In video games that can help you customise your character’s look and weapons, they appear inconsistent on whether or not they have the cutscenes present your customized look and weapons or use the bottom look and weapons. Why is that?

August 19, 2022

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This has loads to do with attempting to keep away from breaking immersion with oddly-shaped gear for the needs of the motion being depicted within the cinematic sequence.

Think about a scene the place our protagonist makes an attempt to coerce a confession out of the villain. She attracts her weapon and holds it up towards the villain’s throat in a threatening method whereas the digital camera zooms in to get a close-up shot in profile between our protagonist and villain. Appears easy sufficient, proper?

Clearly, the positioning of the weapon on this cinematic sequence would have to be very totally different if the protagonist is primarily a dagger wielder in comparison with a sword. You may’t maintain a dagger and a sword in the identical place to threaten – in case your sword level had been on the enemy’s neck, holding a dagger on the identical place would put the dagger’s level laughably far-off. For those who held a sword the place the dagger level could be on the villain’s throat, your blade would already be penetrating via the opponent’s neck. This will get worse the extra sorts of weapons we help, particularly if the weapon doesn’t have a blade – axe, spear, workers, bow, fist, gun, two-handed sword, mace, membership, one-handed sword, crossbow, and so on. will all have very totally different contexts when held to a throat.

In such conditions, creating a distinct animation for this one cinematic for every sort of weapon we permit leads to a combinatoric explosion until we severely restrict the scope of the weapons someway. Because of this Dragon Age II utilized the well-known “homicide knife” for a lot of of its cinematics – it was a dependable well-defined weapon that might be utilized by any protagonist class and nonetheless made visible sense. Related constraints additionally exist for outfits and gear. That profile shot would look actually bizarre if, for instance, the protagonist was carrying huge World of Warcraft-style shoulder pads that obstructed the view as a result of they was emitting huge screen-obscuring particle results. Now we have to standardize sure issues to be able to hold the scope of the cinematics from ballooning uncontrolled.

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