TL;DR version:
- Bit artsy, but a little repetitive with the smoke and text.
- Didn't care for the concept art shots. Hope it's not in the game.
- If it is, hope it's implemented better.
- The computer animation looks correct. It just looks choppy because the frame rate of the renders we're seeing are dialed down to save resources. I'm hoping the animation in the game will use a more natural frame rate.
Original Version:
The trailer wasn't great, but what I saw of actual game play looked good. They just had a great deal of concept art and comic book-style stuff padding it out, which I don't really understand. If there's going to be a fair bit of that sort of illustrative styling in the game proper, it's going to be a pretty weird game. that might actually be cool, but so far, I would have to say that I'm not loving those bits. And if the comic book/concept art stuff really doesn't feature in the game proper, I don't know why they thought it was a good idea to pad out the trailer like that.
And as for the animation, the walk cycles were so brief, it's hard to genuinely say if they look wrong, but to my mind, what I saw didn't look bad. I just think the animation sequences were shot a little low-fi for the trailer, which makes them look choppier than they probably are.
It does make me worry that the system requirements for the game are going to be a bit prohibitive, but I didn't see anything that looked grossly out of whack. I used to be a bit of an animation buff, while I was trying to get into college to study animation, and I saw a lot of animation cycles, good and bad, back in the day. It just looked like the footage wasn't 'shot in ones', which is a classical animation term for one frame of incremental action per segment of cycle*, the smoothest frame rate you could get with hand drawings without messing up the speed of the film (24 frames per second). This is complete conjecture, but I suspect there's probably going to be a refresh rate in the video options, for those whose systems can't run super smooth animations without going nighty-night.
* For example, Flintstones and other Hanna-Barbera animations were shot in twos and threes, where they doubled and tripled up segments of movement, reducing the number of frames total that had to be hand drawn. They still had 24 frames, but instead of twenty-four segments of movement per second, you had twelve or even eight unique drawings, which were padded out with multiples to make up the proper frame rate. That's why those old cartoons looked so choppy and cartoonish, which is sort of their charm, but doesn't work with more naturalistic animation styles.
You see a bit of that in modern computer animated games, especially in AGs, which is what most folks are really griping about when they say the animation looks off. The frame rate is different (it's a little faster than it used to be, which requires slightly more frames), but it's the same basic principle. Budgetary concerns force animation cycles in most AGs to be rendered with fewer 'inbetween' images, making the animations look like those old zoetrope animations that spun in a slotted cylinder that looked a bit like a cake tin or a car filter pan. Once it got up to speed, everything looked normal, but the flickering between frames showed whenever the cylinder slowed down or wavered.
You can actually see this for yourself by playing with some freebie film editing software, or even Flash if you can afford it. You have to add a lot of inbetween segments of action to make the animation look natural, but it boosts the frame rate (and thus the file size) through the roof, which in turn causes bandwidth issues for internet productions, or storage and rendering problems for games you buy on disc.
Here's an example of an animation with extremely few frames:
You get the idea of what's being portrayed, but there are really only two drawings involved, which are cycled at just the right speed to make it look like the action is fluid. It's cheap and dirty, but it gets the job done. Try doing that with more natural forms with lots of detail and it just looks cheesy.
Aesthetically, you can get away with it to some extent if you use stylized art (think The Last Express), but if you try doing it with art closer to real life, it looks inhuman, which throws everyone off, because we all see people walking and talking every day, and know in the back of our heads what it's supposed to look like.
Okay, art lecture over. Thanks for reading.
