I haven't seen a similar topic anywhere on these forums, yet, and I thought I would bring it up. My view on these may be skewed a bit based on the only platform I've played Oblivion on, which is my PS3. Does anyone else feel like Oblivion was a bit clunky? By that I mean the animations, horse riding, spellcasting, bowslinging, swordfighting, general appearance, and general movement of the game felt a bit awkward, to me. I'm hoping, especially based on the new engine, that Skyrim will be different. Horse riding in Oblivion just felt awkward and lacked dynamic animations. Spellcasting seemed slow and lacking in animation variety (the same, robotic, raising the arm and shooting out a ball of differently colored magic or the same, robotic, raising the arm and having a colored sphere covering you). Bowslinging felt slow and had what seemed like an unrealistic string-pulling animation. The swordfighting felt slow, lacking in animation variety, like I was using an unrealistically blunt weapon, and lacking in any realistic response from my enemies. My enemies get hit and are near death, yet instead of bleeding or caring, they appear as if they've had a routine day of walking around and not doing anything harmful. I am focusing on swordfighting because it's the only melee style I've ever utilized, but this extends to melee weapons, in general. They all feel the same, too. I want swords to feel like swords, axes to feel like axes, warhammers to feel like warhammers, and, if they return, spears to feel like spears, because I feel that Morrowind has a similar sense of clunkiness.

As for the general appearance. character (and creature) models seemed bloated and, subsequently, unrealistic, to me. My complaint about general movement comes from the unrealistic animations and just the feeling I get from moving. Fallout 3 seemed a bit less clunky to me, for some reason, but I was just wondering if anyone else even has a clue as to what I'm referring to and I'm wondering what everyone else thinks about what to expect.

Must've been the ps3 version. I played the 360 and PC versions and they seem fluid to me. There were some issues with Spellcasting and melee combat seemed a bit off but for a game that started production in 2002 for a console that hadn't even been created yet, it's animations were pretty good. I don't see what was wrong with the horse animations, The horse animations were fine from the 3rd and 1st person views with the rocking motion to the camera. The only thing that looked odd was watching a fast horse run by you, it looked awkward but from your own characters perspective they looked great.

I never had a problem with this either, everyone always criticizes the animations, but I thought they were fine, doesn't really need to improve much

Yeah, the animations for Oblivion were pretty terrible...

I'm a huge animation guy. It's always a big deal for me in games. Not so much graphics, just animations.


Everything was so stiff... and just awful. I challenge anyone to go into third person, and look at the jump animation and tell me they look good.

Of course it hasn't stopped Oblivion from being one of my favorite games of all time, but I really hope Bethesda can improve upon the animations.
Fallout 3 was a slight improvement, but still had pretty sub-par 3rd person animations.

Yeah, I played on the 360 at first and then got a copy for the PS3. Both copies' gameplay seemed pretty equal to me, though I believe the framerate for the 360 was a bit lower? In any case, as others have stated, the movements you described were definitely stiff, but that was simply a quality of the game, not the system.

Of course it was stiff and clunky dude. Its TES! :thumbsup:

Never bothered me though. They say theyre improving the animation in this one and thats good enough for me.

I won't argue that the PLAYER 3rd person animations were terrible, but that was because they didn't put any time into making sure the players movements didn't look bad because the game was geared to 1st person and they were short on time. This time around they have plenty of time and staff to flesh out this game more than any other game they've made. As for the general animations in the game, the animations were fine for the period they made the game, of course they are crap compared to those now or even in 2007.

Hopefully Skyrim animations will be a lot better.

I'm not only referring to that. I'm also referring to the lack of variety. Spells mostly felt the same. Swords functioned just like axes and both of them functioned just like maces. Enemies didn't seem to react much to the specific weapon type I was using to kill them and I couldn't tell I had just hit someone/something with a sword or a mace 120 times.

I agree 100%. Many of the animations to me were pretty terrible. Hell the male walk animation is way too um . . . underwhelming. The walk cycle does not exude power, confidence, etc. It looks really girly actually with lots of but wiggle. It's down right funny. Horses are bloody awkward, and jumping . . . sometimes the game won't respond to a jump right away. Yeah I'll agree, Oblivion was pretty clunky in that sense.

The animations in Oblivion weren't bad but they probably wouldn't win any awards. The thing is as i recall all the animations in Oblivion were hand rendered. These days pretty much all games use motion capture to make more fluid animations. That being the case i really hope they use motion capture for animations.

Oblivion's animations were an improvement over Morrowind, but by industry standards, they were only just passable. I remember running in third person and it looked more like my character was ice-skating than anything else.

Bethesda's animations have always been terrible. That's the biggest thing I'm worried about with Skyrim.

It was designed on an unfamiliar engine for systems that did not exist when design was started. Most of the Animations were done using tech nowhere near that of modern games. Motion Capture was barely a blip on the horizon back then. It wasn't a failing by oblivion but a byproduct of the situation the game was designed in. Skyrim was designed from the ground up for current-gen systems using modern tech.

The Animations will be better. Knowing Bethesda, they won't be perfect, as animation is not there strong suit, but they will be better than Oblivion's by far. They just have to make up for it with good graphics, physics, and, of course the Writing. As long can truly say I enjoy the Writing, gameplay and visuals can take backseat so long as they don't get in the way of experiencing the writing.

Obviously agree with the whole animations thing, but a Bethesda game is a delicate creature that focuses more on gameplay than appearance. And second, I don't think it was much possible in 2004 (or whenever Oblivion was released) to make a massive game with tons of content, then have it run fluidly all on one disk. In my experience I never encountered any clunkiness or bugs, so I don't understand why everyone complains.

I'm sure Skyrim's animations will be better, as stated before, they didn't even know what 360 was until like six months before the release date. Also, I thought it was interesting their combat animator is actually practicing martial arts (the first Todd Howard interview).

Go for a swim in third person. (Optionally also use that swimming in mid-air glitch)

The Animations in Oblivion were at the top of there class when the game was first announced, errr well sorta. I agree that some of the animations looked a little strange but not all. Like my horses butt looks waaaay to big when my tiny little wood elf is riding it lol. Honestly, it's just hilarious to look at.

The animation they most have to fix in Skyrim IIRC is that [censored] looking 'sprinting-up-the-top-of-a-mountain' animation (AKA the running animation treated exactly the same way as on flat ground). It kills immersion and looks absolutely ridiculous.
(That's censored? Seriously? Heh.)

Same,bro.Like in FPS games,weapon reloading animations matters a LOT to me.And that you can actually see the magazine in 3rd person to go inside the gun.Bad company 2 has awesome animations.

Oblivion has one of the worst animations I have ever seen.

Old enough to have played Zombie Island and that weird game that went 'banzai! mugyu!' on a Commodore Pet ( 8 or 16 k of ram ) so will quite happily put up with much clunkiness and cheapness for this much game, oh yes.