Why are Beefalo the only mob to be tamed? (and mounted)

[NOOOBU]

Tamed Varg will be killing machine definitly in DST and replaced the battle beef soonly(if it added to the game)

Although I like varg if they can be tamed but, maybe something OP is not always good for gameplaying.

[WendyHater9000]

I need grass gator which can walk on coastal ocean, and can be tamed with meat

It can be an more epic version of beefalo since it is more difficult to find and approach

[zzztracer]

Why can a domesticated Beefalo only be ridden by one person? 

It seems reasonable for a big Beefalo to sit two people。

[Mike23Ua]

On 6/28/2023 at 10:44 AM, Hornete said:

To answer your question of "Why are beefalo only the mob to be tamed"
Likely due to the insanely intense amount of animation work needed for each tamable mob. Every idle, every action animation, every emote, it nears the hundreds of different animations that would need to be done. It's crazy enough they put the work into Beefalo way back then honestly, though ANR was smallish in content besides all the bosses so I can see how they had the resources to do it.

But what about all the work that went into designing the various Beefalo outfit clothing options from the Year of the Beefalo event?

[_zwb]

19 hours ago, Hornete said:

It's not impossible, they can do it. But at what cost? What does ~300 animations of work load for each new ridable mob cost the developers? Perhaps we miss out on new mobs, new structures, new whatever due to animation workload being put into specific mobs and taming.

Gotta know the game development process!!! Everything is resources and knowing where and when to put 'em. The ocean while I have my problems with it is stilly a fairly neat addition that adds to the world as an entirety, more ridable mobs is cool don't get me wrong! But it's certainly nothing to the example you put out of the ocean.

Can't they just reuse the animation skeleton? Or is it different for koalephants and stuff?

[Hornete]

Just now, _zwb said:

Can't they just reuse the animation skeleton? Or is it different for koalephants and stuff?

They're slightly different/edited for them yup! Using the same animation rig won't work, but having the beefalo animations as a starting base would certainly make for a good start if they were to ever support the rest of the Beefalo-alike gang.

6 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

But what about all the work that went into designing the various Beefalo outfit clothing options from the Year of the Beefalo event?

Uhhh, like any other content? Concepts were produced, then finalized sprites were made and put in-game . The point of skins is that you can just apply them to existing animations, and you won't need to make more. The difference between producing hundreds of animations and a few images of sprites is very large!

[Mike23Ua]

1 minute ago, Hornete said:

They're slightly different/edited for them yup! Using the same animation rig won't work, but having the beefalo animations as a starting base would certainly make for a good start if they were to ever support the rest of the Beefalo-alike gang.

Uhhh, like any other content? Concepts were produced, then finalized sprites were made and put in-game . The point of skins is that you can just apply them to existing animations, and you won't need to make more. The difference between producing hundreds of animations and a few images of sprites is very large!

So in other words.. they could add more Beefalo costumes that make your Beefalo look like well uhh something else, and it wouldn’t be too much work load? 
Examples being- Koalephant skin, Varglet Skin, or even that unused Catmando thing

It would simply be choosing a Head, body, legs & tail same with the current Beefalo dressing station?

[Cheggf]

21 hours ago, Well-met said:

no one asked for the ocean and they still pulled it off. They have nearly a decade more experience since ANR, they're not afraid of that work load.

A lot of people asked for sailing, DST was released after SW. Even more people asked for the DSA DLC, which in a way is asking for sailing.

[.OS]

Thanks for the replies, interesting stuff!

[-Variant]

4 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

So in other words.. they could add more Beefalo costumes that make your Beefalo look like well uhh something else, and it wouldn’t be too much work load? 
Examples being- Koalephant skin, Varglet Skin, or even that unused Catmando thing

It would simply be choosing a Head, body, legs & tail same with the current Beefalo dressing station?

There's a certain limit to just how different a skin can actually be.

The reason most skins we get for animated things don't dramatically change is because they're limited to changing what's already there.

For example a Koalephant skin wouldn't work on a beefalo because beefalo don't have trunks. They're simply not animated with them.
You can't add a trunk with the existing beefalo assets, you'd need to edit all the animations to do so.
Same thing for Vargs, for the Catmando, they're all edited/changed in ways that make them impossible to simply put onto a beefalo, even as a skin.

[.OS]

Maybe someday Koalephant will be tameable, perhaps others mobs as well...