When you think about your history and the things you've worked on before Star Citizen and Squadron, and you look for a highlight, something that you're particularly proud of, what comes to mind?
TL;DRSteve Bender's proudest work is the Crysis series, where small animation details like suit-specific reloads conveyed character and feel, and he says first-person animation and feel still need a lot of work here.
The Crysis series. Hands down. There's a lot of similarities that I feel at times here at CIG with that, because I remember we didn't know what we couldn't do. So we just sort of did it, right? And it was always, we want to do this better. The animation in particular, and the cinematics and the performances in particular, on the Crysis series get better as you go: number one, Warhead, two and three. Just the quality of the animation, the little details and stuff like that. Someone said to me just the other day, it was yesterday I think, was asking me about Crysis 3, and they said that they remember playing the game and when they were switching suit modes and reloading, the actual animation of reloading the weapon was different in every suit mode. So in power mode, he'd slam that thing forward. And in speed mode, it was like... and in stealth, it was pulling it back and very quietly pushing it forward. It was sort of like riding it in a way and stuff like that. He felt like that created this experience that really tied him more into the suit mode and what he was trying to do. And that loops right back to what we talked about just like half an hour ago, on the first person view and those hands, and how your hands, in what you do, convey your character and their emotion in the first person view.
Those reload animations are exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. Those things that don't seem super obvious, are not in your face, but those little interstitial moments that make all the difference between something feeling tangible and believable and immersive, if we can say the name.
I think that's one thing, though, especially in first person, and we have a lot of work still to do on our first person animations and our first person feel, to really dial that down and craft it down to something that feels solid. I like to say that it's not about necessarily what you're doing, it's about the feel of it, especially in the camera. The way that the camera moves, if you're a game that does that sort of thing, can really make an effect on how the player perceives what's going on around them.