BASE Jumping into the Uncanny Valley
I resisted the urge to buy Neverwinter Nights 2 on release, but over the holidays I had an extra incentive- a co-worker bought it only to find it too demanding for his system. Unwilling to upgrade his PC for one title and unable to return an opened game, he let it go cheap.Â
First impressions…. Despite many great marks for excellence, I will never finish this game and will likely keep playing my library of mods for the original NWN.
It was a headlong dive into the Uncanny Valley.Â
I spent way too long on the character creation screen trying to make a character that was somewhat appealing to me. Despite numerous adjustments to the graphics settings, nothing really made the characters stand out. I had fewer customization sliders than Oblivion, but I probably spent even more time getting disgusted with what I could do with them.Â
Getting into the game didn’t help much. Maybe the familiar game mechanics worked against it- since I wasn’t distracted with figuring out the rules, I had a more critical eye for what was really in front of me.Â
Whatever the reason, the NPC’s were well crafted (more appealing than anything I made in the character creator) with lively personalities and side quests that were incredibly well done in every way… except….
Dammit, people, why are we struggling so hard to give realistic freckles and dimples and eye movement when we’re just going to have them STAND THERE, delivering their lines like a 3rd grader in a school play?
No… wait… the 3rd grader will at least SHUFFLE HIS FEET!
Don’t get me wrong, the actors do a great job bringing the voices to life. I can even bring myself to enjoy it if I could just close my eyes and listen but does anyone ELSE see the problem with doing that with a game that sells itself on its visual effects?
This isn’t even a cut on the artists.  When I say that the characters are paralyzed from the neck down, I’m not saying the artists are paralyzed from the neck up. I know that there are technical limitations that make animation costly and time consuming. I know that resolving those issues will result in more than a few dead-ends and bad investments. I know that it seems to make sense to trudge along the path that IS available to us while we wait…
…but these are precisely the tools that we need to safely cross this valley.
Moving ahead without them won’t get us there any faster. We’re only going to unceremoniously crash into the basin below. While stuff like that makes entertaining YouTube viewing, I recommend we take a step back, find a nice comfortable ledge high above that valley floor, and wait for the climbing gear (and parachute) to arrive.
January 22nd, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Sometimes I really don’t understand the focus on higher and higher levels of graphics, and yet games are releasing with horrible game stopping/ruining design flaws.
“You know, I don’t care if the NPCs twitch their eyebrows when they talk, I would however, quite enjoy it if when I clicked on the dialog to complete the quest the quest would actually complete!”
January 23rd, 2007 at 3:20 am
It would be nice to see someone with visual style that is elegant-but-unreal, analagous to (but not exactly like) WoW’s graphics, use the saved processing power to apply toward more engaging animations and emotive effects.
I’ve been planning on buying Mass Effect when it is released, but I can’t shake the suspicion that I’m going to hate the realistic visuals at some point during gameplay. As you pointed out, animations without those difficult-to-define subtleties of reality often result in an impression of bad acting.
When I see more subtleties in dialogue, which isn’t hindered by technical limitations, then I’ll believe I can expect sublety in personal animations.