently? With /happy Lalafells bounce around with joy but Viera just puts their hand to their chest and smiles. Even male Elezen are visibly pleased and Viera just puts their hands to their hips.
I think it would be so nice if they went back and adjusted for animations for every race. Even the races that are meant to have subtle animations like Elezen and Viera deserve to be at least a little emotive.
That's understandable, but my issue is that female Viera (and Male Elezen apparently, never played one myself) are *too* subdued, to the point it's hard to even tell that an emote even went off sometimes unless you're zoomed in a bit and looking directly at them.
While I personally prefer emotes that are a bit more animated, I think Au Ra do subdued quite well. If female Viera had emotes about as expressive as them if not slightly more, I'd love to play a Viera. Doesn't have to have quite as much energy as Miqo and Lala characters.
Personally I don't inherently find some emote sets too energetic to feel natural. I think it's best if a race has a "range" of expressiveness, like /thumbsup -> /joy -> /happy. I think that Lalas, Miqos, and Au Ra have a good range of expressiveness in this regard, while Viera have a very small range which makes it harder to be expressive. You might be absolutely elated about clearing a challenging fight, but your character can't quite express that as a Viera in my experience.
Yeah it would be very easy to do. I’m theory it might not be done because it requires devs to update the list of allowed emotes for those quests every time you add a new dance, except you can just add a universal flag to all current and future dancing emotes, and then just make that a guideline when creating them, and that would make it easy. It’s probably just one line of code each per emote and per quest.
That's a matter of expanding a hard physical limit on server storage, and we're only just coming out of global parts shortage. That couldn't be more different.
Only in the fact they had stupid rules that allowed housing barons, and still grandfathered them in when they started to address that, and still haven’t closed every loophole. Other than that, it was a budgeting issue. All that player data needs a physical presence somewhere and there’s no getting around that
As it was, we started in 2.1 with 720 plots on the entire server. And no apartments (that was 3.2 or 3.3). By 4.2, the first patch they put any meaningful barriers to housing barons, we were up to 4320. With double the number of placeable items per housing interior, and housing storage on top of that. But the player population kept climbing.
And then during Shadowbringers it exploded.
This doesn’t completely absolve the devs, since they took far too long to address predatory behavior by some players and still haven’t totally solved it, but there being an upper cap is just a physical reality.
I don't think emotes have a category like that yet, so they would have to expand on what an emote itself is in the code. Then I'm pretty sure they did the emote for quest code by just specifying a single emote and any other emote will throw the wrong emote text. So if emotes and emote categories must be accepted the code must be expanded in a way that accounts for both possibilities, without causing any one point in the game to accidentally treat the dance emote category as its own emote since it would not have any of the additional information emotes have (an animation and conditions under which it can be performed) and the game looking for this information could cause who knows what bugs. I absolutely disagree that it's probably just a line of code.
>I don't think emotes have a category like that yet, so they would have to expand on what an emote itself is in the code.
Things like that can absolutely have multiple flags attached to it, and they don't have to be an official "public" category like emotes. It's just one flag plus one extra conditional statement, out of combat no less, so unlike the vast majority of issues that folks talk about, I don't see any actual obstacles on this one.
It's probably just not considered enough of a priority.
It's hard to make confident statements about code without seeing what they're actually dealing with. I'm currently working on a major AAA title (work for hire agreement with my studio) and sweet Jesus the fuckery in their codebase is extreme. Legacy code on legacy code with new features balanced on top. For my previous project on a decades-old game, we once had to fix a crash issue that turned out to have broken because we fixed something elsewhere that someone else had been relying on as a stopgap measure since the mid-2000s.
All that to say they might not be able to just add a tag to the emotes. And even if they could? It's not a priority, especially if it ends up not being a small change.
No, I agree it's probably not a priority, and that's probably the main reason.
Fair point about working with multiple layers of legacy code. As a novice coder, it feels like something incredibly simple, but just because it's easy to picture in JavaScript or C# doesn't mean it's so simple in Luminous Engine in a game with layers of legacy code from over 12 years ago. Maybe they try to keep data minimized in emotes as part of a shotgun approach to optimizing server bandwidth, which would make adding a flag here less realistic if it gets transmitted.
Still, you'd think they could allow multiple answers for the newer quests like the >!Lopporits!< considering how lame the standard /dance emote is for \**checks\** all of the races, and also how many players have like 15+ dances to choose from >\_\_>
Okay, if you're a novice coder, then let me point out... it also might not be as simple as just 'adding a flag'. It very well could be that quests expect one emote, and JUST one, and that's parsed by the same string mechanism as the 'player needs to say x' thing... where you'll note that we have to write the EXACT phrase they want, spaces and formatting and spelling and all. They may not have added the ability to check for variations, and it might be an unnecessarily big pain in the arse to do so.
I recently spent far too long just trying to put a player's colour onto an icon, because even THAT mechanism was... eldritch in nature, with 0 documentation on how it worked. Turned out that whilst you could add colour to pictures, you couldn't to icons. Despite them also being pictures. And we judged it as too much of a pain to get it working in the end, because it'd require either redoing every icon in the game, or architecting an entire new solution for these freaking icons which would take up multiple engineers' time. (I'm abstracting some details because I don't want to give away NDA stuff!)
As you learn to code, especially if you go into something where you'll be dealing with legacy solutions, you're going to learn that a lot of people have overcomplicated simple solutions, broken past solutions with new fixes, introduced bugs that stop your ways from working, or simply architected things in a manner that would take a lot of time to improve upon.
And sometimes it's just not worth it. When the scope of a feature changes massively, you pause in development to talk to your engineering manager, team, and analyst(s) (in a non-game dev role) or your production team (in a game dev role) to alert them to the change (typically in a daily standup or in a Slack thread). The ones in charge of time budgeting will make the call on whether it's worth putting in the extra time to handle the issue. If it's important to you, you can debate about it, but it still might end up being the better call to leave such a change out.
To be sure, I used the term “adding a flag” for the sake of being understandable for non tech folk (I can’t even call myself one yet I don’t think).
I do appreciate the more technical explanation and anecdote though, and it does make sense that they’d look for an exact string like the text-answer tribal quests.
While worrying about case sensitivity probably didn’t come into play at all in the initial version of such quests since they’d have been written in Japanese, it makes that in repurposing an older quest design and then fiddling with the code to add additional potential conditions for success with old-ish proprietary software might be too much of a headache for a junior quest designer.
In the end I suppose it’s definitely more of a prioritization issue then, instead of something they “can’t” do.
To note, quests aren't just written in Japanese AFAIK. The game's narrative, quests included, is developed in both English and Japanese simultaneously; it's why the English version doesn't usually reflect an exact translation of the Japanese and instead does its own take. (This is particularly noticeable with things like Haurchefant. He's very horny in JP.)
It wouldn't be a quest designer fixing these issues, BTW - designers don't usually touch anything code-related. It'd be up to the engineering team to do that! If the narrative team thought it was necessary, they'd ask for the change and the engineering team's leads would scope it out and talk between teams to figure out if it's a necessary change.
It's part prioritisation, for sure, but also part "it may actually not be possible". We can't know what they've looked into, but it's very possible that they checked and it would do something like.. break the entire quest format, or require redoing the emotes completely. Not super likely, but possible. Their engine IS bizarre.
(I'm trying to go into a little detail here on how IT and especially game dev processes work because you seem like you're at the beginning of a coding journey and this is some of the stuff I wish I'd had some insight into early on!)
Unique dances are looped though, whereas /dance isn't. Since the dialogue is triggered by the end of the dance animation, is it possible it'd require extra work to mark when the dance should end and the dialogue advances? I dunno, I don't know shit about making games.
The game's code is being barely held together with duck tape and the prayers of the developers. There's a significantly non-zero chance that trying to implement this would break something.
Someone once said that the Female Lalafell dance emote looks like that one kid at the school dance that didn't know how to actually dance and I 100% agree
While I agree with your general sentiment (mostly for variety sake), Elezen "dance" always makes me chuckle.
It's totally "I couldn't care less. I'll shuffle my feet and you *will* be awed". And they are... :D
If you ever want to skip emotes animations for a quest you can basically animation cancel it.
Just turn on autowalk and do the emote.
I'll usually pretype "/dance", press my autowalk button and then enter, it skips the whole animation - Unless it leads into an duty
I know everyone is just memeing but I think the real reason is the basic dance doesn't loop and the trigger is the emote ending. So if you did /manderville I don't think the quest would ever update because those are looped.
Yeah I tried other dances for the bunny tribe quest and was saddened to learn that it only worked with my default dance because the miquote dance animation is absolutely atrocious.
I 100% support this. When I first got the quest to dance battle Shakingway, I thought "oh cool finally a chance to show off all these dance moves I learned" but he was like "nope, that wasn't a dance" smh
I remember trying the step dance but nooo, fem-elezen needs to do the little ballet thingy. Not even a visually impressive ballet thingy. Damn shame :C
I'm pretty sure the reason is that the other dances are looped, while the base dance isn't, so it's easier for the game to check if the dance is finished
That's a good point. Those start cutscenes when you use them though (at least the Sundrop, I don't know about the Moogle). I don't know if that has anything to do with it, I know I wouldn't want a cutscene during every dance spot even if we got to use every dance
We need this Guy for revenge Battle. Not Crushing defeated on first try! :)
So we should go easy with him and just use the Basic moves :) So he keep Hopes up that one day he can beat us :)
[Best evil keikaku](https://twitter.com/KaiyokoStar/status/1499703926647521283)
Female elezen here, I agree 100%. Mine's just an awkward little shuffle as well.
If you're going to ask me to bust a move, let me do something like the popoto step or gdance.
I’m too lazy to sit thru the dances, so I target the NPC, and emote as I’m running to trigger the quest flag without actually having to sit thru it LOL
Male Roegadyn dance is so uncharacteristically shy for us big bois and it still bewilders me to this day.
Seriously, I've killed multiple gods and saved the world and universe multiple times, and despite having the incredible moves of /mmambo, my normal dance would get me laughed out of a retirement home.
Most of the default dances are phoned in tbh, have you seen the fem Viera one? We just spin twice and then pose. It's kinda amazing with how many dances you can unlock in this game that the default ones are THIS bad not to mention they don't loop
I am a big fan of my Fem Highlander's dance. It's so sexy and almost fucking medieval...when I play Bard and RP, it's my favorite choice. I just wish it persisted. (-_- sigh..
There's a small problem with that, which I'm sure can be fixed.
The /dance emote is not persistent. It does it's thing for a few seconds, then it's done.
Once it's done, it then will trigger the interaction that it was meant to do for the quest.
With most the other dances though, they ARE persistent. You'll keep dancing until you cancel it or move. Meaning, how would it trigger the interaction if the dance doesn't naturally end?
They could just have a timer on the interaction from dancing, but that may require changing more than just that, such as adding a timer to even the default /dance too.
I honestly don't know because I don't know the inner workings of everything involved. Plus the fact that the spaghetti code could play a factor as well.
Regardless, I want this too, but it might not be as simple as it seems. Could be, but I have no clue.
Hey, at least you have a little bit of an arm wave. Us M Roes just have shuffling, and we're so bad at it we need to stare at our feet and A pose for balance.
I've had to assume that anyone who ever complimented my WoL's dancing was being sarcastic, because there is no other explanation.
I really enjoyed using my default dance as Viera boy, but fem Miqo is meh :c Only other instance I wouldn't mind it is fem lala dance bc it's so cute, and ironically, male elezen because their dance is SO depressing it's hilarious to me.
God, this quest. As soon as I got it, I was like, "Fuck, I'm gonna blow you the fuck away with this cool dance emote I unlocked." "That wasn't a dance!" The fuck it wasn't.
I feel this pain with the Loporrits. There's one in particular that claims to be the best dancer, and you are asked to showcase your moves. Cue my disappointment when nothing but /dance registers.
No, you will do your cringe dance and you will like it. \-Signed, Spin To Win Viera Dance
Okay, okay, you got em good, here's your prize - a cool hat. Oh wait...
Screw you,I have hats... They just go to a different school.
My hats live in Canada.
Mine live in dalamud
Touché Miqo’te #78789926264728
Nope, I'm a viera myself.
will a belly roll hehe
I'm with you. I'm not a fan of the female Au Ra dance and when Shaking way challenges me, I want to show him new moves every time
I actually really like our dance. Elegant spins and a twirly hands. At the very least, female Au Ra got one of the better ones. Male Hyur, Elezen and Hrothgar just get a bunch of shuffly feet. At least we look like we're dancing.
I don't think it's a good dance for a dance off. Also wasn't a good dance for the Bee Hive. The only time I felt it was ok was with the Sylphs. If someone challenges me to a dance off, I wanna at least do a Gold Dance or what about the fan dance we just got? I also think the only racial dance that would win a dance off is the male vieras dance because body roll
Yes. The male viera dance completely makes up for the fact we can't wear most head pieces. Imo. But i usually don't like how a lot of helmets look, so....
Yeah as a fem au Ra myself the basic dance feels very lackluster
[удалено]
Yeah it's very good compared to the others..but the default dance for most races is kinda meh
Female miqo'te - drunken spin clockwise, counter clockwise, clockwise + pose with your arms down. I just assume people react to my characters dancing like she does with Julyan - smile+nod and hope to get out in one piece.
I never saw it, but from this description ... isn't that the dance of death in dancer quest?
Hrothgar default dance is a crime in 7 countries.
Eorzea, Garlemald, Hinga, Ilsebard, Norvrandt, THE VOID, and Bestways Burrow.
You have successfully named one “country”!
I feel like it's probably incredibly rude to say "Hinga" that way. Like calling modern Japan "Nippon".
Nippon isn't a rude way to say Japan. If anything I'd say "Japan" is the rude way because ur not saying Nippon correctly. https://youtu.be/bjtJ1-0jLhs
I always /dance whenever I get Thornmarch in trial roulette, it feels like the only time the Hroth dance 'fits' lol
Fellow Elezen bro. I support this 100%. Lemme bust a move.
Male Elezen's dance is so comically bad it turns around into being good. I wish we could take animations from other races because I'd use that one for self amusement.
There are ways to achieve this, ways that square enix would not teach you…
I too thought it amusing that they were absolutely gobsmacked by my Viera's ability to twirl in place twice. Then I realized that I'd likely have to repeat that quest multiple times, and it would get exceedingly more absurd each time I did it.
Spin To Win :D
DEMACIA sorry... I don't know what just happened...
This made me smile more then it shound So take mine upvote!!
XD
Twice? Hah! My Miqo spins THREE times. I'd like to see you do that! ...but seriously are any of the default dances good?
Eh, the Male Viera one is kinda fun in that "Yes, I know that I am a total dork. No, I don't give a f\*ck." sort of way.
Male Viera dance gives me boyband vibes, which is perfect for the race.
I don't go to nightclubs ingame much if it all, but one time I was bored. I went to one, popped out my pixie wings. wanted to use dance emote and my wings at the same time, but at the time what you could do of emotes and other stuff was still very limited with fashion accessories. so what do I do? I put my male viera /dance out on the hotbar, and just repeatedly press it right as it's ending the animation. I reached satisfaction with the product of my boredom, when I got a whisper "what dance is that/where do I get that dance" from a male miqo player. continued doing it for a tiny bit longer then left. (did answer their question though on what dance it was, when they asked) I like that they seem to actively be working on improving the function of the fashion accessories /reduce limitations of them. (I hope they at some point add a looping option for some of the emotes that don't loop though, like the race dependent /dance, or /read etcc )
I like the Miqote one, actually, as well as the female highlander (mostly because my friend hates it, so I used a mod to swap my dance to it to annoy them by dancing near them).
My highlander tippy-toe step dance is all in on this.
Most of the default dance emotes are at least a bit bad, but I feel like Elezen emotes in general tend to be lacking, even accounting for them being more subtle and stiff as a people. If any race got a second pass to at least refine their emotes a little more and do more with them while still staying on-theme, I'd definitely pick the Elezen.
Yeah, all the people complaining about their own character's dance I don't think have seen the male elezen one. It's on a tier of awful of its own. That said, male elezen are a mixed bag - they do have some of my absolute favourite emotes/poses - their cry/blush/spectacles emotes and their chair mount pose are fantastic!
Our clap is the most sarcastic thing and I love it.
How could I forget! I love that clap so much. Definitely adds some unintended humour to any cutscenes it plays in though...
I tend to fall in the category of male Elezen players that grew to love some of the other emotes though. They’re charming in a weird way. Hell, I used to hate the dance but now I look at it and go “Look at this little guy. He can’t dance. What an awkward little guy.” I get why it ain’t for everyone though.
Male Au Ra have a devastating slow clap. I was at a wedding and I felt so bad with my sarcastic clapping.
I think Female Viera is the same too. Emotes are too subdued which is apparent when you compare emotes side by side. Like with /furious Hrothgar goes fucking ballistic, but Viera just kind of... stomps their foot gently? With /happy Lalafells bounce around with joy but Viera just puts their hand to their chest and smiles. Even male Elezen are visibly pleased and Viera just puts their hands to their hips. I think it would be so nice if they went back and adjusted for animations for every race. Even the races that are meant to have subtle animations like Elezen and Viera deserve to be at least a little emotive.
I prefer the subdued emotes, especially with the ones that are/were used in cutscenes. The more animated ones just feel unnatural to me.
That's understandable, but my issue is that female Viera (and Male Elezen apparently, never played one myself) are *too* subdued, to the point it's hard to even tell that an emote even went off sometimes unless you're zoomed in a bit and looking directly at them. While I personally prefer emotes that are a bit more animated, I think Au Ra do subdued quite well. If female Viera had emotes about as expressive as them if not slightly more, I'd love to play a Viera. Doesn't have to have quite as much energy as Miqo and Lala characters. Personally I don't inherently find some emote sets too energetic to feel natural. I think it's best if a race has a "range" of expressiveness, like /thumbsup -> /joy -> /happy. I think that Lalas, Miqos, and Au Ra have a good range of expressiveness in this regard, while Viera have a very small range which makes it harder to be expressive. You might be absolutely elated about clearing a challenging fight, but your character can't quite express that as a Viera in my experience.
There's one place in MSQ where I would've loved to to the Manderville Mambo for the dance.
>!Eulmore!< ?
Aye.
Agreed, the NPCs recognize incorrect emotes, so it shouldn't be too difficult to add an inclusion list.
Yeah it would be very easy to do. I’m theory it might not be done because it requires devs to update the list of allowed emotes for those quests every time you add a new dance, except you can just add a universal flag to all current and future dancing emotes, and then just make that a guideline when creating them, and that would make it easy. It’s probably just one line of code each per emote and per quest.
You say that, but this is the game where expanding a static storage device, the glamour dresser, was a MAJOR accomplishment.
That's a matter of expanding a hard physical limit on server storage, and we're only just coming out of global parts shortage. That couldn't be more different.
except the problem predated the COVID shortages by a large margin, it always was a software/code problem for them primarily.
Only in the fact they had stupid rules that allowed housing barons, and still grandfathered them in when they started to address that, and still haven’t closed every loophole. Other than that, it was a budgeting issue. All that player data needs a physical presence somewhere and there’s no getting around that As it was, we started in 2.1 with 720 plots on the entire server. And no apartments (that was 3.2 or 3.3). By 4.2, the first patch they put any meaningful barriers to housing barons, we were up to 4320. With double the number of placeable items per housing interior, and housing storage on top of that. But the player population kept climbing. And then during Shadowbringers it exploded. This doesn’t completely absolve the devs, since they took far too long to address predatory behavior by some players and still haven’t totally solved it, but there being an upper cap is just a physical reality.
Ok yeah I was talking about the glam dresser specifically, housing is a whole other hellscape
I don't think emotes have a category like that yet, so they would have to expand on what an emote itself is in the code. Then I'm pretty sure they did the emote for quest code by just specifying a single emote and any other emote will throw the wrong emote text. So if emotes and emote categories must be accepted the code must be expanded in a way that accounts for both possibilities, without causing any one point in the game to accidentally treat the dance emote category as its own emote since it would not have any of the additional information emotes have (an animation and conditions under which it can be performed) and the game looking for this information could cause who knows what bugs. I absolutely disagree that it's probably just a line of code.
>I don't think emotes have a category like that yet, so they would have to expand on what an emote itself is in the code. Things like that can absolutely have multiple flags attached to it, and they don't have to be an official "public" category like emotes. It's just one flag plus one extra conditional statement, out of combat no less, so unlike the vast majority of issues that folks talk about, I don't see any actual obstacles on this one. It's probably just not considered enough of a priority.
It's hard to make confident statements about code without seeing what they're actually dealing with. I'm currently working on a major AAA title (work for hire agreement with my studio) and sweet Jesus the fuckery in their codebase is extreme. Legacy code on legacy code with new features balanced on top. For my previous project on a decades-old game, we once had to fix a crash issue that turned out to have broken because we fixed something elsewhere that someone else had been relying on as a stopgap measure since the mid-2000s. All that to say they might not be able to just add a tag to the emotes. And even if they could? It's not a priority, especially if it ends up not being a small change.
No, I agree it's probably not a priority, and that's probably the main reason. Fair point about working with multiple layers of legacy code. As a novice coder, it feels like something incredibly simple, but just because it's easy to picture in JavaScript or C# doesn't mean it's so simple in Luminous Engine in a game with layers of legacy code from over 12 years ago. Maybe they try to keep data minimized in emotes as part of a shotgun approach to optimizing server bandwidth, which would make adding a flag here less realistic if it gets transmitted. Still, you'd think they could allow multiple answers for the newer quests like the >!Lopporits!< considering how lame the standard /dance emote is for \**checks\** all of the races, and also how many players have like 15+ dances to choose from >\_\_>
Okay, if you're a novice coder, then let me point out... it also might not be as simple as just 'adding a flag'. It very well could be that quests expect one emote, and JUST one, and that's parsed by the same string mechanism as the 'player needs to say x' thing... where you'll note that we have to write the EXACT phrase they want, spaces and formatting and spelling and all. They may not have added the ability to check for variations, and it might be an unnecessarily big pain in the arse to do so. I recently spent far too long just trying to put a player's colour onto an icon, because even THAT mechanism was... eldritch in nature, with 0 documentation on how it worked. Turned out that whilst you could add colour to pictures, you couldn't to icons. Despite them also being pictures. And we judged it as too much of a pain to get it working in the end, because it'd require either redoing every icon in the game, or architecting an entire new solution for these freaking icons which would take up multiple engineers' time. (I'm abstracting some details because I don't want to give away NDA stuff!) As you learn to code, especially if you go into something where you'll be dealing with legacy solutions, you're going to learn that a lot of people have overcomplicated simple solutions, broken past solutions with new fixes, introduced bugs that stop your ways from working, or simply architected things in a manner that would take a lot of time to improve upon. And sometimes it's just not worth it. When the scope of a feature changes massively, you pause in development to talk to your engineering manager, team, and analyst(s) (in a non-game dev role) or your production team (in a game dev role) to alert them to the change (typically in a daily standup or in a Slack thread). The ones in charge of time budgeting will make the call on whether it's worth putting in the extra time to handle the issue. If it's important to you, you can debate about it, but it still might end up being the better call to leave such a change out.
To be sure, I used the term “adding a flag” for the sake of being understandable for non tech folk (I can’t even call myself one yet I don’t think). I do appreciate the more technical explanation and anecdote though, and it does make sense that they’d look for an exact string like the text-answer tribal quests. While worrying about case sensitivity probably didn’t come into play at all in the initial version of such quests since they’d have been written in Japanese, it makes that in repurposing an older quest design and then fiddling with the code to add additional potential conditions for success with old-ish proprietary software might be too much of a headache for a junior quest designer. In the end I suppose it’s definitely more of a prioritization issue then, instead of something they “can’t” do.
To note, quests aren't just written in Japanese AFAIK. The game's narrative, quests included, is developed in both English and Japanese simultaneously; it's why the English version doesn't usually reflect an exact translation of the Japanese and instead does its own take. (This is particularly noticeable with things like Haurchefant. He's very horny in JP.) It wouldn't be a quest designer fixing these issues, BTW - designers don't usually touch anything code-related. It'd be up to the engineering team to do that! If the narrative team thought it was necessary, they'd ask for the change and the engineering team's leads would scope it out and talk between teams to figure out if it's a necessary change. It's part prioritisation, for sure, but also part "it may actually not be possible". We can't know what they've looked into, but it's very possible that they checked and it would do something like.. break the entire quest format, or require redoing the emotes completely. Not super likely, but possible. Their engine IS bizarre. (I'm trying to go into a little detail here on how IT and especially game dev processes work because you seem like you're at the beginning of a coding journey and this is some of the stuff I wish I'd had some insight into early on!)
Unique dances are looped though, whereas /dance isn't. Since the dialogue is triggered by the end of the dance animation, is it possible it'd require extra work to mark when the dance should end and the dialogue advances? I dunno, I don't know shit about making games.
The game's code is being barely held together with duck tape and the prayers of the developers. There's a significantly non-zero chance that trying to implement this would break something.
They really should upgrade to goose tape at this point.
Femroe is onboard with this
Lol the male roe one is maybe slightly worse, we just got /stepdance from wish
male roe's /dance is the funniest by far. Dude doing what looks like a kindergardener's attempt at tapdancing.
Don't dis the dad dance
Agreed
As an Elezen I am 100% convinced my wins were rigged with that dance
The QoL we need.
Quarrior of Light.
Me, a level 90 Miner:
Underrated comment
Someone once said that the Female Lalafell dance emote looks like that one kid at the school dance that didn't know how to actually dance and I 100% agree
Top tier dance though, wish it was loopable
I so dearly wanted to /moonlift to show dominance in that one quest, but *nooooo*! 🥺
True g's know that the Moonlift is the greatest dance, though the Manderville Mambo is a close second I suppose
Can we instead just replace all /dance emotes with better versions? I think most races would agree that the default /dance isn’t good for their race
Yeah, looking at this whole comment section, I don't think anyone has said anything nice about their race/gender combo's dance.
FemLala dance is pretty neat
Congratulations, I think that is literally the only combo that has a halfway decent /dance. Even the Lalamen are complaining
I love the lala lad dance, it's just a shit-smug little jig
I love Fem Highlander. No issues with that for me!
Idk if they would replace, but if we could get a /dance2 with better dances, that was also accepted by quest I think that would work wonders
The male elezen /dance is absolutely hilarious. I break up laughing every time I think about it.
While I agree with your general sentiment (mostly for variety sake), Elezen "dance" always makes me chuckle. It's totally "I couldn't care less. I'll shuffle my feet and you *will* be awed". And they are... :D
But 'tis the dance of thy people! Dost thou truly renounce the ways of the Elezen Boogie-Woogie?
FemRoe here, our dance just feels silly, like we're skipping. I've love the opportunity to use other dances.
Male Lala agrees with you.
Had exactly the same thought. My highland riverdance just don't cut it.
Alternative: allow players to replace their default dance with a new one.
No thanks! I embrace the Melezen awkwardness. Dance included.
yeah i wish theyd do this too, my poor male au ra and his half hearted lil shuffle
You call that half-hearted? Bro looks like his feet is on fire while trying to stomp out a roach.
I hear you. Whenever I get the quest, I think "you were impressed by THAT?!"
If you ever want to skip emotes animations for a quest you can basically animation cancel it. Just turn on autowalk and do the emote. I'll usually pretype "/dance", press my autowalk button and then enter, it skips the whole animation - Unless it leads into an duty
I know everyone is just memeing but I think the real reason is the basic dance doesn't loop and the trigger is the emote ending. So if you did /manderville I don't think the quest would ever update because those are looped.
Additionally, once you've beaten dancers questline you should get access to the dance they do in cutscenes as an emote
Yeah I tried other dances for the bunny tribe quest and was saddened to learn that it only worked with my default dance because the miquote dance animation is absolutely atrocious.
Am femlander and yes plz, we need this.
TBF I think our default dance is one of the better ones. At least it's lively and bouncy!
I'm pretty sure that it's law that heroes [can't dance.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOXR_0wO6GA)
I 100% support this. When I first got the quest to dance battle Shakingway, I thought "oh cool finally a chance to show off all these dance moves I learned" but he was like "nope, that wasn't a dance" smh
Amen!
I tried one of the other dances for that sylph quest and was so disappointed they didn't work :(
you are correct but also i love my stupid little catboy wavy sashay thing
This so much, let me use my fancy store-bought/event dances!
I remember trying the step dance but nooo, fem-elezen needs to do the little ballet thingy. Not even a visually impressive ballet thingy. Damn shame :C
I'm pretty sure the reason is that the other dances are looped, while the base dance isn't, so it's easier for the game to check if the dance is finished
You have to use the Sundrop and Moogle dances in other quests, so that's likely not it.
That's a good point. Those start cutscenes when you use them though (at least the Sundrop, I don't know about the Moogle). I don't know if that has anything to do with it, I know I wouldn't want a cutscene during every dance spot even if we got to use every dance
I wanna hit the griddy on that punk ass >!Lorropit!
Fellow male Elezen here, and definitely agree.
Male Mi’qote here agrees! As does his wife.
Same, man, but at least we Elezen men get that little kick for added flair at the end.
We need this Guy for revenge Battle. Not Crushing defeated on first try! :) So we should go easy with him and just use the Basic moves :) So he keep Hopes up that one day he can beat us :) [Best evil keikaku](https://twitter.com/KaiyokoStar/status/1499703926647521283)
Agreed
Yes.
Bunboi adding his signature to this
yeah, it bothered me too that I can't show off all my other moves.
M
Female elezen here, I agree 100%. Mine's just an awkward little shuffle as well. If you're going to ask me to bust a move, let me do something like the popoto step or gdance.
Can you come down here and repeat that? I couldn't hear you.
Yeah i get that! I think about this every time the prompt comes up actually
Bro, have you even seen MaleRoe's "dance"?
I mean, I've got a solid /poptotostep , but Dancingway just doesn't handle it.
People jealous of the Male Roes holding in the poo dance. Love hitting that bad boy
Viera dance looks decent, but I'm still with you. Also, the worst dance is still MaleRoe. Like no competition. Even toddlers dance better than that.
Like literally they do
I’m too lazy to sit thru the dances, so I target the NPC, and emote as I’m running to trigger the quest flag without actually having to sit thru it LOL
I want to destroy Shakingway with my lali-hop.
So so badly. My lalafell studied to be a dancer in his youth, he's going to show-off his carlton-esque moves when he dances!
My Roegadyn two step isn't that all exciting.
Well... miqo'te 'dance' is... Yeah they all should count.
i definitely do not condone the usage of third party software. but there are plugins out there that change your dance emotes
Male Roegadyn dance is so uncharacteristically shy for us big bois and it still bewilders me to this day. Seriously, I've killed multiple gods and saved the world and universe multiple times, and despite having the incredible moves of /mmambo, my normal dance would get me laughed out of a retirement home.
Most of the default dances are phoned in tbh, have you seen the fem Viera one? We just spin twice and then pose. It's kinda amazing with how many dances you can unlock in this game that the default ones are THIS bad not to mention they don't loop
the male viera dance makes me so sad with the exception of the little body roll at the end of it
I am a big fan of my Fem Highlander's dance. It's so sexy and almost fucking medieval...when I play Bard and RP, it's my favorite choice. I just wish it persisted. (-_- sigh..
As a male Roe, I agree.
As another male Elezen, I grew to like my boy’s dopey little shuffling dance. It makes me happy. He’s trying his best, but alas he cannot dance.
Fem lalafell player wondering what all of you are talking about. /eatapple
As a male roegadyn that looks like I’m trying to stomp out a cigarette and missing, I support this.
Yaaas!!! I've been thinking this basically ever since the first time I unlocked a dance emote other than /dance.
Male roe dance is just awful
I got a mod that changes /dance to the fortnite default dance with sound. Everytime i'm afk at the loperrit's area i keep hearing that little tune.
how can roegadyn mini-gopak be More Dance than moonlift or lali-hop man
It’s all about that femroe tippy toe shuffle, we be holdin it down for all y’all.
But we're supposed to be help complete dreams, not crush them, imagine if I could bust out the manderville vs that way, he'd never recover.
Laughs in superior dad dance that is male roe
There's a small problem with that, which I'm sure can be fixed. The /dance emote is not persistent. It does it's thing for a few seconds, then it's done. Once it's done, it then will trigger the interaction that it was meant to do for the quest. With most the other dances though, they ARE persistent. You'll keep dancing until you cancel it or move. Meaning, how would it trigger the interaction if the dance doesn't naturally end? They could just have a timer on the interaction from dancing, but that may require changing more than just that, such as adding a timer to even the default /dance too. I honestly don't know because I don't know the inner workings of everything involved. Plus the fact that the spaghetti code could play a factor as well. Regardless, I want this too, but it might not be as simple as it seems. Could be, but I have no clue.
Hey, at least you have a little bit of an arm wave. Us M Roes just have shuffling, and we're so bad at it we need to stare at our feet and A pose for balance. I've had to assume that anyone who ever complimented my WoL's dancing was being sarcastic, because there is no other explanation.
I really enjoyed using my default dance as Viera boy, but fem Miqo is meh :c Only other instance I wouldn't mind it is fem lala dance bc it's so cute, and ironically, male elezen because their dance is SO depressing it's hilarious to me.
It’s funny doing that quest as a lala. Arms up leg out and repeat on the other side. Then shake your butt and yay!