Hey, welcome to New Frame Plus,
a series about video game animation.
We have spend the last month marveling at Red Dead Redemption 2’s tiny little details.
The way your main character’s facial hair grows in real time and requires regular shaving.
The way you have to dress appropriately for the weather.
The way your guy visibly gains or loses weight depending on how much you feed him.
This game seems to have an infinite quantity of those novel elements,
a million tiny recreations of realistic detail from our world.
I want to talk about the animation in Red Dead 2 today,
because animation (naturally) plays a huge role in creating that sense of simulated realism,
and it highlights a question I’ve been pondering for a while now:
To explain what I’m talking about,
let’s look at a particular subset of these animation details:
the way your main character interacts with collectable objects in the game world.
You know: the looting system, the gathering system... that particular stuff.
Say you’ve just survived a shootout and your opponents lay scattered before you...
You can loot all of them, and when you do,
Arthur (your character) will approach them,
bend down, lift them by the collar and pat them down for valuables.
There are multiple versions of this animation.
Say you’re in a building and you want to loot the place…
If you see a collectable item sitting on a table,
just hold the loot button and Arthur will actually reach out,
pick it up and stuff it into his satchel.
He will physically open cupboards and drawers, and grab the contents individually.
Is there a piece of paper or a photo over there you want to check out?
Arthur will approach, pick it up and hold it for you to see,
flipping it over if you like before returning it to its place.
Did you spot an herb out there in the wild that you want to gather?
Watch Arthur kneel down to pluck it, actually strip it of the leaves and bits he wants
then stuff all that into his satchel!
Feeling hungry at camp?
Arthur will actually spoon himself up some stew from the pot,
then you can walk around and eat that stew, bite by bite, at your leisure.
And then he drops the bowl on the ground because I guess we were raised in a barn, ARTHUR.
We’ve all got to live on this hill, man.
Pick up after yourself.
Did that mean old bandit punch your hat right off?
Better go pick it up and put it right back on your head, like that's an EASY thing to do.
You want to head out on foot but then you realize you forgot your rifle?
Well, just head back to your horse and watch Arthur grab the rifle off of his horse’s saddle
and sling it over his shoulder.
Do you realize how HARD that had to have been to get right?
And I know the horses' balls shrinking in cold weather is kind of a played out punchline at this point
but *BLEEP* man, that ACTUALLY HAPPENS.
I feel like we’ve become numb to the fact through sheer repetition but that’s actually real!
I can barely fathom the thousands upon thousands of animations and supplemental animation systems
built into this game, much less the technical wizardry required to make it all actually
look and function the way it was intended.
This is mind boggling.
Most games don’t DO stuff like this.
They don’t actually show these kinds of actions in animation.
And if they DO actually animate some interactions like this, they don’t animate NEARLY this many.
It’s really impressive what Red Dead Redemption 2’s dev team have achieved here.
But the question I’m now left asking as a game animator
(now that my jaw is finally up off the floor) is this:
To what extent does this massive showcase of realistically-animated detail
enhance the Red Dead game experience?
Enough to be worth the thousands of expensive work hours that were no-doubt required to create them?
And I’m not even asking this in reference to the working conditions
and the excessive quantities of unpaid overtime Rockstar demands of its employees
(although that is unquestionably the most important factor here).
But let’s put that aside for a second and just talk strictly in terms of cost-benefit:
is the impact these animations have on the play experience positive?
And is it positive enough to be worth the enormous financial investment required to create them?
On the one hand...
...maybe so?
I mean, it IS amazing to look at.
And knowing what went into creating it only makes the spectacle more impressive.
There is something to the fact that half of the positive buzz surrounding this game since release
has been the lot of us marveling about all these little details.
It’s not often these days that a AAA game can push fidelity far enough past what its
competitors are doing for us to actually sit up and take notice and 'ooo' and 'ahhh' over it.
That novelty value alone has almost certainly led to SOME increase in sales, right?
But has it led to enough to offset the costs?
Because this stuff IS expensive!
You need skilled animators, you need really skilled technical animators,
and really skilled engineers working with them.
Animation is just EXPENSIVE.
It is a slow process, and every hour of that work costs money.
Is all that money best spent here?
On realistically-rendered simple interactions like picking up a can of beans?
...Maybe?
In most any scenario, for most any other game, I would say...
NO
Absolutely NOT
Are you KIDDING me?
but Rockstar just isn’t subject to the same limitations as most studios, so...
You know what?
Let’s look at this from a different angle…
Red Dead Redemption 2 is clearly intended to provide a robust
simulation-style open world experience.
This enormous sandbox that we’ve been given to play in
is painstakingly designed to immerse you in that 'Wild West outlaw' fantasy.
But a big part of the appeal of that wild west fantasy is how grounded it is
in the historical reality of the late 19th century American west
(or at least, a romanticized approximation of it).
And a big part of creating that sense of historical, lived-in reality is in the details.
So, in a very real way, this robust suite of unusually realistic game animations
is contributing to that sense of simulated reality.
By removing as much of the 'video game-y' animation shorthand as possible and respecting the realistic
detail of the world being presented, these animation systems are unquestionably enriching
that wild west fantasy simulation.
But THEN AGAIN...
there’s a reason other games don’t do this, and it’s not just because of the expense
(although that is definitely a big reason).
It’s also because realism can get really repetitive and boring!
Reality is boring!
Seeing Arthur reach out and open a cabinet to loot its individual contents
is impressive as heck THE FIRST TIME,
but having to sit through one of these animations
every single time you just want to pick something up
gets TEDIOUS.
And when almost every single interaction with the world takes several seconds to play out,
it has a significant effect on the game’s pace.
The thing about animating for games is that you've always got to be mindful of how your
your animation impacts the play experience as a whole.
This is one of many many places where the disciplines of Animation and Game Design overlap.
All that game-animation shorthand that other games usually do instead of this?
We came up with (and still use) that shorthand for a REASON.
It’s more fun!
It gets all the tedious stuff out of your way so you can get back to the fun parts.
In Breath of the Wild, when you want Link to pick something up, he doesn’t reach down,
grab it and stuff it into his pants.
You press the button and BAM.
You have that item.
It’s quicker, it’s easier, it happens as fast as you can think it, and it just works!
Players are cool with that.
No one is sad that Link didn’t spend four seconds picking up each one of these items individually.
Heck, a lot of the time, we don’t even really consciously NOTICE
animation shorthand like this in our games.
Do you ever stop and think about how many doors you walk through in these games that
your character doesn’t physically open?
Even in some extremely AAA games, you just click on that door and...
...look at that.
It opens on its own!
You basically opened the door FOR that character, like a perfect gentleperson.
And I think that’s great!
It’s a difference that no one really notices while playing, and not only does it save the
devs some unnecessary work, but it actually makes the experience of walking through a
video game door that much less cumbersome for the player.
Sure, it’s unrealistic, but in a way that bothers nobody and
tends to actually improve the play experience.
Or look at Monster Hunter.
That one is an interesting case, because it’s a franchise that is becoming
increasingly AAA in its presentation, but has ALSO simultaneously
started using more animation shorthand than it used to.
One of the things that makes Monster Hunter World such a huge step up over its predecessors
is the way it’s done so much to streamline the tedious bits of Monster Hunter gameplay.
Unlike in the previous games,
grabbing plants and insects and stuff is INSTANTANEOUS now.
You don’t even have to stop running!
Just hit the button, your character kinda does a grabbing motion with their hand
and BAM.
That thing is in your inventory.
And climbing in Monster Hunter World is effortless!
Unlike your Uncharteds or your Tomb Raiders, where every jump or climbing motion is tied
to a button press, scaling a wall in Monster Hunter requires nothing more than
just running at that wall.
The hunter takes care of the rest.
And that makes it so you, the player, don’t have to worry nearly so much about terrain while you're out hunting!
You can just focus on the exciting bit: tracking and fighting that giant monst--
AH GEEZ
But then again (again)...
Zelda and Monster Hunter?
These games aren’t aiming for any kind of grounded realism.
I mean… clearly.
They are both much more video game-y play experiences than Red Dead is trying to be.
Maybe you like game-y games more than the simulation-y ones (I tend to favor them myself),
but each of these play experiences does require a very different approach to animation design.
That said:
there is a point at which additional animation fidelity DOES start to detract from
even a grounded, realistic game experience.
That point may be different from game to game, but it does exist.
And Rockstar was clearly aware of that too, because - even in Red Dead 2,
even in a game where you pick up and loot every single thing individually - they have compromised
on that sense of animation reality. In a lot of little places!
I mean, there’s a reason that your character picks up ammunition automatically just by
running over the guns his enemies drop.
[ammo pickup sound effects]
That is a VERY video game-y thing to do!
But Rockstar know that nobody... NOBODY.... wants to watch Arthur stop and
realistically collect individual bullets from each weapon in the middle of a firefight.
So they just have him do the game-y thing.
And we are all kinda grateful for that, right?
Even in our simulators, players do appreciate those little conveniences.
And, if streamlining ammo collection was a good idea, maybe streamlining item gathering
would have been a good idea too?
Maybe having to loot or interact with every little thing individually DOESN’T enhance
the Red Dead gameplay experience quite as much as it first appears?
I’ve been bouncing these questions around in my head for weeks, and (clearly) I don’t
have a definitive answer for them, probably because there ISN’T one.
Changing the way looting animates in Red Dead wouldn’t just be making a change to how
realistic the game looks.
It would be making a fundamental change to both the game’s pace
and the game world's sense of internal realism.
Maybe for worse, but... maybe for better.
Different games do have different needs, and making the best decision for your own game
especially when you’re in the middle of making it can actually be REALLY challenging.
If you happen to be working on a game right now, I guess the best advice I can give is:
Know experience you’re trying to create, and always ALWAYS look for opportunities to streamline
It can be really easy to default to realism sometimes when you’re just trying to
figure out how to visually present something.
Like, it’s easy to think: “Oh man we’ve got doors in our game...
hmm... I guess I HAVE to animate our character opening them..."
But no! Maybe that door can just... open.
Maybe that’s fine!
The video game-y animation answer won’t always be the right choice for your specific game, but
look for those opportunities anyway, because
It’s good to at least know what your simpler alternative options are.
[Zelda cooking sounds]
But I also want to say this:
Hats off to Rockstar’s animators and technical animation team for ALL of this.
Like, this is a stunning achievement.
As a person who plays games, as a person who does this work for a living…
I am in AWE of what you folks created.
This is breathtaking, and you should all be proud as hell.
And I really hope that your employer decides to respect its talent enough to give you
the sustainable working life you deserve, because DAGGUM.
You lot sure have earned it.
Anyway, thank you all for watching and listening to me ramble.
We’ll get back to our more usual thing next time.
Until then, subscribe if you want to see more game animation videos, and I’ll see y’all soon!