Using an
Emote Command in some games (especially
MMORPGs) will trigger Emote Animations. Sometimes, these are also used as
Idle Animations, or
recycled by the devteam for cutscenes.
Examples
- The child-targeted animation program 3D Movie Maker has various over-acted emotes for each character model (sit, talk, walk, etc). Thankfully for the movie makers, there's an option to pause the animations at a given frame, leading to entire movies where all character motions are built out of various mix-and-matched frames of other animations.
- The Wii A Boy and His Blob features a "hug Blob" button.
- Army of Two includes "Bromance" type stuff where you can high five your co-op team-mate, or shake hands. Or smack them. This will usually completely derail a mission for several minutes as players continually smack each other.
- Asheron's Call 2 has, amongst its more generic emotes, the "gokart" emote, which would cause a player to remain in a sitting position while moving.
- City of Heroes has over two hundred
of these, including five different "/dance"s, a half-dozen variations on "/sit", eating, drinking, beating someone with a baseball bat, turning someone into a pumpkin, being turned into a pumpkin by someone, plotting evilly, and inviting someone to kiss your butt. Furthermore, new ones seem to be added with every major release of the game.
- While many multiplayer shooters have emotes (mostly victory gloats), the cult of multiplayer saber fighting in the later Dark Forces Saga games caused the developers to eventually add thirty different default emote animations.
- These are the only way players can directly communicate in Dark Souls and its sequels, besides buying and finding a certain kind of item in Oolacile that plays a pre-recorded message when used ("Hello!", "Very good!", "Help me!", "Thank you" and "I'm sorry".) It's common for invaders to bow to their opponent so each other can prepare for a duel, and some gestures are purely made for humiliating their opponents.
- Demon's Souls and its various sequels and Spiritual Successors have a variety of pre-animated animations (including the highly memetic "Praise the Sun" gesture made famous in Dark Souls) that, along with mad-libs style messages ([Fill in the Blank] Ahead, Beware of [Whatever], Use [Thing], etc.), are the only means of non PvP player interaction.
- The Lord of the Rings Online also includes over a hundred of animations with new ones being added frequently. Several dozens are the basic ones, rest are unlockable through gameplay. Many quests require you to perform certain animations to progress. Also, there are at least twelve different emotes for various dances alone.
- Dragon Quest IX has "Party Tricks", many of which are given out as rewards as you complete quests. They were most likely added because of the game's increased focus on multiplayer.
- Earth & Beyond had emotes for your character and your ship; yaw spins, barrel rolls, short loop-the-loops, all performed without influencing the direction of flight or breaking formation.
- Bored Everquest players proved that it's possible to make any character dance the macarena with stock emotes.
- Fable:
- Fable has a wide variety of emote animations, many of which need to be unlocked by fulfilling certain criteria in-game. Despite it being a single-player game, they're actually useful: you use them for Romance Sidequests, frightening villagers, flipping off guards, farting to make children giggle, showing off trophies for extra renown, or even being forgiven for minor crimes.
- Fable II allows the player to "extend" certain emotes for better results with the caveat that, the longer the emote is extended, the greater the chance to fail. Failure can be funnier than success: failing the fart emote results in the player soiling themselves.
- Final Fantasy XI actually has made multiple updates to its emotes. An early patch after the initial US release (later known as the "sitting nerf") changed the /sit emote for female characters so their legs weren't spread quite so wide. More recently the various dancing animations used for the Dancer job class were added as new /dance emotes.
- Puppeteers' animations will perform emotes along with their masters.
- Final Fantasy XIV has various animations that vary slightly depending on the Player Character's race, and sometimes their job. These are coupled with Idle Animations (as you can trigger them on command) and are used for almost every cutscene, which makes the characters seem robotic at times.
- Fortnite Battle Royale features dozens of emotes and dances for sale, with more regularly added either through season passes or in the game's shop. Notable ones include the Vulcan Salute, the Wakanda greeting, and the Spider-Man pointing meme.
- Guild Wars also includes several, with dance (based on character profession) included. Also notable are /flute and /guitar ("Rostafan plays a mean air guitar.")
- Mabinogi added emotes for greeting, laughing, crying, and being angry, among others, around its 1-year anniversary in North America. As of mid-August 2010, further animations for salutes, formal greetings, and dancing were added.
- The Matrix Online includes several selectable dances which differ based on gender as well as a collection of interactive emotes. Players can either accept the emote or decline it, such as /kiss, /propose, /manhug, and /dap.
- God Eater Burst has a variety of them keyed to the D-pad and shoulder buttons, ranging from clapping to a bow.
- Golden Sun: Dark Dawn replaces standard Yes and No answers to questions with 4 emote actions so Matthew can respond angrily or happily, etc.
- League of Legends features a joke, taunt, dance and laughing emote for each champ, most of which come with its own animation.
- LittleBigPlanet has the D-Pad entirely devoted to the player-controlled characters' emotions. Each button has a designated emotion (for example, up is for happy, right for angry, down for sad, and left for fear) and pressing it up to three times will change the intensity of the emotion.
- This is an integral element of character customization in Phantasy Star Online 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, referred to as "Lobby Actions" (in the Japanese version) or "Emotes" (in the Global version). Typing in a chat command or using the dedicated Emote menu will let you perform a special pose or animation unique to that emote, which have two or more variations depending on gender and additional modifications that can be toggled with a button press. New Genesis even added an additional modification element called Hand Poses, which can be used to alter your character's hands during an Emote. You start off with over a dozen of these pre-installed and can obtain more by using Emote Tickets to add more to your roster, which can be obtained in various ways including as freebies, AC Scratch, or SG Scratch. As of this writing, there are over 900 unique Emotes in existence, with new ones added every two weeks or so.
- To a lesser extent, Phantasy Star Nova reused a few Lobby Actions from PSO2 to facilitate basic communication in multiplayer. Due to a lack of an in-game chat function, Lobby Actions in this game can only be used by adding them to your hotbar, which means it has to share space with all of your other important gameplay stuff like Skills and Items.* PlanetSide has a wide variety of animations, the majority of which are played with voice callouts; "HELP!" will cause your character to wave their arms in the air, saying "Yes" causes them to make an "OK" gesture with their hand, et cetera. There's several hidden commands, such as "cabbagepatch", that causes your character to dance. Sadly, the animations are missing in the sequel.
- Portal 2's co-op features gestures.
- Prince of Persia (2008) has a dedicated button for activating conversation between the Prince and Elika. The conversations do include snippets of the backstory, however.
- RuneScape has a few dozens of emote animations. Some are given out during certain holiday events, others are unlocked by completing requirements, and still others are only activated through the use of a specific item, weapon, or costume/cape.
- Space Engineers allows the space-suited players to use several emotes, which can be expanded with Game Mods. Amusingly, the animations are blended, allowing you to wave one arm in the air in celebration while the other is face-palming.
- Second Life, since all of the content is user-made, has literally thousands of emote animations and gestures.
- Star Citizen has a wide selection of emotes for the sandbox universe, with each emote having a few variations. It's possible to hold down the trigger on your automatic rifle while dancing, sending a wild spray of bullets in every direction.
- Tales of Symphonia has a mini-game in which the stock emotes are mapped to random keys on the controller, and the player must trigger emotes to match the demonstrating NPC.
- In Toontown Online, this varies from waving hello, to applauding, to growling, to growling with an organ playing in the background.
- Torchlight II has these available in multiplayer and it overlaps with Emote Command and Slash Command by using a forward slash in the chat window. These included mostly humorous ones like /jump "[Player] tries to jump but can't." to /secret "[Player] is trolling Justin!"
- Warframe features dozens of animated actions the players can perform from their modifiable emote wheel, ranging from simple gestures like handshakes, to levitating, to elaborate "nartas".
- In World of Warcraft, the slash command "/dance" triggers a different dancing animation depending on the race and gender of your character. For example, male dwarves will perform a "Cossack" dance, while female dwarves will perform some Riverdance-esque Irish step-dancing. There are other animations as well. /rude, /train /roar, being a few examples.
