Yeah I feel like there have been a good number of threads about this already, so no, OP is definitely not the only one. I believe Adam already said that the old shadow animation isn’t coming back, so I don’t think it was a matter of us not yelling and screaming enough.
While I know they said it’s story related, I’m guessing they also wanted something that would pop off the screen a bit more, as the black water color look might blend a bit too much in to some stages due to the relighting. But that’s just a guess. If so, I think it makes sense.
Personally, I liked the way the old ones looked from the standpoint of duplicating the character’s motion. Some of them, like Glacius’ puddle punch, Spinal’s soul sword, etc looked flat out awesome with that effect and the new animation just doesn’t pick up those nuances nearly as well in my estimation.
I do like that the new shadow effect is brighter, I like that it has more of a splash effect, and it’s very well animated IMO, and while I love customization, I tend to think that having a toggle for this might be one more toggle than they’re prepared to put in the game.
That said, I really do hope that they can work on the shadow effects, because I do think that there’s a happy medium to be found.
If you want some purple in there to make them pop, that’s great. I think that’s useful and it can look nice too. But maybe also include some black in there as well, and definitely have a clearer, better mimic of the regular move being done; specifically, clearer outlines of limbs and weapons.
That’s where I feel like the black, a good contrast, could help a bit. Right now, it’s just all purple with maybe some lighter purple and it all just looks like a large, splashy haze in some moves.
Again, I like the splash effect, but that’s more on the outskirts of the move. Within the core of it, there should still be well-defined shadows of the actual motion happening and I don’t think we’re seeing that nearly as well as we could right now.
So maybe a mixture of the two, with black and hints of purple at the core and middle area, with more defined mimics of the movemrnts, leading to more purple splashes on the ends, would help quell fans issues with it, make it look better, more stylish and more detailed overall, and not force IG in to creating yet another toggle where one’s not overly needed?