Wishing ain’t make it so, Nintendo is best-in-class at interactions because they’ve been building their wind engine since Wind Waker and prioritized it for gameplay, not because their art style frees resources. Their world has an underlying sense of physics simulations and so a lot of things I ask for just don’t work because most games avoid physics simulations like the plague.
Jason Schreier wrote about cloth interaction today and pulled up an example of Uncharted 4 having a jacket removal and noting, only Naughty Dog has the money to blow on 4 seconds of screen time. Because even then it took weeks of the best technical artists in the world. For 4 seconds of screen time.
I mean sure I understand that graphics technologies are not at this time built to do these things, which is the point. We’ve spent the last 20 years going from Ocarina of Time to Witcher 3, we should spend the next 20 making sure when my dude is wearing a sword on his back it doesn’t ghost through his trousers every time I run
I’m also the voice yelling at animators to stop fiddling with clipping issues because nobody cares (or at least I don’t) because anyone can make a game look stupid in 10 seconds and what I really want is more content so I can cram more cool stuff in.
And just as often the conversation is, can we do a stealth attack if you don’t have that weapon equipped and should we do a clean sheath or pop the weapons away?
Do we care about sheath models or do we let the player pop weapon sets?
What about stance – if you’re left foot leading on first swing but your run stopped with right foot leading how do we get back to correct pose, can we blend in 3 frames or do we need to duplicate all our attack chains to match starting stance?
Designers losing that fight in the late '00s is what brought us to Assassin’s/Arkham auto combat that we’re only now recovering from.
Yeah I am on Team Animation with this one. I don’t care if it doubles the development length just make clothes behave like actual clothes.
There’s a new Red Dead 2 gameplay video coming out tomorrow morning and I can’t wait to see how that game moves when someone is actually playing it. Of course, Rockstar leans heavily into the immersiveness of their experiences so each new game places an even greater focus on animation. It really comes down to what the goal is with your game: Immersion or mechanics?
Rockstar’s an interesting example because they believe in simulationism more than almost any dev; they invest heavily in Euphoria so they can create realistic falls and trip characters all over the place (most games keep feet fully grounded at all times) and they embrace the chaos, making the tradeoff away from fidelity if it’s more systemic and broad. They give up good controls for a QWOP-like game because they get benefits from humor. They still pull off certain techniques no one else does because they have such massive talent pools but they trade away fidelity and are solving it by not having to make those tradeoffs through MONEY.
I think Nintendo has the right of it, though. Breath of the Wild is something like 1/10 the energy in fidelity as a modern AAA game but still has more scenes of well-observed nature than almost anything. The climbing is the best illustrative example; a month of programming to get a universal solution that doesn’t break in the way Ubisoft’s climbing always does after a decade, and it’s much more empowering. Cheaper and better it only gives up a bit of cartooniness in exchange. But who believes that art style can’t convey complex adult tones if they want?
No melee combat in a game that attempts visual realism. It’ll just never work. As soon as the graphics get perfect, then the crudity of the input will become apparent. There’s no real way to solve that problem without the holodeck. I guess some people will accept VR as an interim solution, but the lack of force feedback makes it similarly ultimately unworkable.
I’d modify that to, ‘only fidelity to the extent that it helps sell the impact and decisions of an abstracted system’. I mean, games are never not simplified reflections and yet games are still awesome. D&D is abstract as anything but it’s awesome. Pressing a button to decapitate a guy misses a million cues of angle, timing, approach, force, but it’s still awesome. I always keep in mind the bright line that this is fake and believe that players can accept dips away from fidelity in favor of clarity, responsiveness, and baditude.
Actually you’ve just gone spoiled from Superhot VR, huh?
Also get rid of punching dudes in films while we’re at it. Fight scenes are never ever “realistic”. They can only be movie realistic. So get rid of them until Bruce Lee is reborn and can make them work
Also, movie gun fights. Get rid of them until we can produce disposable human clones to shoot at for real
There’s certain things you just have to live with, is what I’m saying
(I say these snarky things as someone who’s as bothered by the issues as Cuba is, who, I know, is mostly joking anyway)