Today I talk about what I find to be two of the most critical pieces of game design for the player.

I’m no developer. I don’t know how to code, design or draw. This means that the only thing I can base ideas for game design around are the experiences I have while enjoying finished products, and two things are always at the forefront, whether they are exceptional, terrible or bland. They can single handedly make or break a title’s success for me personally and entirely govern the atmosphere and success of a scene. I am talking of animation and script.

Both of these things are so utterly vital because they are so common. Every movement of a character or object is “animation”, every piece of text – whether voice acted or simply a character’s text-only journal – comes under the heading of script. If a common animation is off, in any way, it can be disastrous to the enjoyment of the player. Equally, voice actors phoning it in or terrible dialogue can utterly destroy any suspension of disbelief.

In the case of animation, it’s pretty shocking how poorly this can be done by even the most professional development studios. Bethesda’s Oblivion and Fallout 3 stand testament to just how much this vital piece of design can drag a game down if implemented poorly. The constantly clunky feeling to characters movements, as well as being generally ugly, really highlighted the bugs in game AI. This was not helped by voice acting which seemed no better than bored at times – not to mention the ridiculous changes in accent due to some lines only being recorded by some voice actors.

An amazing experience I had was, having played Fallout 3 for a day beforehand, I booted up Dead Space. The introduction sequence was like some sort of devine intervention:

Oh, so that’s how it’s meant to be done. The slickness of human movement, the real emotion in the voices. Dead Space is a game where atmosphere is vitally important and the movement of the monstrous beings you encounter perfectly transmit this. Clawing along the walls, popping from vents, some slither – it all combines to create a feeling of something utterly alien, unknowable and uncommunicable with. A direct helper to this is the brilliant voice acting of various characters: They sound realistic, actually scared, panicy in that introduction as they careen towards possible destruction. Dead Space being one of many games to exploit the “log” system (whereby unseen characters leave behind video/audio recordings for the player to find), voice acting was especially important while constructing the plot of the surroundings and past events. The fear in the voice of hunted men who’ve worked out a key fact was a component that added so much to the experience.

An extension of this is live action videos, as employed mostly by the Command and Conquer series. Let’s make one thing very clear – if we’re too busy laughing (or staring at breasts) to take in cutscenes, you’ve probably done something wrong. I’m looking at you, Red Alert 3. The interesting thing about this medium is it’s almost entirely down to the actor, at least for me. Whereas in audio, it can seem that if half a coversation is poor, everything is dragged down, in video I find that (for example) Joe Kucan portraying Kane is something I will never get tired of. Particularly in dance remixes.

On the subject of dialogue and VAs, I also want to mention Republic Commando which (nearly) gets a certain aspect spot on. This is the random speech triggered by events dialogues that occur frequently throughout the game. They are nailed by their VAs, but most importantly they are either short or are said extremely rarely. There are a couple of exceptions (usually relating to health pick ups), but overall their execution is preferable to other ways I have seen it done. Valve also comes close with Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 – but these suffer from either being so rare as to never be heard by most players, or being so common as to become memes.

Why is it that so many companies don’t seem to see the value in decent animation and voice acting particularly?  What’s the point in a super-sexy Unreal 3 rendered Crysis-level awesomesauce graphics engine when there’s nothing good to look at?  Why include sound software that can accurately reproduce the sound of a gunshot, when your dialogue isn’t actually worth hearing?  These things are important, they can ruin games.

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Something I would be interested to know about is the exploits of indie gamers. How do they do in the region of animation and, particularly, voice acting? Many don’t even have something that would classify, I suppose. Most being 2Dish games without much talking (or, with text). Do comment if there are any that did anything particularly impressively (or hay, really, really badly).