New Roblox Character Animations - a bad update.

If you have played ROBLOX yesterday or today, you most likely will have noticed the new character animations. This update comes under 6 months from the last character animation update, which also caused many issues because of the Robloxian's legs moving when you stand still. In obbys for example, on levels where you must jump over deadly bricks to reach the next checkpoint, the legs move, killing your character when you are just standing still, preparing for the next jump.

Disappointing looks

This new animation update is, in my opinion, pointless and worse than the previous animations. When you walk, it looks as if your avatar is about to fall over, or running in an extremely awkward fashion. On each step, the legs fly back way to far and do not look natural at all. When you play a busy game with lots of other players, it looks as if everyone is running around, late for a meeting!

When standing still, the body movement makes your character come across out of breath and panting. The chest/body bobs up and down, which I find rather distracting. I personally had no problems with my avatar simply standing still when I was not moving.

 

Animations affect game play

I've tested out the new animations on many popular games of different styles and have found a number of problems. On FPS such as "Paintball!", the new, bigger movements of the characters when just walking makes the game much harder to aim, as the arm holding the gun moves. When you are standing still in first person, you can feel and see the bobbing movement of the character and it actually made me feel a little sick.

Another issue I have found on games where there are lots of moving/flying objects such as "Crossroads", is that my Robloxian often feels unbalanced. It does not take much to knock him over and send him flying off the map. The more complex movements also tend to add lag on slower computers. At first I thought it was just me, but after talking to fellow Robloxians, I found they had experienced similar issues.

When climbing a ladder on a game, it is now also really hard to control your character as you can not move them left or right, only up and down. This also affects game play as many obbys require you to move left or right whilst climbing a wide ladder. In some games, the climbing update makes climbing easier, but in others it can ruin the game.

My views

Overall I believe ROBLOX was not designed to have real, life-like motions and animations. The block characters are made to look and act in a basic way, they are not like humans. They are like LEGO characters, whose body parts are restricted to which way they can bend and move.

What you can do

If you also have similar views to me and would like to try to get ROBLOX to remove the update, I would recommend tweeting them on their official Twitter page (@ROBLOX) or sending them and e-mail. \try to explain to them what it is you do not like about the animations or suggest ways for them to improve them. Also, feel free to share your opinions of the new animation update by leaving a comment on this post.

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog post, I will write on here again if there is any news or updates on this story.

Bobstar500