HERE IT IS!!! -- The FIRST 13 Min of MGS4!!!!

[jalsonmi]

Plaupius said:

IllegalPaladin said:

Plaupius said:
Wow, I love the way they use music to create the feel of the game. The transitions from "cinematics" to player control weren't that smooth, somehow the awesome feeling of being there was lost when you switch to player control, but maybe that's just because I'm not the one in control. Anyway, looks definitely great, IMO much more interesting than GTA IV for example.

Considering how in every one of the past MGS games (as well as many other games for that matter), you'll have to sit through a short loading sequence. I think that this transition between cutscene and gameplay is awesome especially because it's instant (or at least isn't seperated by a loading screen)

That's a valid point. But judging from the video, the impression I got was that all of the sudden Snake's animation and movements got a whole lot worse.

Actually, here's a point of criticism for nearly all games, it just happens to be more pronounced in games that aim for graphical realism: why do the characters move about as if they have no inertia and ball bearings under their feet? For MGS4 we get this amazing level of detail in just about everything and during the cutscenes the animations are spot-on, but as soon as you transfer to player control the illusion breaks. Would it be so hard to do some kind of inverse kinematics based animation system that runs in real time and doesn't look like cardboard characters? As a side note, does Crysis have something along those lines? I remember seeing something hinting at that direction in a tech demo video.

There's actually a technological term for that problem-- the Uncanny Valley. As graphics get more and more realistic, they reach a point where they are almost lifelike but not quite. It's at that point that our brains tend to reject those graphics, as tey feel like they should be real but are just...off. They don't quite move right, the faces aren't quite real enough, etc. The valley refers to the slow progression of graphics apporaching lifelike attributes--as they get more lifelike, we read them as more realistic, until we reach the Uncanny Valley, at which point they level of realism we read them as having goes way, way down, to the levels of nearly cartoon level graphics.

This effect is most pronounced and discussed when it comes to motion capture animation--the way Beowolf or The Polar Express just feel off to so many people, but it's becoming more and more an issue in video games, especially this generation. It's not like Leon Kennedy's movements in RE4 ever got disected the way Snake's have in MGS4.

Which is not to say MGS4 doesn't look badass, because it does.