World of Warcraft

whomever starts speaking

When I started playing Warhammer, at first I didn't notice, but eventually I discovered that to a certain degree, characters will turn and look at one another. If you target another character who is within roughly a 80-degree angle of the direction your character is facing, your character will automatically turn his or her head to face that target. This in itself doesn't seem like it would do all that much for roleplayers, except it would really help make our characters feel less like dolls and more cheap wow goldlike actual actors in a story. It would be really neat if I could stand with my friends in a circle, and just by changing targets, indicate that we are listening to whomever starts speaking.

Unfortunately, that's about it with regard to interaction between player characters in Warhammer as far as I could tell. In fact, Mythic seems to have decided that Warhammer characters are just too cool for emotes like "/sit," "/lie," and "/kneel." There is an emote for "/dance," but if you try it, your character will frown and look at you like "what?" and then the game text will tell you that your character refuses to dance. Even when it came to idling, my Witch Hunter character never ever put down her gun -- it seemed odd that she should walk around all day without every resting that arm. So it looks like Warhammer is a good game for roleplayers so long as you want to stick to the adventurous, violent, and tough-guy type of roleplaying, and never have a moment when your character even sits down to have a bite to eat. In my opinion, this is a serious shortcoming for roleplaying in Warhammer, in that the character's emotes are so one dimensional.

At least in WoW, we can pretty much sit down and have wow gold  a chat no matter where we are in the world. Warcraft characters have at least some semblance leisure time, of a life outside of killing monsters, which roleplayers try to use to great effect. In fact, I only hope that this sort of thing gets expanded in the future, so that WoW characters have more and more ways to interact with each other in coming expansions. The addition of a new "/cower" emote in Wrath of the Lich King was an excellent addition, which roleplayers have enjoyed using a great deal.

The key thing I hope Blizzard will remember is that emotes and animations are additional forms of communication -- not cool just things you can make your character do. Emotes and animations which are bent towards communication and interaction will always be more successful than those which just look neat. Often idle animations get in the way more than they help, for example (such as the night elf female bouncy animation -- there really needs to be a way to turn stuff like that off!)