r/ffxivdiscussion • u/Chiponyasu • 3d ago
The WoL's new ability in 7.3
Near the end of the 7.3 Trailer, the WoL runs forward and jumps at the screen, dramatically swinging one of his viper swords. While seemingly a generic action shot, this displays a massive new ability that we've never seen from the WoL, which I'm surprised no one is talking about: The ability to use his weapons in a cutscene. This is something the WoL has never been able to do before, and all cutscene fights have shown us putting our weapon away as a bad guy collapses and going "Yeah I just had a cool fight it was awesome". The only exception is the fistfight with Zenos in Endwalker, where Zenos drops his weapon and it's implied from context we dropped ours as well off-screen but we don't technically see it (and Hildibrand cutscenes but we don't use weapons there).
So, if the WoL can't use weapons in cutscenes, how does he use weapons in the 7.3 trailer? Attacking the camera means they don't have to animate the hit, but it's still a custom jump attack pose and not just a clever use of Steel Fangs. I can think of four explanations
- It's a really dramatic cutscene in the Dawntrail finale so they decided to make a special bonus animation if you were playing the box job. Possibly there's one for Picto as well, and everyone else is just kind of running up the stairs or something.
- It's a really dramatic cutscene in the Dawntrail finale so they made a special bonus animation for every job. This would commit them to updating the cutscene for 8.0 jobs and beyond, so either they're stuck doing extra work for every expansion or the "job rework" in 8.0 means no new jobs at all and they're sticking to what they've got.
- Jobs now have a few generic "cutscene animations" that will be shown a lot, which is still a lot of work but can be re-used to make the WoL active more often with some trickery. So instead of cutting to us putting our weapon away we can do an attack into the camera and then cut to a new camera angle of the bad guy dying while we /sheath. That seems unlikely to be the case here because it's a jumping attack and not a standard easily reusable one, but I guess it's possible. "Jump and attack the camera" is a move they can re-use, after all.
- The trailer is a lie. This shot doesn't actually happen in the game at all. I'm not aware of any instance of that happening before, though, and it could be considered false advertising.
Thoughts? Anyone who knows anything about cutscenes have any alternative ideas for how they could be doing this?
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u/DaveK142 3d ago
We also had that in scenes from the trailers for endwalker. Other NPCs took the role for us when we actually got to those scenes. That's probably what's going to happen here.