Hehe, funny thing Squarejaw, I've been bitching about animation for a loooong time. Of course there's a bias since I'm an animator in the industry, but really, its seemingly the last frontier of quality. The crap that gets passed as animation is rather remarkable. Top tier games, with high quality models and overall production quality, seem to only make it as far as 'technically sound animation', but with no soul. Any reasonable animator can make a walk cycle or death anim(worst offenders btw!), but does it have character or emotion?(of course many game anims don't/won't have emotion, but at least character no?!
) Oh and mocap...well thats just a non-issue. Sure even I have had to do cleanup(which isn't bad btw...its kind of relaxing), but it just isn't "animation" on any level so...but yea, the verisimilitude has increased exponentially in models and textures, but animation hasn't ever really 'evolved', as its almost entirely technology independent, so we have the lack of talent to blame. When you look at games like ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, Jak and Daxter, Mark of Kri, Sly Cooper and so on, there really is just no excuse.
Ultimately though, on topic, this has been rampant for some time, so I dont see it as having anything to do specifically with next gen. There's no reason those animators that spew forth the crap working on last gen are going to get any better for next. Working on an Unreal3 project, I have some great peeks into what Epic is offering for 'next gen' animation toolsets, but it means little if the talent isn't there.
Hell, overall, the size of the modeling/texturing workforce that can compete with overachieving next gen talent has shrunk significantly. We're going to see an influx of hyper normals mapped junk(there's no such thing as
hyper normals mapping...I meant the volume we'll see
) simply because shaders can mask poor artwork. The people that are talented now are only going to perform even better with near limitless technological options, while the less talented, that were able to 'get away with' lesser quality as the technology wasn't as demanding nor expectations as high, are going to drown. Actually this isn't true, as SOMEONE has to do the work, and there's more work than truly qualified people to do it, so I guess they're in luck.
So my disappointment(though minor as it is) lies with the extreme power of these beautiful machines, and very few developers to truly exploit it.
Cheers
