GribbleGrunger said: For years devs have been under the misconception that making characters look real is the the way to capture the essence of a human, but it's misplaced. Yes, it's important but it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is how they act and interact with the environment as you play. ND are actually pushing this to the next level and hopefully UC4 can improve on TLOU in this regard ... but that will be a tall order. If you animated a stickman in a realistic way, you would hit the uncanny valley because the actions of the stickman are perfect but our brains won't have the 'human' normal reference points. This is the same as having something that looks real but doesn't animate in a 'human' way, which of course is the flip side of the argument. Animations, contextual animations are for me the next big evolution of gaming. People think they have it now but they don't. Most of the animations are convenient for the devs to put in, like Nathan Drake touching a surface when he gets close to it. This is just an animation associated with 'closeness' but what we need now is animations associated with 'character'. Imagine searching for materials with Ellie and she suddenly just walks over to the book case, removes a random book and starts flicking through it? Or she might just stare at a painting of a deer for a long time which then informs the animation system on Joel to move over and gentry persuade her away by grabbing the crook of her arm. Spaces should be constantly filled with these 'human' things. |
I absolutely agree. I actually also think it's important to remember that just doing something human isn't going be enough either. For example, I check my watch probably 100 times a day. But, the way I do it is a little bit different every time. In order for characters to seem real to the player, they're going to ahve to take that sort of thing into account.
It's going to take litterally thousands and thousands of animations per character to make them seem real, and I can't wait until we get there.
Bet with Adamblaziken:
I bet that on launch the Nintendo Switch will have no built in in-game voice chat. He bets that it will. The winner gets six months of avatar control over the other user.