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[Jesb]

I hate that lazy developers continue to do stuff like this, but it’s still a thing today and doesn’t seem to be going away. What am I talking about? I’m talking about drawers or doors that magically open without any animation of the hand actually opening the door. It completely takes the immersion out of the game for me. Stop doing this, fuck.

 

[Pegasus Actual]

Bro if immersive drawer-opening gives you wood just walk over to your dresser and go to town.

 

[sigmaZ]

I could see that being annoying the game was slower and going for more realism. Would annoy me in type of games I play as it would kill the pace.

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

nothing lazy about it, not everything needs an animation, this would be absolutely awful for games where you open shit all the time like borderlands or a bethesda game; yeah let me just pause the game and take away control from the player to open crate 1 out of 50.

 

[Magic Carpet]

 

[Danjin44]

Thats not really lazy, I heard animation for opening door in games is difficult and very time consuming, so some devs rather put that time in something else that has bigger priority.

 

[SHA]

Cautious devs more precisely, and there is nothing wrong with being cautious, it's normal, but we still haven't reached a point where it's as productive as when they weren't before, I still believe they could be productive while being cautious.

 

[xXRedxSlugXx]

Well it is your lucky day pal!

 

[PonyStation4]

How about turning animations in games?

 

[IAmRei]

Umm, what about toilet in rpg, i mean they are eating foods, nobody bats an eyes when our character doesnt poo at all after so many dishes they eat to buff themselves : ))

 

[Represent.]

For me its bad animation.

Specifically how does my character animate while rotating in place.

Most games that animate like this gif have very shit tier animation, which leads to combat feeling lighter than paper, which in turn leads to bad feeling combat, which leads to a bad game

As soon as I move the left stick around 360 degrees, and this is how my character animates - I get turned off the game immediately. Unless the gameplay itself hits REALLY HARD and makes up for it in other aspects, its going to be hard for me to finish that shit.

In an action game I need good animation to go along with hard hitting combat. This below is just lazy to me. Good animation helps your games combat feel smooth yet heavy.

This makes your entire combat experience feel like lightweight, which is a huge turnoff for me.

 

[Mibu no ookami]

I hate that lazy developers continue to do stuff like this, but it’s still a thing today and doesn’t seem to be going away. What am I talking about? I’m talking about drawers or doors that magically open without any animation of the hand actually opening the door. It completely takes the immersion out of the game for me. Stop doing this, fuck.

I like how you think this is about laziness.

Game development is a project. Projects have timelines and fixed resources.

Something that you want not being in a game doesn't mean that someone was lazy, ultimately it means they didn't have the time/resources to spend on that aspect.

Generally the biggest games (most detailed/complex) have the most time and resources.

 

[Represent.]

How about turning animations in games?

wow someone actually agreed with me

 

[Husky]

Do you feel this way about first-person games, or just third-person? In first-person, I think I actually prefer not to see a hand reach out to each item I interact with.

 

[Kataploom]

Lazy? You're talking about the issue that singlehandedly puts times and budget in their knees and designers to scratch their heads lmao.

No, seriously, everything related to doors are a pain in ass in game development, it's avoided as soon as design phase starts because nobody wants to deal with it that much so good practices to get it done within reasonable constraints are performed instead of reinventing the wheel, and animating hands to accommodate them to carrying objects, let alone procedurally without any noticable error, is basically that in several magnitudes.

You almost touched a tabu subject in the industry lol.

 

[What A Shame...]

The immediate action of the door/drawer opening feels more important than seeing the animation, at least in first-person games.

 

[ThatPolishGuy]

Bro if immersive drawer-opening gives you wood just walk over to your dresser and go to town.

Yeah, Thief remake did that and it was such a chore.

Compared to earlier games, which were well better and really immersive and they didn't have that.

In the beginning I thought, well this is gonna be immersive as f. Later than the road, when I put in some hours I was like, daamn those drawers- those never end lmao.

It looks good on paper but in practice not so much it's like GameCube RE Remake doors opening animation, you just wait and wait for animation to finish.

Thrown in some relatively nice paced gameplay, and pause for 5s to 10s in repetitive manner for animation to finish and instead of immersion, you have broken the immersion.

Also that's time and budget for devs, I rather have a fun game with a bit simplified pick up and hands movement animations than slow down and wait for detailed animations, make a game like Thief remake in todays era of SSDs and you have basically something like a bunch of loading screens every animation- that's not a good pacing.

Don't get me wrong, it's doable but it has to be simplified and there have to be fast hands movements, not detailed, look at those hands and do animation for 5s every damn time. Then it will work, give a sense of immersion, I guess it's all about balance. Try a bit too hard and you throw in the games pacing, try a little and you have too archaic design. I guess the best games are that which are right in the middle, IMHO.

 

[Aces High]

I’m talking about drawers or doors that magically open without any animation of the hand actually opening the door. It completely takes the immersion out of the game for me. Stop doing this, fuck.

Complete opposite for me.

I hate when games have hyperrealistic animations for everything.

It's a waste of everyone's time.

"Our game has 40 hour playtime" Yeah, but 30% of that is opening drawers.

 

[CamHostage]

Most games that animate like this gif to me have very shit tier animation, which leads to combat feeling lighter than paper, which in turn leads to bad feeling combat.

If you want truly great animation, go watch an animated movie. Pixar makes lots of them, they're pretty enjoyable...

If you want great interactivity, where the character you play as reacts when you push a button, then you've got to be ready to give something up. Game designers are working as hard as they can to achieve a balance of natural animation with responsive play, and tech designers are creating and training animation systems which are helping to make the seemingly-basic-yet-qwop'ingly difficult physical movements of human bodies more possible in a reasonably rigged character. But games have to, first and foremost, be played. And characters eschew many aspects of lifelike motion in order to focus on play.

Where you see "shit tier animation" in your GIF quoted above, for example, I see 17 complete 360s in less than 8 seconds (including a full reversal of momentum in the opposite direction with almost no delay of movement.) It moves as fast as the player can spin the analog stick around, which is exactly what this player is trying to get the character to do, and may be what works best for the gameplay. It's not great animation, no, but it's perfectly serviceable game animation.

If you're willing to sacrifice instant reaction and for slower and more accurate body motion/physics, some games like Assassin's Creed and GTA and Monster Hunter prioritize animation systems over twitch gameplay, and that's fun sometimes to have the restrictions of reality weigh down on your character, but usually you're playing a game because you want to play a game, not to sim real life.

 

[Spukc]

Devs are lazy

 

[Dacvak]

Personally, I don’t believe in “lazy development.” I think it’s mismanaged development.

 

[nowhat]

I could see that being annoying the game was slower and going for more realism. Would annoy me in type of games I play as it would kill the pace.

Agreed - case in point, RDR 2. The game has many things going for it, but goddamn it's annoying to play.

 

[March Climber]

Jesb Represent.

There’s a bar with two opposite sides

Realism<————————————>Fun

The things you both want bring the scale closer to the realism side and make movements feel sluggish/heavier, more deliberate, and more delayed, because your overly animated character has to do all of these small actions to appear more realistic.

Those small actions can all add up to large annoyances. A balance has to be made and sometimes devs will make hard choices so that their games aren’t slowed down to a crawl to simply look as realistic as possible.

 

[CamHostage]

Lazy? You're talking about the issue that singlehandedly puts times and budget in their knees and designers to scratch their heads lmao.

No, seriously, everything related to doors are a pain in ass in game development, it's avoided as soon as design phase starts because nobody wants to deal with it that much so good practices to get it done within reasonable constraints are performed instead of reinventing the wheel, and animating hands to accommodate them to carrying objects, let alone procedurally without any noticable error, is basically that in several magnitudes.

You almost touched a tabu subject in the industry lol.

It's actually a weird thing that people think anything in a game is simple in any way like the real world.

We see a "world" in front of us when we turn on their game machine and TV, we see a character standing in that world, we push a button or pull a stick and the character moves. So, then, the mind leaps to accepting all of this as reality, and everything possible in reality should be doable as easily as the real world. Just tell the computer, "Move Hand A to Handle B and Pull", and drawers will open, with all the real stuff inside and physically able to be interacted with. We don't think of games as being polygon definitions (not even "surfaces", but rather mathematical arrays of triangles that the renderer and physics system then uses to calculate what an object looks like and what happens when some of the math interferes with the coordinates of other polygon math clusters,) of them having rules for why objects or characters behave as they do (and that if there's not a rule for a scenario, the object has no possible reaction to what it encounters,) of having sounds and movements and actions only when somebody designs those sounds and movements and actions (or writes a code to procedurally generate a sound/movement/action based on parameters of activity.) We cannot imagine that simply opening a drawer involves so many different mechanisms and combination of animation rigs, that it could introduce game-breaking bugs from one basic action. Doors, similarly, seem liken the easiest thing imaginable to program into a game (it's a big rectangle which pivots from hinge-points on one side) and we've had doors in games since PS1 and beyond, yet doors can be a real nuisance to game developers.

Why game developers can’t get a handle on doors

“You’d be surprised at how many games don’t have interactive doors at all”

www.theverge.com

I always think it's weird how hard people lol at game glitches, like when you could ride a woman in RDR or when you break through the playing field and fall into the empty staging area. People laugh so hard, screaming, "That shit can't really happen!" No it can't really happen, but neither can 90% of the actions you pull in a game, but this shit isn't real, this is a game. People should actually be amazed that it did happen and the game kept going, that the simulation is on solid-enough grounding that the machine keeps going even when errors break its normal running instructions. It sucks when a game bug breaks the immersion so carefully constructed by developers, they try their best to hide all the ways a game can go wrong, but if a game character does something weird in a glitch, it's actually the veil of illusion being lifted off the game for a second, giving you a window into how the game was actually made to work.

Still funny when stuff flubs in a silly way, but don't get huffy that the "stupid game" is doing something impossible; it's stupid of you to think a computer program, running 1s and 0s to put on a interactive show for you, knows or cares in any way about what's possible in your real world.

 

[gtabro]

Every time I do this in a Souls game I can't help but think about this guy lol

 

[Kindela]

I thought I wanted the same thing while I was young and naive OP. But then I played rdr 2 and realized that I'd rather not spend 10 seconds skinning an animal every single time.

 

[Mibu no ookami]

Personally, I don’t believe in “lazy development.” I think it’s mismanaged development.

Easy to blame management as well.

The reality is you need a lot of good things happening to make a good game.

Good management, talent, budget, time.

If any of these aren't there the game probably won't be good.

 

[Danjin44]

If you want truly great animation, go watch an animated movie. Pixar makes lots of them, they're pretty enjoyable...

If you want great interactivity, where the character you play as reacts when you push a button, then you've got to be ready to give something up. Game designers are working as hard as they can to achieve a balance of natural animation with responsive play, and tech designers are creating and training animation systems which are helping to make the seemingly-basic-yet-qwop'ingly difficult physical movements of human bodies more possible in a reasonably rigged character. But games have to, first and foremost, be played. And characters eschew many aspects of lifelike motion in order to focus on play.

Where you see "shit tier animation" in your GIF quoted above, for example, I see 17 complete 360s in less than 8 seconds (including a full reversal of momentum in the opposite direction with almost no delay of movement.) It moves as fast as the player can spin the analog stick around, which is exactly what this player is trying to get the character to do, and may be what works best for the gameplay. It's not great animation, no, but it's perfectly serviceable game animation.

If you're willing to sacrifice instant reaction and for slower and more accurate body motion/physics, some games like Assassin's Creed and GTA and Monster Hunter prioritize animation systems over twitch gameplay, and that's fun sometimes to have the restrictions of reality weigh down on your character, but usually you're playing a game because you want to play a game, not to sim real life.

Most people dont understand this simple concept....

Meet PlatinumGames’ NieR:Automata team! | PlatinumGames Official Blog

PG game designer Takahisa Taura here. It was my pleasure to share some new information and footage from NieR:A […]

www.platinumgames.com

Here’s a common situation: You’re patting yourself on the back for making an animation that looks super-cool and flows really nicely. Then, you put your perfect animation into the game engine and try controlling it, and it dawns on you that it’s too slow, too clunky. With tears in your eyes, you go back and cut away huge parts of your magnificent creation until it finally feels good.

As an animator first and foremost, there’s a lot you can’t help but want to leave in. But you’re not making a movie here – you’re making a game, and it has to be tight and responsive. The truest sign of a skilled game animator is their ability to make something great with the number of frames they’re given.

 

[March Climber]

CamHostage Danjin44

I feel like Kojima and his team are one of the few devs who manages to find perfect balance between realism and fun.

Death Stranding being a great example and MGSV being a perfect example.

 

[ThatPolishGuy]

I thought I wanted the same thing while I was young and naive OP. But then I played rdr 2 and realized that I'd rather not spend 10 seconds skinning an animal every single time.

As I have mentioned above on Thief's remake example. Pretty much same thing.

Imho, Naughty Dog has one of the best animations in industry, and they still do rather simplified hands motions for picking things up or opening stuff and it works.

Hands move, good. Not archaic.

But those are rather fast hand and simplified = not a chore.

You can still have rather fast paced immersive gameplay or enjoyable stealth and not feel like it's dragging things on.

Although I think I had more fun with The Last of Us 1 on PS3, especially in the hospital section. Or maybe I'm looking through nostalgia or something. But I feel like I'm not imagining things, compared to TLOU2 obviously.

 

[Boralf]

Lazy attempts at forming a discussion also need to go away.

 

[Danjin44]

I feel like Kojima and his team are one of the few devs who manages to find perfect balance between realism and fun.

Death Stranding being a great example and MGSV being a perfect example.

But those games have entirely different type of combat system.

When you have enemy or boss moving this fast and aggressive you need your character to be responsive rather than realistic.

 

[March Climber]

But those games have entirely different type of combat system.

When you have enemy or boss moving this fast and aggressive you need your character to be responsive rather than realistic.

I can guarantee you that Death Stranding and MGSV have enemies that move very similar to something like that, and Kojima’s gameplay allows for so much dexterity that you can outplay those scenarios easily (if you’re good).

 

[Danjin44]

I can guarantee you that Death Stranding and MGSV have enemies that move very similar to something like that, and Kojima’s gameplay allows for so much dexterity that you can outplay those scenarios easily (if you’re good).

I maybe wrong here but in Death Stranding and MGV dont you mostly shoot? Or does it have melee sword combat?

 

[March Climber]

I maybe wrong here but in Death Stranding and MGV dont you mostly shoot? Or does it have melee sword combat?

There are minor melee options, but I’m talking about the character movement in relation to a fast moving object.

There are certain spoiler enemies in both that keep you on your toes because they are…beyond normal.

I included Death Stranding because a lot of people think that game is one thing (walking sim) when half of the game is another thing (that I won’t spoil), that requires usage of tools, movement, and skill to overcome.

 

[Danjin44]

There are minor melee options, but I’m talking about the character movement in relation to a fast moving object.

There are certain spoiler enemies in both that keep you on your toes because they are…beyond normal.

I included Death Stranding because a lot of people think that game is one thing (walking sim) when half of the game is another thing (that I won’t spoil), that requires usage of tools, movement, and skill to overcome.

But the combat in Elden Ring is waaaay different than DS and MGV, animation was build around that combat.

for Melee combat like Elden Ring I need to responsive especially against super aggressive bosses.

 

[March Climber]

But the combat in Elden Ring is waaaay different than DS and MGV, animation was build around that combat.

for Melee combat like Elden Ring I need to be responsive especially against super aggressive bosses.

Your post tells me one critical thing: You really, really need to play MGSV.

There is literally no other third person action shooter that controls as good as MGSV. I have typed paragraphs here about how it is the literal peak of TPS combat and it is head and shoulders so far above everything else, that people would rather aim to try and match games below it to be great.

They can’t possibly touch the clouds so they’d rather just reach higher land.

 

[Beer Baelly]

Shouldn't have opened that door OP

 

[Danjin44]

Your post tells me one critical thing: You really, really need to play MGSV.

There is literally no other third person action shooter that controls as good as MGSV. I have typed paragraphs here about how it is the literal peak of TPS combat and it is head and shoulders so far above everything else, that people would rather aim to try and match games below it to be great.

They can’t possibly touch the clouds so they’d rather just reach higher land.

Again you are comparing TPS to Elden Ring which have very different combat, the animation system on those games would not work in Elden Ring.

Are you telling me enemy in MGV as aggressive as Maliketh?

 

[bender]

 

[The Pleasure]

For me its bad animation.

Specifically how does my character animate while rotating in place.

Most games that animate like this gif have very shit tier animation, which leads to combat feeling lighter than paper, which in turn leads to bad feeling combat, which leads to a bad game

As soon as I move the left stick around 360 degrees, and this is how my character animates - I get turned off the game immediately. Unless the gameplay itself hits REALLY HARD and makes up for it in other aspects, its going to be hard for me to finish that shit.

In an action game I need good animation to go along with hard hitting combat. This below is just lazy to me. Good animation helps your games combat feel smooth yet heavy.

This makes your entire combat experience feel like lightweight, which is a huge turnoff for me.

Is he hitting the griddy or doing the stanky leg?

 

[Jesb]

Lazy maybe is a little harsh and probably not the best choice of words but sometimes it can come off as just off putting because it can bring you out of that immersive feel. I totally get that for some games it’s not practical to do an animation for every single thing.

Like obviously we don’t want an animation in RE to pick up every bullet we find. But I’m ok with a hand gesture to open doors. I’m not saying it needs to be some super detailed close up dramatic slow motion animation. Just a quick animation of seeing the hand open the door is completely fine to me.

Of course you gotta balance realism and authenticity with fun. But I feel like they can improve on that some more.

 

[March Climber]

Again you are comparing TPS to Elden Ring which have very different combat, the animation system on those games would not work in Elden Ring.

Are you telling me enemy in MGV as aggressive as Maliketh?

MGSV doesn’t always have ‘shooter-cam’ and neither does Death Stranding. On regular movement their camera is just as pulled back as ER and allows for a vast freedom of movement including dodging, rolling, etc.(and MGSV has a CQC parry) I feel like we are kind of talking past each other here because you’d have to either play or look up spoiler boss fights with expert level players with both games I’m talking about, in order to understand.

 

[Danjin44]

MGSV doesn’t always have ‘shooter-cam’ and neither does Death Stranding. On regular movement their camera is just as pulled back as ER and allows for a vast freedom of movement including dodging, rolling, etc.(and MGSV has a CQC parry) I feel like we are kind of talking past each other here because you’d have to either play or look up spoiler boss fights with expert level players with both games I’m talking about, in order to understand.

You played Elden Ring and fought Maliketh….right? Can you in straight face tell me the bosses in Death Stranding and MGV as fast as that Maliketh?

 

[SCB3]

Have you played Red Dead 2? Its like that, it gets very tedious very fast

 

[AV]

People like you are genuinely ruining video games.

 

[Lucifers Beard]

I'm good thanks, I don't need an animation for everything. Just let me get the loot or whatever it is.

 

[Puscifer]

The Thief reboot really showed us why you don't do that, because it's boring. Same with Red Deads 30 second skinning animations and why I'm not exactly hyped for GTA 6: because if that stuff is infesting the gameplay I'm not going to force myself into enjoying it.

 

[March Climber]

You played Elden Ring and fought Maliketh….right? Can you in straight face tell me the bosses in Death Stranding and MGV as fast as that Maliketh?

Yes and yes. There are some that are as fast or faster.

 

[Danjin44]

Yes and yes. There are some that are as fast or faster.