Lancer and Paragon Blitz
Why does the new Blitzcrank skin have a walk animation, like he has legs; when he clearly floats with jets? Kind of completely ruins the skin. :/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBqDMkhbyaA
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Everyone's been complaining about it, but they claim it's because he's not quickly recognizable as Blitzcrank with the model changes if they also change the walk animation. To me that sounds like they need to either change the model or find an animation that's close to the walk animation but looks more like floating.
Hey CÅT -
The animator who worked on this pair of skins commented on the PBE boards when they were still in development to provide context on the reasoning behind not changing the run.
From the boards thread:
Hey guys
I'm an animator that worked on Lancer Rogue/Paragon Blitzcrank and wanted to give some additional insight into this topic. If you haven't already, check out the post Riot AdamUnicorn wrote (linked above!) about the new production process/philosophies we used while making these two skins. It's definitely worth a read!
The main idea that informed our decision to keep a run animation similar to base Blitzcrank was gameplay readability. Very early on in development we had conversations about whether or not the run animation was something we could change. Blitzcrank as a character has some pretty iconic moments such as his silhouette, his run animation, and his hook ability and as the Nexus article discusses, we tried to focus and prioritize on what would made this Blitzcrank skin awesome (the hook) and all the other elements (skin design/effects/animation/etc) followed suit.
All skins have multiple levers that artists can play around with to make a skin feel different but still the same champion (and every skin has varied success with this). Areas like Colors, Models, Textures, Animations, Spell Visuals, and Audio all work together to form the final product. If we think of a character’s readability as a bucket, each of these different factors contribute to filling that bucket. Changing too many things all at once results in the contents of the bucket to overflow, leading to recognizability issues. Changing one thing drastically means having to be conservative (make little to no changes) in other areas.
In Lancer's case, because the changes to his model were SO extreme, in order to maintain his readability as Blitzcrank, it was critical that we keep his run animation. We initially tested some floating/flying animations but we quickly learned that any meaningfully different runs on Blitz immediately made him next to unreadable as Blitz.
TL:DR we thought about changing his run animation, but in order to sell the cool fantasy of this mech/warrior/lancer which required extensive silhouette and model changes, we couldn't also change the run animation.
TL;DR TL;DR by redditor Kadexe: These skins look really different from standard Blitzcrank, and changing the walking animation would be going too far when you're already pushing it.
when will both of them come out
