Are actual Lions and Tigers as large as ours? "no"

That's a good move, as melee characters are hindered by not being able to see the target, thus lossing their effectiveness in social hunting parties due to these large creatures.

I see it more every day where there is less and less melee combat players make up our hunting parties, being replaced or just blotted out by the growing blob of these oversized creatures.

SOTA is now moving to become a majority ranged combat dominated world.

Cats need to stand off from the target and...

"Make them fight like a cat"

I think it's time for programing our new oversized big cat toons to not sit themselves ontop of the target.
That's the best solution possible.
~Time Lord~

 

I've seen a significant decrease in the number of archers, probably due to the battery of nerfs that happened during the last couple of years.

 

I figured that these new pets and mobs are still a work in progress. I agree that they are ridiculously huge as a pet, cumbersome, and immersion-breaking. Maybe only as a mob for fantasy's sake with tamed pets being smaller? I'd reduce the size and make them a bit less textured and more toony. They're almost too real-looking! Or give us new realistic character models to blend in better- yeah, that's the ticket!

 

I don't think they have much of a big staff anymore to spend much time on creating or modifying art assets.

As for the sizes, it might make sense for there to be a singular "monster lion" somewhere that's huge, but personally I don't think storytelling wise they've established enough pretext for all lions and tigers to be huge and other animals to be smaller. I think players are going to always be doing a double-take on how large they are.

I'm not sure that looking badass is a good enough reason to make them that large. I've been looking at some Frank Frazetta paintings. In some cases he makes them really huge and in others he makes them pretty small. In the ones he makes them huge, you can imagine they're part of some primeval savage world where are a lot of animals are huge. And incidentally, LB did a game called Savage Empire which fit this genre and there was a monster called a smildon (sabre-toothed tiger) that was supposed to grow to a monster-size. Interestingly enough in other folklore there are stories about black lions that are tougher and meaner than golden lions but are often also smaller. In LOTRO you might have large elephants, but they're 20x the size, not just 3x the size, and are legendary animals and look monstrous. Lots of pretexts in storytelling to justify monster animals that I don't think SOTA has.

If we're also talking pets, I also happen to think that Time Lord's concerns about people dragging around monster-sized pets with them are a legitimate concern for a bunch of reasons.

 

Well hold up we are comparing RL lions and tigers to and Obsidian Tiger? wouldn't that be like comparing a regular grey wolf to a Dire wolf? if you compare you will see the Obsidian is more likely the correct size
as you can see here a sabretooth tiger which maybe close to the obsidian would be correct. this is fyi actual comparison in RL

 

Actor Richard Harris who is 6 feet tall and the lion beside him is fulll grown.
<---<<< I've seen this individual tiger in real life along with the monk walking beside him. The monk is just over 5 foot tall and the tiger walking beside him is a very old full grown tiger, the largest of all the tigers these monks have.

<---<<< This is Obsidian and it's size does not demand anything made of it be large. In fact, most things made of it are quite small.

Yet no matter what size any pet is, they should stand off from the target, not ontop of the target as they currently do.
Currently the SOTA cats are well over real life size and are much larger than most targets/humanoids/monsters.

The problem is, "they stand on top of the target" thus blocking view of the target, which then renders any attack made on the target's back side pure guess work.

In the spirit of "The Savage Empire" the sizes they currently are, are correct, yet even in The Savage Empire, the attack view did not allow the monsters to colide with or sit on top of other monsters.
~TL~

 

Its not a scientific thing....

I haven't gone into these scenes yet... I've just seen people carry around tiger pets... and obsidian tigers seem to look just like normal tigers to me... and they looked much larger than any other pets I've seen people drag around and unbelievably huge even for a larger than normal tiger. Just seemed weird to me. I'm sure it has to a lot of other players.

 

Lol I agree it should stand back abit to swat to fight so one can see.. but what I was trying to say is that the idea of the obsidian is that they are more powerful , just like that of destroyers. I was referencing that we are not talking about regular lions and tigers which is what is presented above. instead I was comparing them to RL Saber tooth size and dire wolf sizes. which would indeed fit the current size of the big cat based on that as a reference to something real that was larger than todays cats.. So realistically its size could be correct And if you take history into account you will find that animals today are way smaller than there were way way back in some cases. the reason they are smaller is hunters over time tend to kill of the larger trophy sized animals which over time kills off genetics that make larger breeds in the wild a thing.

but as timelord pointed out being obsidian does not mean that it has to be larger is correct. tough things come in small packages too

If you think tigers are bad, ever been to the wyverns lol. you can't see anything in that fight at all when you are in the middle. I look at it this way not every fight will favor how you play so its more a matter of adapting. they shrink the tiger a little well it would help the melee but maybe the pet owners want bigger pets to feel more grand considering you get to have fancy swords and skins. there was a stream where it was brought up that people wanted dragons and the likes to be much larger but as they said the issue then is with small areas and large pets and all the collisions and visual stuff that than becomes an issue. Perhaps the exaggerated size was to please the tamers with a much larger more scary pet to appease those that were asking for larger pets. but all in all yeah keeping the pet a foot away from the mob would help a lot...

lets not forget UO had even larger pets most were at least kind enough to park them away from the bank lol

 

I think the problem here is that the axis for the model is somewhere around the chest and the attack distance is measured from that. The models are so large that a normal attack distance makes it look like it's standing right on top of the target. I also don't see any attack animations from the large cats, which might be a bug or just a synchronization issue when in a large group.

 

I agree that the models are way too big.

My take on the artistic side of things:

As the models are pretty much realist, they cause a feeling that either the Avatars are really small or the big cats were mis-scaled.

This caused me to feel SotA is one of those cheap, generic Korean MMOs. Even after a couple of years in.

If there's the intent to make a bigger, stronger rideable type of big cat, they should look freakish, so they can be regarded as monsters rather than counterparts of RL animals.
Imagine how jarring it would be if the wargs from LOTR looked like perfectly fine wolves but just scaled up.