witcher 3 trees witcher 3 trees
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Wishing aināt make it so, Nintendo is best-in-class at interactions because theyāve 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 donāt 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.
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I mean sure I understand that graphics technologies are not at this time built to do these things, which is the point. Weāve 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 doesnāt ghost through his trousers every time I run
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Get me a CPU scaling in power like graphics cards have, and compound it for the next twenty years, and weāre in business.
Unfortunately general-purpose computing speedups have been plateauing for a decade.
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Iām also the voice yelling at animators to stop fiddling with clipping issues because nobody cares (or at least I donāt) 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.
Iāll point them to my pal Cuba next time I guess
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Seriously animators will spend twice as long messing with this if you let them, itās maddening
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And just as often the conversation is, can we do a stealth attack if you donāt 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 ā if youāre 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 Assassinās/Arkham auto combat that weāre only now recovering from.
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Yeah I am on Team Animation with this one. I donāt care if it doubles the development length just make clothes behave like actual clothes.
Thereās a new Red Dead 2 gameplay video coming out tomorrow morning and I canāt 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?
Guess who just walked backward into Shop Talk
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I would read a blog of you talking game dev shop if you wrote one.
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Hereās a thought: end representational videogame melee combat altogether (hah hah hah)
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Rockstarās 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 itās 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 doesnāt break in the way Ubisoftās climbing always does after a decade, and itās much more empowering. Cheaper and better it only gives up a bit of cartooniness in exchange. But who believes that art style canāt convey complex adult tones if they want?
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Watchu mean? Like, no combat, period?
No melee combat in a game that attempts visual realism. Itāll just never work. As soon as the graphics get perfect, then the crudity of the input will become apparent. Thereās 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.
Iād modify that to, āonly fidelity to the extent that it helps sell the impact and decisions of an abstracted systemā. I mean, games are never not simplified reflections and yet games are still awesome. D&D is abstract as anything but itās awesome. Pressing a button to decapitate a guy misses a million cues of angle, timing, approach, force, but itās 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 youāve just gone spoiled from Superhot VR, huh?
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D&D is entirely imaginative, it has infinite fidelity! This is not an Arkham Asylum situation.
Iām actually getting pretty bored of it which is part of where Iām coming from!
YES.
i mean games should generally strive to be less about fighting and/or killing dudes and monsters
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Also get rid of punching dudes in films while weāre at it. Fight scenes are never ever ārealisticā. 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
Thereās certain things you just have to live with, is what Iām saying
(I say these snarky things as someone whoās as bothered by the issues as Cuba is, who, I know, is mostly joking anyway)
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I think they should be more about sexing dudes and monsters
But donāt get me started on the clipping issues present there. I know from personal history as an adult videogame producer
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9 days to go!
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