Way back in the sprite days of RPGs like Final Fantasy and whatnot, conveying visual emotion and nuance was difficult. Apart from the text itself, the devs were limited to three tools: music, exaggerated sprite models (such as the bug-eyed, wide-mouthed adventurer who is trying to convey surprise), and close-up head shots. While some limited measure of success could be attained with these, it left the burden of most of the nuance up to the players to imagine and insert with their own memories.
Oddly enough, we really haven’t come that far in modern MMOs. Whether players realize it or not, one of the reasons we have difficulty connecting and empathizing with the NPCs and events is how limited and stilted the body language is that we witness. Getting a text box, a single line of spoken dialogue, or a scripted scene with the characters emoting as if they were marionettes is a far cry from what we see on TV or in movies. There’s a lot of those small touches that simply aren’t present in games — the coy looks, the sarcastic smirk, the hand gestures, body positioning, etc. — and it’s been keeping any potential emotional connection between the player and the game at bay (or at least presenting a subtle speed bump).
Guild Wars 2 is employing a very old-fashioned RPG technique of talking heads (or talking bodies) on a separate screen. It does well to deliver the story and voice acting, sure, but there’s still that body language that isn’t coming through as well. Plus, the game is taking characters out of their environments to tell these little scripted scenes, and that robs some of the cohesion. It’s not terrible, for sure, but it’s certainly not as effective as it could be.
SWTOR did better in this regard, but not great. The cutscenes are still there, and there’s certainly more in the way of voice acting. Yet what irritated me overtime is how little body language played into these scenes. Most of them were just talking heads with limited facial movements or stock hand motions. I seem to recall BioWare saying that they came up with a program to help “film” these scenes without doing all of the camera positioning and NPC gestures by hand. I think this was a mistake, because the eye is more clever than you think, and you begin to spot repetitious patterns and incongruent details over time.
BioWare goes back and forth on delivering solid body language. In some of their games (and in portions of SWTOR), when attention is devoted to communicating outside of just words, there can be great little moments where the characters seem to come alive. But that’s not as often as I’d like.
I feel that The Secret World does body language far better than these other two, although again, not perfectly. I realized this the other night when I was finishing up a scene with a detective, and she punctuated a final cynical line by tilting her head down, looking up, and giving me a slight shrug like, “You know how it is.” It was so wonderfully understated that it felt downright natural, and I started to recall many more moments in the game where I was seeing this improved body language. The characters I really liked and connected with tended to say a lot with their hands and gestures as much as their words, and I didn’t realize it as such until now.
Telling great stories in a visual/audio medium is more than making characters talk — it’s making them act like real people. Maybe we’ve been flirting with the uncanny valley for so long with MMO characters that act like robots but sound normal that we’ve thought of that as the norm. I hope this is the new norm and that more devs take care to put effort into creating believable body language into their characters.
Agreed that the cutscenes in TSW are a cut above, even with some of the uncanny valley and excessive eye rolling. The other thing that reduced the effectiveness of the SWTOR conversations was the “interactivity” itself. The vaunted Conversation Wheel not only breaks up the flow of the narrative while the player decides what to say, more often than not, what the character ends up saying is not what I expected by making that choice. Every so often, it was so bad, I escaped out of the conversation and started over.
A lot of people don’t, but I actually like the fact that my characters don’t speak in TSW. It means I can think of their voices and backgrounds a certain way, without the developer and some voice actor (great though they are) injecting their concept of how MY characters should be. Plus, expressions of vague consternation and disbelief on my toons faces is priceless. “Ah, the strong silent type, I see.”
Prime example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSi0925FTPM
Agree with you entirely on TSW and like Rowan, I much prefer the silent protagonist solution they’ve come up with. The combination of relatively natural body-language and being allowed to imagine my character’s response instead of having it dictated to me works wonders.
TSW often throws in some wonderful little touches in the cut scenes, too. I particularly like it when one of the NPC makes a passing remark about my character’s reticence. It adds another level of knowingness and yet increases the immersion at the same time. Very clever. I also love it when my character begins to react in a very natural way, giving a hint towards narrative drive, but stops short of actually acting, thereby leaving notional control still with me.
There’s still considerable room for improvement but all-in-all TSW has made the best stab at this kind of thing that I’ve seen. It’s going to be quite painful going back to the GW2 version.
Yeah the GW2 cut-scenes are just out and out painful. I’m hoping that by skipping all the useless god-awful story quests I’ll never have to be subjected to their random mouth flaps and flagrantly looping idle animations against a vomit inducing ‘painterly’ background again.
It is sad for GW2 : they try to add significant gesture in their NPCs discussion but it fell short.
http://www.arena.net/blog/chuck-jackman-on-updated-cinematic-conversations
But even their video demonstration in the blog post was not that good !
What kills GW2 cutscenes for me is the cheesy dialogue about the heroic deeds our characters have done and will do. I don’t know how long ago theater and the movies have done away with this kind of acting. I also would have a hard time finding a blogger, much less a professional writer who’d dare coming up with that dialogue.
But, I absolutely agree, TSW had the best cutscenes, mostly due to the writing, but also through some raising of eyebrows or dropping corners of the mouth at the right time.
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No mention of SOEmote?