Lately I've been noticing small little details in games a lot more; little things like how a character's eyes will follow objects that they can interact with, or idle animations have caught my eye more and more. I think I'm starting to realize how little, in games at least, the big picture matters if these little things are ignored.
It really shouldn't surprise me; I've known for quite a while that Shigeru Miyamoto will have a special garden-esque area created for his Mario games where he can just run around and see how things feel, make sure that jumping on a goomba feels appropriately squishy and springy. Yet it wasn't until now that I truly understood how important for a game it was to get this, "tactile" feeling. If a game doesn't respond the right way, doesn't feel right, or looks odd, I lose interest.
It reminds me a lot of the "uncanny valley" problem that digital artists are running into when trying to model faces. Things look similar enough that you notice the lack of details and it makes it look "off". The same thing happens in games when a character doesn't look at who he's addressing, or when the controls don't match what's happening on the screen; you can't quite describe what's wrong, but you know that it is."
Now that I think about it, I can't come up with a video game that I like that has this kind of problem, where things don't feel right. Even Chaos Legion, a game that in all respects classifies as "mediocre", everything still feels right.
The devil really must be in the details.
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3 comments:
"uncanny valley" is that what happened on Van Helsing?
Not quite. "Uncanny Valley" was a term coined by, I believe Quantic Dreams, that refers to the notion that as we get closer and closer to recreating human faces digitally, the faces start to look extremely creepy and "just not right". Specifically they tracked people's reactions to digital faces and noticed that as the faces got more realistic subjects would say that they looked more realistic, but then after a certain point the subjects would start to say that they looked even more unrealistic even though they were technically more realistic than the previous faces they had seen.
Interestingly Quantic Dreams has gone on the record announcing that their latest game "Heavy Rain" has broken through the Uncanny Valley. All they've released are some pretty screenshots and a video of a close up on a moving eye, but it all looks really good. Personally, I'm hoping that they really have done it, but the skeptic in me thinks that it's just another one of those claims that game developers will make for their upcoming titles in order to increase hype.
In the case of Van Helsing though, I'm assuming that you're referring to the way the CGI looked and moved, in that case that would be very similar to what I was talking about in this post, just add another level where you're control the werewolf and it feels similarly off and you've got what I was talking about.
That is what I was thinking... kind of spooky how close to mimicking life these things are getting.
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