if bethesda have a good animation system- then why cant they do some more stuff with the game?


it should be easy to make kicks, and to check what would be the best punch/kick to use. i personaly think there should be a kick key, holding it down would effect the power and moving a direction would determine what type of kick

it should be easy to make a nice counter attack system - a single week week would be more than enough for this simple thing
1: dodge or block an attack
2: grab, trap or move the attacking limb
3: let the player decide what to do; kick,throw,attack with weapon, attack with magic, use as a human shield, talk etc


it should be easy to animate some climbing! again, single week would be all it takes to nail a few decent climbing mechanics!
-- grabing the ledge or outcrop you are looking at with the appropriate arm
-- knowing which arm to grab with and what arm should let go when you need to get to the third hold
-- knowing what to do with the rest of the body (what are the legs doing,are you leaning, are you trying to get your body around something)
-- damaging stamina, and damaging stamina when you have more weight on you.
-- experiment with the use of smaller weapons and magic whilst climbing
-- make some nice controls- grabbing holds might be point and click, but arrowkeys might make the player lean different ways or control the legs.
-- whilst npcs dont need an advanced climbing ai- they should at least be able to climb simple things and know what to do when you climb

it would also be great if swimming and flying animations where decent...


EDIT: by easy, i mean for a team of paid for professionals who spend their time wasting away at making this odd game about people yelling at dragons

Should be easy
Should be easy
Should be easy


I see this phrase repeated in your post and it's not accurate at all.

Do you even know what animation work involves? Are you an animator?

As much as I would love pretty much all of those ideas, having a game that intricate probably won't happen for a while. Mouse and keyboard/controller's just don't have enough buttons, or it just isn't easy to incorporate so much of what we can do in reality with our limbs, and put it into the game. Assassin's Creed was able to kind of do it, but for the most part there wasn't much freedom as to where you could put the assassins limbs. The fighting system was good for that style of game with pre-animated counters to help it flow, but combat still felt choppy at times. Oblivion had good combat animations, but it was lacking as well with the lack of the enemy recoiling when you cut the hell out of them or injure them severely.

Bethesda has given pretty good details on how combat will play out, and all we can do is wait for videos. Actual climbing animations and graphics would be awesome, and actually being able to climb up boulders or get onto all fours when trying to conquer a large hill is something that I definitely look forward to, but we have to think realistically with what they can do. I'd rather have an awesome game with a memorable story than sacrifice that for better animations.

Jack254, you have some good ideas, but I feel that this is another of your "nag/complain"-threads. You say "should be easy", maybe it is, but they may be focusing on stuff that's more important (like crossbows, werewolves and other awesome [censored]). And if it really is easy to make it could be done with community made mods.

This was my first thought as well.

We shouldn't all need to be experienced games developers or digital artists in order to discuss and make suggestions, but when your argument hinges on "add climbing anims in a week - easy!" you either lack perspective, or you should be working at Bethesda (or the game or movie studio of your choice) already. Assuming you're not a spectacularly talented and productive amateur, you should perhaps reconsider your post after doing some research and/or trying your hand at character animation.

Personally, i would prefer a climbing system to crossbows/werewolves any day. Think about it - Climbing a mountain with nothing but your bare hands, frosty winds trying to rip you off the rock, all the while you're slowly pulling yourself upwards, hand over hand. You finally get to a cliff ridge and attempt to haul yourself up, only to slip, fall for a bit, and make a desperate grab, trying, and suddenly succeeding in finding purchase on the icy rock, your body dangling out over certain death.

I would much rather prefer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs8xx-RDaPE&t=4m6s over http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jUWm2ynQr4&t=0m49s. :hubbahubba:

Why? I don't really understand why anyone would want an old weapon that was present in previous game, and can be modded in, over a completely new way to traverse the landscape, which fits in with the area. I mean, really, how else are we going to get up those mountains?

Crossbows wouldn't work like that at all and you know that. And I'd rather have climbing, instead of having to walk on specific paths up the mountain.

I swear, every one the threads I've seen made by you annoy me.

If it was really that simple, they'd do it. So it's quite clearly a lot more difficult than you're making it out to be.

Well, if there was anything worthwhile at the top of those mountains, you would have a path or some other way to the top (like 7000 steps!). From the mountains I have seen, they are just blank peaks, and if you climbed up there, the only thing to do would be to go back down. The only situation that I could see where you would have to do straight up climbing is if you were trying to reach some forgotten ruin, that over centuries has become inaccessible by normal means by avalanches, etc.

And maybe you would have 1, maybe even 2 locations like that. It just doesn't seem worth the dev's time.

Edit: And if you took out the specific paths, that would make reaching those mountains a pain in the ***, because if you had a climbing system like that you would have to assume that it would take a while. Personally, I wouldn't bother with the climbing if it was really that prevalent. That is just my opinion though.

Edit 2: That Half-Life 2 link was half serious (no pun intended), I just meant I would rather have the relatively little things like crossbows and werewolves, rather than a whole overhaul-like climbing system. Again, just my opinion.

No no, see, they're really dimwitted and he is the only one who can tell them what to do.

I kid, I kid. He might not know how difficult it is to animate/incorporate aforementioned animations into the game.



You do have a point. Still, I think it would be pretty cool, even if you didn't use it to climb mountains, only buildings.

Animations are actually the hardest thing to put in the game. Map design is pretty much copy and paste, and you can throw a sound file into the sound folder in no time. But to get good animations they have to have motion actors, and wire frame skeletons in the models, and textures that can stretch and not look dumb. Not to mention the rendering takes forever. My brother and his friends are trying to make games using the source engine, and animations are the only thing they can't get a hang of. Its really something that takes a long to time to learn how to do.

I honestly think that they should have none of those stuff that you mentioned. This is Elder's Scroll, not Assassins Creed, and I love that simple fighting mechanics of Oblivion and I'll love it the same in Skyrim. Elder's Scroll have their own original ideas and Assassins Creed has there, shouldn't be a mash for both. If you want those kinds of things then just buy AC Brotherhood, heard its exactly what your asking for. Oh, and btw its not easy to animate things like climbing, punching, and kicking, and when you said it can be done in a week then your basically saying it's possible that Rome was built in a day.

Definite no on the climbing building thing, maybe actual climbing ladders but no parkour.

Not even a ledge-grab feature?

It would be enough. A bit of ledge grab to enter houses on top. Though it isn't that easy :').

The OPs description sounds like a wishlist for Uncharted 3. I like games with more than 15 hours gameplay. The features would be AWESOME but i let Beth of cause what they don't deliver in complexity, they more than make up for in play time.

An infinite amount of monkeys could do it in a second.

Ever tried making a game? I give you a week to make a simple platform-game with climbing, like the original Prince of Persia.
You can even use game-maker, so you don't have to waste time coding the fundamental elements of the engine. It should be easy....

I made a "game" once. Was real cool!!! :hehe: I made a "ball" "bounce" across the "screen", and it all took only "a day". I'm so proud, game making is easy as [censored] :wave:

Jack.. have you even read the thing I posted yesterday? Do you even read your own threads? You have done exactly what I've complained about in your other thread. You think you know everything, well you don't. Don't underestimate animating and implementing a new thing in a new engine. I have also noticed that you never post in your own threads anymore, you just make one, wait for a flame war and never post in it again. Are you seriously trying to troll this whole forum or what?

Holy crap that climbing was awesome there.
Concerning all these things everyone seem to want, I'd go:

1) Mounts and mounted combat
2) Climbing.
3) The rest.

Climbing is so fitting for Skyrim and would be awesome...

:facepalm: I guess that link didn't illustrate my point very well. :laugh:

The climbing there is just unbelieably good!!!

Even ignoring the part where all those animations (many of them prodedural / modified on the fly, since it's open world) aren't nearly as easy as you'd think....

...the harder part is defining the game world for climbing. Or coming up with an on-the-fly "anolyze the geometry around you and figure out what features are grabbable" system.

Sure, putting climbable surfaces in something like Portal (not that it had it) would be easy - linear levels, built all out of boxy shapes. "Edge of box" is grabbable, wow that's not hard. Oblivion's map didn't have anything like that, except in a few town places.

And that Modern Warfare clip, while somewhat impressive..... isn't really. That sequence looks completely linear. So all the "climb" spots were completely and easily defined, and all the animation variations (going over the edge, jump-and-spike, sliding down and dangling) were slightly-interactive cutscenes.

Making a system to do all that on the fly, on whichever parts of the vast mountainrange that might work for it...... yeah, not so easy.