[orient]

Originally Posted by Ugignadl

I believe you, as someone suggests above, simply *feel* bored watching the animations, and so *feel* like they are too slow.

Isn't that just as bad? I've definitely thought to myself "C'mon, hurry the **** up!" in a lot of games; The Longest Journey and Syberia to name a few from recent memory. Regardless of realism, sometimes I just want my character to perform quicker. The pace at which your character performs actions is a conscious design decision as we've both suggested - and some developers clearly need to work harder on making their games less frustrating to watch/play in my opinion.

So yeah, maybe "slow motion" is the wrong term, but I have to agree with the OP that a lot of adventure games feel too slow, to the point of frustration.

[booB]

I thought Dreamfall's animations were pretty close to real-life speed, but obviously that game has more of a third-person action-adventure design than your average classic adventure game. And I think The Longest Journey makes good use of a leisurely-but-realistic pace throughout the game, instead giving you the option to make April run at almost any time, and even allowing you to skip several seconds of time during almost any action. Running across a huge screen only takes seconds if you want it to.

I think a lot of animation in adventure games is slow for the purpose of making sure the player, who is not used to watching a lot of fast action in adventure games, actually sees the detail of the character walking, or picking something up, or whatever, rather than blinking and missing small actions such as these.

Then again... in real life, if you saw a weird, glowing, pulsating object, and you went to pick it up, wouldn't you take a few extra moments to extend your hand toward it, making sure you don't get burned, or electrocuted, or sent to another dimension?

[Sik]

Originally Posted by orient

While you're probably spot-on about the limbs moving the same amount during each frame so that the animation doesn't look jerky, I can't say I take 8 seconds to pick something up and put it in my pocket I'd say about half that on average - much quicker than in your average adventure game.

It started out as 5 seconds in my head, but the numbers got prettier with 8. It was just an example to illustrate, and I highly doubt most pick-up animations are as long as 8 seconds either.

[Ugignadl]

Originally Posted by orient

Isn't that just as bad? I've definitely thought to myself "C'mon, hurry the **** up!" in a lot of games; The Longest Journey and Syberia to name a few from recent memory. Regardless of realism, sometimes I just want my character to perform quicker. The pace at which your character performs actions is a conscious design decision as we've both suggested - and some developers clearly need to work harder on making their games less frustrating to watch/play in my opinion.

So yeah, maybe "slow motion" is the wrong term, but I have to agree with the OP that a lot of adventure games feel too slow, to the point of frustration.

I think we are converging to a state of agreeance. If the OP had couched it instead in terms of *design* decisions instead of entire games moving in *slow motion* (and the "majority" at that!) I would have replied entirely differently.

I have not played Still Life, but cetainly for the adventure games of the late 80s and all the 90s it was very rare to have characters change their movement animations for any reason. To use Simon the Sorcerer as an example again, when you are captured by the goblins or battling Sordid at the end, you walk casually. I believe the problem (in "fixing" this) was a snowball type effect:

- First we need to classify which situations are "dramatic".
- Do we grade on scales of how "dramatic" each situation is?
- How much do we alter of a character's behaviour for each kind of dramatic situation? Movement animation? What about the "That doesn't work" line? Do we have to alter everything for every different situation?

Most of the time designers need to think practically in terms of programming, art required, and so on. The above is a huge task compared to the recycling of animations and dialogue seen in the majority of standard adventure games.

So while I would say it is unfortunate, it is an unfortunate *reality* of adventure games which we must simply accept. Complaining about it is like complaining Wolfenstein has bad textures and resolution, or the lack of a reasonable z-axis in Doom. With FPS games, as time rolled on these were overcome.

With adventure games, we have seen several "solutions" in recent games, however there is no consensus. Sometimes you have the option of double-clicking to allow instant movement. (Didn't TLJ have that?) Sometimes you have a map to allow fast travel. Sometimes (the Sam & Max games come to mind) you have dramatic scenes where movement and dialogue etc is altered.

But the industry just isn't on the scale required (in terms of sales) to employ enough people to get to the point where Doom 3 is compared to the Catacomb Abyss. It would be nice, but I think we all have to think practically and direct complaints to issues where we can actually be constructive.