One bit from one of the many Naughty Dog dev interviews is that they tried various animation approaches for how enemies react to a melee whack in TLOU and they ended up going with one that warped the model to a struck stance on the exact frame it was hit, no matter what pose it was in previously. Everything else felt too unresponsive and the warp didn’t actually look unnatural even though it wasn’t physics-based.
Probably their resources to make craploads of variant animation posings helped make this viable tho
Modern animation systems are all about complex blending between many different animation inputs - your walking animation playing while looking at a target playing while doing something with your arms playing while solving inverse kinematics so your feet and arms don’t clip through the ground and all of that blending into the next set of animations you’re supposed to go into.
But we still ask for a switch in all our systems so we can turn animation blends off because the pop is the entire point because games work like animation. You need to do unrealistic things and exaggerate because the impact is all in the player’s mind; it’s all about anticipation and reaction.
Motion capture is beloved because it grabs all of the subtle unconscious movements to maintain balance and exist that bodies do. But action games, even high-budget action games, aren’t (shouldn’t) be about realistic bodies but about impact and crunch and intensity and all of that is what traditional animation principles are for, and you need all those tricks to convey physicality past a glass display, a couple of resonating membranes, and (if you’re lucky), a vibrating piece of plastic in their hand.
I think it might(?) be okay, I found this (very) recent reddit thread where someone’s working to compile a list of every XBLIG game and it’s there & I found it in one of the XBLIG archives/reuploads for hacked xboxs. Altho the website it was on seemed uh, maybe not 100% trustworthy.
i’m voting “No,” because I think instead you should play only the most recent one, ideally from a save someone else gives you that is like 25% through the game already, and then write a long post explaining the plot of the series based on what you can extrapolate from that far in