Quote:
Originally Posted by RockNFknRoll
It might be a mix of that but nah most adventure games are clearly slowed down from real life. If anything they should err on the side of being too fast, in my opinion. What you're talking about is action games, which I agree can be faster than real life and that's usually a good thing.
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I must say I'm curious if you have actually timed this. My impression is actually the opposite. At least in regards to walk speed. I agree that animations give you the impression everything is in slow motion, though. Let me elaborate. You can usually guess the approximate distance between two points on screen based on the size of buildings, doorways, height of the character, etc. In most games the time it takes to walk from A to B is much faster than the 6 km/hour that is considered normal walking speed. At least that is my impression, I haven't timed it, it has just always seemed obvious to me.
The reason it seems slow, is:
1) watching someone walk is boring, and in a game, unlike a movie, you often have to watch the character traverse the entire distance from A to B without clever editing.
2) To make animations fluid, limbs often move almost the same amount between each frame. unlike real movement which is more explosive and erratic. This makes movement seem slow, even if the time to perform an action is as fast as, or even faster than it would normally be for a real person. It's especially noticable when someone picks up an item. 8 seconds is not an unreasonable amount of time to pick something up, and pocket it. Just try it. A real person would probably spend something like half a second reaching for the item, 3 seconds grabbing and making sure the grip is good, half a second bringing the item back to his pockst and 4 seconds pocketing it. A game character would spend 2 seconds reaching, 2 seconds grabbing, 2 seconds bringing it to the pocket, and 2 seconds pocketing in one fluid motion... which seems slow even if the total time for the action is the same. Also, fluid animation for jogging/running just looks wrong, but that is something that even games with 50 times the budget of the average adventure game is guilty of. It's just tricky to get right.
Anyway, while I think a lot of the slow motion impression is an illusion, more realistic animations would be welcome, at least in games where realism is more important than aesthetics (Seeing every detail of an animation in a "cartoony" game is more important than in a realistic one). I also agree with the point that in a situation where your avatar is in a hurry, animations should get speeded up. Acceleration when going from walk mode to run mode is often unreasonably slow as well.
That said, with the limited market for adventure games, and relatively small budgets as a consequence, I'd rather see more time and money spent on a good script than more time and money spent on bells and whistles.
