Wello!
I’ve been hoping that the game would up it’s animation game ever since I first posted here more than a year ago - it was my very first post and the most glaring issue.
Now as we’re getting close to release, I’m still not seeing anything getting any better almost anywhere.
I came here since I saw the new Sentinel animations and thought that if THIS was the best you could do and THIS is worth showing off - I should really set my expectations 20 bars lower for this game in the animations department!
All these are MAJOR( with not just capital letter but full on caps lock) problems. Every movement in this game creates a sense of uncanny valley cringey feeling in me which no other game has managed to do so far.
If a small child moves as fast as a grown man without moving legs any faster, we get this eerie, confusing and awkward feeling which is called “uncanny valley”.
Uncanny valley happens because our brains are context and sense making machines, we’re used to seeing bodies be a specific way and work in a specific way; our brains quite literally calculate depth, colour, missing patterns & speed based on what we observe - completely unconsciously. While this term is mostly used to mere appearance of beings, it is not only limited to it.
Here are just some of the few very obvious ones which I bothered to write down after watching half of a single 4 minute patch 0.7.8F build video.
There is no sense of motion easing, acceleration or hardness in almost any skill or attack by either the player or mobs - throwing a heavy object like a hammer looks more like throwing a feather. It’s like gravity doesn’t exist!
Monsters are all gliding all the time because while their legs are moving, their bodies don’t move in sync with appropriate force.
In our universe, only non-limbic creatures are able to have an invariable speed of movement, everyone else does not. This means that limbic beings have to have their movement varied all the time because they exert different amounts of force depending in which state their limbs are.
Monsters keep their running animation while hugging the wall
Monsters mostly, if not always turn by simply gliding with their limbs being static or just teleporting the other way.
Every animation seems to have only 1 variant which just awkward. This can work in games that use attack animations once every 5-10 seconds but not every second or less.
When characters or monsters jump, there’s no sense of gravity just gliding through the air with same speed of motion.
Small mobs and big ones seemingly move with the same speed although their legs don’t move any faster although smaller.
All of these problems are emphasized even further by the unnaturally heavy distinction between the background and the NPC or player entities.
Thank you for listening to my Ted talk and don’t forget to drink water if you’re thirsty.
but people aren’t looking to be reasonable when they spend their gaming dollar. Which is why it’s comforting to know in this day where gamers are known for chasing cutting edge graphics and animations, there is still enough of us that want to support and see a passion project reach its potential.
on a game that doesn’t meet that standard, that’s entirely up to them & I wouldn’t have a go at them for that. The downside is that they’d be missing out on an otherwise great game.