Did anyone else notice the unfinished animation in the Gamescom trailer?
The Rus unit’s weapon is just floating in mid air when they switch to their musket.
I’m a little worried if THIS is what they choose to showcase in the marketing trailers.
That’s just the Rus technology, comrade.
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They have it other way around though. It was the axe which had a sling to wear it on the back and not the gun. But I am not complaining I am happy that they use them as stands its cool.
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For me it looks like the axe is “stored” on the barrel of the rifle. Like they just hang it on there so they can quickly swap to axe for the melee fight. The back is for the rifle. Edit: post below provides nice context
It didn’t look bad to me really.
It’s better than just having their musket disappear when they switch weapons.
I think its fine to gamify something like that while still giving you information at a glance (you can clearly see their rifle even when they’re in melee. People probably don’t care how realistic their gun holstering is.
Doesn’t strike me as any quality deficiency.
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Look, unit’s weapon is just floating in mid air too 
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Well the handles are too short though.
With all the terrain changes in AoE4 there is no way to make that work with longer handles. I prefer their solution with shorter handles which dont clip. Especially after seeing this picture you can definiteley see where they are coming from.
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Yeah I was just thinking that, even at the “full” length it probably won’t be completely grounded most of the time.
Worst case they just slightly extend the axe handle? Honestly I don’t think anyone would care 
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Oh, it didn’t occur to me that it could be intentional. I thought the axes were just floating weirdly in front of the models, I guess they are resting their guns on the axes,
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Nice!
Now people can get a better idea of what’s going on/ should be going on.
That’s why visual fidelity is important also for some less than obvious reasons. That includes proper representation of shadows, polished animations, sufficiently detailed models and their appropriate interaction, visual effects that correspond to what is happening on the gameplay side.
But they should extend the handles anyway, they really look short
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this is what i thought it was in the video, maybe not perfectly portrayed, but glad i guessed right…
In medieval Rus, weapon holds you.
In all seriousness, the spike/ax is not casting a shadow, so it does look like it’s floating at first glance. Hopefully just a beta bug to squash.
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Considering the “love” proper animations have gotten so far, this does not surprise me at all – and I already deeply hate it. I hope they’ll fix it, but I doubt it.
This and many other problems I’ve noticed in the video, my friend. Having played the Beta, I’m honestly not too worried about these things, as they can be fixed. What worries me is their marketing strategy… and their CHOICE of including footage from behind that showcases an unfinished/unpolished product.
This… I will never understand. Why would you choose that angle that makes your product look bad? Show them from the front, or hide the secondary weapon, or edit it out, or take another shot, or just show something else that is more polished. Why purposefully release footage like this that makes your product look worse than it actually is?
To make them longer when used as stand should be easy but I feel that there is a problem of animations. They are probably recycling some other melee animation which would look bad with longer shaft. I mean they are really short even when they use them in melee mode. Bardiches are more akin to pole arm than axe in real world use and even in dimensions and thickness of a weapon.