Why are all adventure games in slow-mo?
 

It just occurred to me that I can hardly think of any adventure game where the characters and the actions move at real life human speeds. We get used to the standard, so you might not have thought about it, but when you think of real life and what it would like to watch someone walk around or jog or pick up something, you realize how crazily slowed down everything is in games. It's like straight up slow motion For example, when you pick something up in almost all adventure games, they sloooowly reach their arm out. Their walking is at a snail's pace by real life standards. Or when they jog there's a total weightlessness to everything, like they're on the moon. It really tests your patience after a while waiting for each action to complete, and it sucks the life out of the game.

Granted, I've been trying to get through Still Life 2 which is just unacceptably slow and laggy, but it's really like 99% of games.

I'd love to see a game where the animation was really made to look HUMAN. Where movements were real life speed, sometimes jerky, no nonsense. That should be something that, with modern tech and physics engines, is a priority in pushing games forward, and it should apply to adventure games too. It would probably have a much larger impact than graphical quality even, in terms of immersion.

Of course, I'm discounting things like the old sierra games running on modern systems where they can be turned up to bolt across the screen in a blink.

Do you agree with me? Are there any games that really get it right?

I think models in Secret Files 2 amazingly resemble human moves, not only during walking/running but also reaching for something, standig up, jumping etc.

Best ones I have encountered so far at least...

Totally agree. I'm playing Overclocked right now and people's actions are so slow... at least you can double-click to immediately go everywhere.

I'd love newer games to have a speed slider like in the Sierra games. I don't care about realism, let me get where I need now!

I agree, but what I'm saying though, is that actual realism would have things moving MUCH MUCH faster. So it would be win/win.

I agree, this is more than possible to add today. It shouldn't tax a modern graphics card at all.

I've just started playing this, and you're right that at least the walking and running is much more natural. Not sure about reaching for stuff. It's still not quite there yet, but this is much closer than most. It's nice and brisk.

I'm struck by how smooth it runs, and how much better it looks than Still Life 2. SL2 runs as if I'm trying to play it on Windows 95 and it doesn't look a fraction as good as other games I can run just fine (Half Life 2, for ex).

I don't really agree. I mean, yes, some games do seem to be a little slow, but most are pretty close to realistic.

The thing you might be ignoring is that the default speed of most game characters is "walk". Most of these guys have pretty slow natural walks. That's perfectly realistic in the game world.

One thing that also may be contributing is poor emulation. Are you playing games with dosbox? Keep in mind that even with a high-end system, it's not perfect. Plenty of games are much smoother and have more natural animation on the original systems.

no. i don't think you're really conceptualizing what i mean by real life movement.

I agree. This seems to be a common symptom among adventure games — maybe it's just an easy trap for developers to fall into. Games like The Longest Journey and Syberia stick out in my mind for having an unnatural slowness. I didn't really mind it as much at the time in TLJ... but since then, the more games I play, the less I want to watch long, protracted, and oft-repeated animations of picking up items as if we have all the time in the world (and apparently severely lessened gravity, or something).

While it doesn't quite fall in line with the "realistic human movement" you were mentioning, I think Telltale's Sam & Max deserves to be applauded for having a fluid and diverse set of animations that's almost as snappy as its dialogue.

I agree that in most 2.5D/3D adventure games - where your character is a 3D model - animations do tend to be too slow and it can become frustrating after 10+ hours of playing the game. There are probably a few explanations for this.

An obvious one being dated technology or general bad practice - animations that were created using old methods or a dated skill set. It's not uncommon for games to reuse old animations from previous games, as well.

Another could be the readability of the animations - making sure the player understands what his/her character is doing. A simple way to do this is to make it s l o w e r.

It could also be due a simple aesthetic clash...let me try and explain. Adventure games are generally slow paced. Levels are very static and occasionally pretty lifeless, with some movement every now and again from birds in the sky or a person casually strolling by. Everything's so leisurely - unlike in real life. I can only imagine that realistic animation would seem really out of place in such a situation. Running through one of these environments with determination and urgency, when everything around you is so sterile...it would seem kind of odd, don't you think? The same goes for picking up items really quickly. Sometimes I pick up my mobile phone pretty fast...if my character picked up his/her phone as quickly as I do, I'd probably jump out of my seat and wonder what's going on. Is something important going to happen!? :P Just a thought.

Speaking of character animation, Assassin's Creed is still mesmerizing to me.

Most 3RD person video games (First person shooters etc) that people are used to playing nowadays are actually much sped up from real life. Even a 'walk' in most FPS games is extremely quick.

In fact, if you were to slow them down to real-life speed, they would be extremely frustrating to play. It is a big problem for developers/animators - how to speed things up so that game players are not frustrated (because unlike in real life where you are happy to walk a city block in 3 minutes, you expect it to take 30 seconds max in a game!) while still keeping the movement and animation realistic.

I haven't played some of the games mentioned so can't comment on them - but could it be that the games are close to at real-life speed, but perhaps you are used to the faster speeds that are the norm in games now?

I just started playing thru the first chapter and i'm really enjoying it. Its pretty dam funny and the puzzles are all really logical and well thought out and have a lot of relevance to the story. If it continues to impress me i'll be buying the 2nd chapter and having a go at that one!

although my MI pre-order starts coming next month so i'll soon be hooked on that.

GoT

You make good points, but my thinking is that the environments ought to catch up as well. The thought of my character moving with urgency and determination gets me excited. Often times with adventure games, there's an incredibly urgent situation unfolding and yet the character is taking his/her sweet ass time just the same as before the emergency started happening. Still Life 2 is the worst example of this syndrome I've seen in years. "OMG I NEED TO FIND THE ANTIDOTE IN ONE MINUTE OR I'M GOING TO DIE!!!" and then she casually strolls along. It makes the drama almost a non-starter.

Even without the environments though, it doesn't hurt to have good speed to it. Secret Files 2, as I'm playing now, would be an example. It's far from perfect though. Like I said above, there will be dire moments and the character is moving and commenting as if nothing is different. I understand the complexity of progressing from that from a developer's point of view, but if they want a great game, if we ever want the genre to come out of the underground again, they should put in that effort.

Assassin's Creed is a great example of human movement and environments. What if an adventure game was in an open world environment like that? It would be so exciting. There are so many unexplored ideas that really seem obvious when you think about them.

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.

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. ;)

i don't think your time analysis really checks out, but kudos for putting the thought into it :lol:

I agree 100%. Some adventure games really lack the feeling of you making a difference in the game world. There's so little that actually reacts to you that sometimes, being able to examine a lot of things just doesn't cut it. Your left feeling like your character may as well not exist and it may be suitable if you just examined these scenes as an ominous, God-like figure.

That's why subtleties make a huge difference in adventure games. You click on something or talk to someone that may not be relevant at all, but your character still interacts with it, has a unique animation or says something humorous...those things make the game world seem more real. A lot of the best adventure games have this mentality.

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 :P I'd say about half that on average - much quicker than in your average adventure game.

Why are all adventure games in slow-mo?

My answer would be: they're not. Certainly not all, and certainly not even most. At least none of the ones I tend to play are (classic LucasArts and DS stuff like Another Code).

Text adventures are pretty quick too. In fact, faster that human walking speed. Just typing "N" I can cover a lot of territory in an instant. Anything from moving out of one room to another, to getting from the bottom to the top of a cliff. ;)

You have two people disagreeing and you just reply with "no, I don't think you understood me"?

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

It seems to me that you are disagreeing with *design* decisions, relating to the expression of drama, tension, immersion and so on. I don't know why you chose to use "unrealistic speed of movement" as your outlet for these grievances, instead of what you are actually having a problem with.

It's a game, remember. I can't stuff a ladder in my wizard hat at any speed, let alone faster than Simon (for example).

yeah i am disagreeing with a particular design decision (or lack of decision). so? most of the games i have in mind i really don't think are purposely slow to be super deep and dramatic, but even if they were, it's usually not good imo.

if you like things slow, be my guest to have that opinion.

denying that a lot of games have slow movements is pretty silly though.