I usually play through most RPG's as a female character, maybe it goes back to the first game series I started playing (not including mario) Tomb Raider. I hate how most game, even amazing tech games like mass effect have the same animations for both genders. Would anyone else like to see the females in skyrim actually walk like women. I'm not looking for jessica rabbit here, just something not so butch as Oblivion. Thoughts?

nothing personal against you, but frankly this is just...really? Fiddling around with walking animation, now I can accept people who maybe want more realistic walking animation or some such in general....but is this really something to bring up?

I agree with you. I also play most RPG's as a female. And Oblivion definitely makes them walk and do other actions like a man. Maybe some more "girlish" animations for females and "manly" animations for men. However, Oblivion did do a descent job at lowering some attributes for females such as strength but raising some others. But to be honest with you, I play in 1st person mostly, so it doesn't really matter to me.

This. I don't know who the OP is but I've lived and worked around girls all my life. And his ideas on feminine stances are typically unnatural. Females generally won't have different movements or stances from males unless there is a reason behind it, ie. trying to attract attention.

Well, hopefully they used motion capture stuff for the animations in Skyrim (well for the humanoids anyway :B). If so its a good sign towards having separate animations for each six. If they did everything by hand though... hopefully they made them different. If they are differently, they bloody well better not make women walk in some hyper-sixualized fashion or I will rage. :brokencomputer:

No, not really. I mostly play as female characters but it doesn't bother me. There's less of a division between genders in the Elder Scrolls universe. Gender stereotypes aren't as enforced as they are in the real world. I've never viewed the way women walk/run in Morrowind or Oblivion as masculine, nor have I viewed the way men walk/run in Morrowind or Oblivion as feminine. It's a gender-neutral animation, as are all actor-animations. I'd like to keep it that way.

It's not really that ridiculous an idea. It can be expanded to asking for different animations between the beast and humanoid races. Do you expect agile, clawed cat people to walk the same as other humans? Should bipedal creatures have the same animations?

Considering they're using Havok Behavior, I see no reason they wouldn't have done this already. You just import each body/mesh/creature and define a series of Behaviors (hence the name) which consist of lots of different animations for various actions, and then the actual game middleware is going to let the Skyrim engine blend between them. Females have different bodies and hence it's possible they did more than a simple animation retarget (though the skeletons/bones are likely the same in quantity, the females should have different proportions).


I don't know about the OP for sure, but I don't think reinforcing gender stereotypes is what he had in mind. I can see a legitimate point being made in that sixual dimorphism exists in humans, and thus we walk differently. If he was making this point, I don't know. But I may as well because I'm here.

Yes, most definitly if there are trampolines invovled!

But

It's never really concerned me. Also, it seems to walk close to stereotyping?

On the whole, I don't think men and women walk differently IRL, so I don't see the point in making a distinction in the game.

Well in reality, there isn't much difference between how females fight and males fight. Gender means nothing when you learn how to fight from the same place.

I don't know if the OP is talking about women walking differently to men to 'attract attention' or not. But women do actually walk quite differently as the leg and pelvis structure are different to men's. Having said that it not something that I would have thought of as an issue in the TES in anyway! Surely there are more important things to be worrying about.

Gives new meanng to a cat fight and [censored] slap

We all learn at the same dojo?


Is not part of that due to the kind of foot attire? I'll grant you a bit of female differentiation, but there can be some quite identical walks across gender, especially when carrying a load or athletic builds come in. Again, where ther are genrealizations, there are arguments against them.

I pretty much agree with you the differences are not that pronounced. Was just trying to show that there may be some logic behind the idea and its not just a post by someone who want all the female characters to walk Jessica rabbit, femme fatale kind of way.

Understood :foodndrink: Me iz just riffin' on the stereotype wavelength

Ach, now something on topic....

It'd be interesting to see what would get implimented first, different kinds of body stature (weight based) vs. a different kind of walk (gender based). It'd also be interesting to see the decision process. Would making a more femine gait draw in more female players? Or does having more body type variety draw in more players overall?

It's no great secret that we have sixual dimorphism in our species. My anthropology classes in college taught me many of the ways we differ, and the pelvis is the big one.

http://www.engr.wisc.edu/groups/nmbl/pubs/cb08_chumanov.pdf




I'm not supporting or defending anybody who wants different animations just so women are portrayed as "sixy". These ideas are quite grotesque. But I am defending the original point of the OP, because technically males and females should have different walk/run animations. People who say otherwise have no basis other than "Bethesda has more important things to do". With Havok Behavior it could take them 5 minutes to modify the animation for females. You import the male animation, adjust the hip swagger a bit, that's it. They have to differentiate the females after all to load a different body mesh. At the same point they probably also point the mesh to which Behavior file it should use. Wouldn't take that much work.

Edit: And specifically, as I said in my first post, I'd like to see animation differences between species. Cat and lizard folk should move a bit differently. For that matter their body meshes should differ significantly.

This is a great idea, make young women walk like Radiant Jen Zi in Jade Empire :teehee:

You unknowingly bring up a good point. Old townsfolk and children should have different animations as well. Havok Behavior definitely allows for this if they wanted to do so.

To expand on my earlier point I guess it would make more sense for the PC/NPCs to have one large behavior file, with different age and gender behaviors. They can stack/blend behaviors so the "age" behaviors could just modify the active walk/run animation to make them appear elderly.

It's really no different from what they've already told us. We have confirmed leaning animations (screenshots) and realistic turning/pivoting animation blending (where the shoulder dips in one direction, among other things) in the game these animations get triggered by specific events. For the gender/age animation differences, you just have a persistent event pointing the object to which animation to use for run/walk and other things.

It's really not too out of the question.

Im a guy, and personally I always thought the way most games portray women is pretty silly. I mean I like swaying hips and big bouncing boobs as much as the next guy, but I just dont think it fits most TES women. High class in towns, sure. And Id like to see more personalized animations. Not EVERY man and EVERY woman needs to walk/sit/stand the same way, and please at least have different skeletons this time around.

I see where you are coming from but it isn't exactly on top of the list for me

Go Badgers! (saw the webiste link)

And I think we're both aiming at the same end.

Of course I understand the dimorphism, but what I'm getting at is just ow pronounced it is, what exacerbates it, what makes its noticibale (or less noticable), what assumptions are being made about how women walk, etc. And of course we have other basis, annecdotal evidence.

Yes, slightly different animations are needed. I just hope they don't try to make the female animations "sixy" like most games. :facepalm:

It's one of my biggest problems with games. They all make women look like strippers on the battlefield, and most of them act overly flirtatious. It's ridiculous.
I swear if I see "Boob bounce" physics appear in an Elder Scrolls game before cloth physics, i'm jumping off of a building.


For your entertainme- Education... I have made a graph:

Armor variations in videogames:

http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/2589/armorss.png

Women do move differently to men; it's got nothing to do with stereotypes or gender roles or prejudice, it's a fact. We're just different.

Whether or not it's a significant enough difference to matter in the context of a heroic fantasy RPG is another matter. The more detail and (quasi-)realism the devs can put into Skyrim's character animation, the better - so I do hope there are distinct animations for masculine and feminine characters, even if the differences are very subtle.

I'm pretty sure this is why they picked a more robust animation system. Personally, I would have liked to see Autodesk MotionBuilder and HumanIK used, because they seem even more robust.

I'm also curious to see what Havok Behavior will do for their particle animations (which they say they are using it for), as well as facial animation. I also really hope they use the Inverse Kinematics features of Havok Behavior to adjust the animations at runtime to look better on uneven terrain. I really disliked the character "sliding" uphill when you ran on an incline. Hell, it can even do a foot plane-solver for stairs, by the looks of it. Or a stairstepping animation works, too, if the stairs all have the same step height. Or both, because IK could be used at runtime to adjust the stepping animation to the steps.

Yeh ever since I played GTA4 I cant stand oldschool animations . Like how Nico will step up onto a curb and lean into a turn while running. There arnt really any hills or steady inclines that I remember so idk if the step up thing is something on the character or has to do with the static world meshes(idk, I dont really know much about how this stuffs made). Like I mean if its dynamic or scripted.

Oh I didn't realize that women that cat fight are trained in weapon combat and stab slap each other with swords, my bad....

If you've ever seen a mock sword fight between men and women in a medieval faire, then you would see how men and women with similar training fight the same way, just like people from that live in the same area have the same accent and so on. I really don't see what was so absurd of what I said. Humans are humans regardless of gender and if you teach two humans, one male and one female the same thing, they will fight exactly the same way.