IMO good animations are far more important than nice models, textures, or backgrounds

[Atmos Duality]

Couldn't agree more.
I stopped playing A Valley Without Wind because of three big reasons:

1) It's extremely repetitive. Most attacks are exactly the same, with a different sprite and element. Most enemies just randomly fart about either spraying projectiles or trying to bump into you.

2) The sense of scale falls off when you realize how little the environments actually matter.

3) But most jarring (and relevant to this topic):
The animations are TERRIBLE. Whenever you attack, your character enters into this frame where it looks like they're taking damage. And it's only 1 frame! So if you continuously attack (which you will be doing...A LOT) it just looks awkward.

All the enemies have very limited animation, and it seems to have been done that way intentionally. The best animations are the robots with their staff-like weapons, some of whom actually look like they're trying to hit you with the weapon.

Good animation and purpose is what made Metroid, Castlevania and Megaman (the platformers AVWW is allegedly trying to imitate) stand out among their peers even in 2D.

 

[hutchy27]

ME3 is very nice looking game, until the characters start moving

I know, have you seen them run in that game?!? wtf if that?

 

[josemlopes]

To be honest it does make the game feel like Hitman lol.

But yeah, at least for third person games, for FPS's, like on the case of that Half Life video, I dont see it working as well, most of those action would require a QTE, Kinect or some kind of mind reading software. For the case of third person games take a look at Max Payne, really cool stuff when Max jumps and hits a wall in midair.

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

Why not have both?

Money.

Making good animation takes time and effort, and making good looking movement for characters who's actions are not entirely in the programmers or animators hands is a nightmare. It is hard to make realistic movement since real movement has so many small movements to go with the larger ones.

Publishers want the game to look good in screenshots and trailers first, looking good in gameplay is only a secondary concern. You can't make good animation look good if you only see one instance of it.

 

[Brawndo]

Why not have both?

Money.

Making good animation takes time and effort, and making good looking movement for characters who's actions are not entirely in the programmers or animators hands is a nightmare. It is hard to make realistic movement since real movement has so many small movements to go with the larger ones.

Publishers want the game to look good in screenshots and trailers first, looking good in gameplay is only a secondary concern. You can't make good animation look good if you only see one instance of it.

Why can't modern games just use motion capture? I mean, the first Mortal Kombat released in the early 90s had better animations than some modern games thanks to trained actors and stuntmen doing motion capture.

 

[Keoul]

I have seen somthing like this with Mirrors edge. This is the reason you don`t play FPS only games in TPS mode .

Hmmm if you play it in multiplayer do characters look like that? I've never actually played dead island

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

Why not have both?

Money.

Making good animation takes time and effort, and making good looking movement for characters who's actions are not entirely in the programmers or animators hands is a nightmare. It is hard to make realistic movement since real movement has so many small movements to go with the larger ones.

Publishers want the game to look good in screenshots and trailers first, looking good in gameplay is only a secondary concern. You can't make good animation look good if you only see one instance of it.

Why can't modern games just use motion capture? I mean, the first Mortal Kombat released in the early 90s had better animations than some modern games thanks to trained actors and stuntmen doing motion capture.

Well, for a lot of things they actually do, but there is only so much it is good for (Black Ops and Uncharted, for example, used it for it's cutscenes_ Mortal Kombat used it because they only needed people moving forward, back, and do a certain amount of moves, all at the same speed. To do that now, you need to move in all directions, raise multiple weapons, use different devices, and all kinds of other things. Also, the camera itself is a problem. With a cutscene you know where the cutscene is at all times, so it works pretty well. When the camera could literally be anywhere in a given scene, it doesn't work as well. Also, motion capture is limited by the number of the "tracking balls" you have on your actors.

LA Noire used a large amount of camera to capture every movement of the actor, but it was designed only to work on the actors faces, and while they were sitting down. Rockstar can afford a lot more tech than your average developer can, since every game they have released has been a hit.

Every dollar you spend on animation is one less you can spend on everything else. Developers need to be very careful not to overspend in any one area, less they run out of cash before they finished the game.

 

[skywolfblue]

Why not have both?

Money.

Making good animation takes time and effort, and making good looking movement for characters who's actions are not entirely in the programmers or animators hands is a nightmare. It is hard to make realistic movement since real movement has so many small movements to go with the larger ones.

Publishers want the game to look good in screenshots and trailers first, looking good in gameplay is only a secondary concern. You can't make good animation look good if you only see one instance of it.

Why can't modern games just use motion capture? I mean, the first Mortal Kombat released in the early 90s had better animations than some modern games thanks to trained actors and stuntmen doing motion capture.

Most modern games DO use a lot of Motion Capture.

Thing is, Motion Capture is horridly glitchy out of the gate, it's a very rough technology. So animators have to go in and manually clean it up (in a 3d program) by hand. Hence, a lot of time.

 

[Worgen]

Animation is actually really hard to do since there are so many varied environments and situations that could occur, its much easier to make really nice graphics than it is to make really spectacular animations. Getting two 3d objects to interact well is still pretty tricky.

 

[ChildishLegacy]

I completely agree. I loved the way WoW played and looked because it's animations were so smooth and made the game feel really fluid. Other MMOs like rift just felt so clunky and horrible even though they looked a lot better graphically, i felt like i was controlling somebody made of granite.

This is one reason is why I go off so many MMOs, because I just can't bear playing them after playing WoW for so long. I don't understand why so many devs put little effort in their crappy animations compared to their amazing looking textures etc, because there's no point of them if what you're looking at most of the time (your character/enemies) looks very shoddy/robot like.

 

[shrekfan246]

From what I remember, the Uncharted series has always tried to pay its fair amount of attention to animations. It's one of the few games I've ever seen that the character actually has a unique set of animations for going up and down step-like objects.

- Terrible rag doll corpses that have no weight to them and end up in awkward poses (6:40)

Also, I love terrible rag-doll physics. I can't get mad at them when they're so absolutely hilarious sometimes.

 

[Jdb]

An animation thread? Have some Third Strike then.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

Hmmm if you play it in multiplayer do characters look like that? I've never actually played dead island

No, it looks better. It`s nothing to scream about but it´s really not as bad as shown in the vid. I guess they use different animation-sets for the characters you see if you play online.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidtDV_4ZLI&feature=related

This is a bit offtopic but it´s the funniest zombiekill i`ve seen so far
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGDaAWuCVHs&feature=related

Another note: Just finished MP3 on Oldschool. I had never the feeling that the animations are in the way of gameplay. Every ingame death (which happened a lot on this difficulty) was my own fault. I wish more games would use Euphoria. It looks outstanding.

 

[geK0]

I can see your issues; I watched the whole video and was annoyed by the same little things. Although, overall it looks like a damn good game; I should really get into this series.

 

[lunavixen]

choppy and uneven animation is what gets me, to me there is nothing worse than watching animations go through and it starts looking like a marionette with half its strings cut. Developers can't really go to one end or the other, if the animation of the characters is bad but the scenery is awesome, they get slammed for the animations, and if it is the reverse, they get slammed for the graphics, i think they have to find the middle ground until they get it right.

It's quite funny, actually... remember Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, the derptastic glitchfest that nearly killed the series?

In that game, she had proper stair animations, realistic door-opening skills, items had to be picked up, and no rag-dolls at all (static death animations were used). How is it that a game that was terrible in pretty much all departments could still get all those things right, but AAA games today can't?

i couldn't have put it any better myself