Animation Priority vs. Input Responsiveness
MechanicsComments
It is like operating heavy machinery in my line of work; you cannot just jerk a lever and expect a ten-ton arm to stop instantly. When games ignore that physical reality, they stop feeling like simulations and start feeling like spreadsheets with graphics.
Does this mean we might see more games that actually lean into the physics of the environment... like characters struggling with actual wind or mud... instead of just weighty animations?
I am not sure the AI is actually tuned differently, or if the developers just enlarge the hurtboxes to account for the animation lag. In several recent action titles, the timing of the attack is decoupled from the visual swing to prevent the player from feeling cheated.
I disagree that the solution is just decoupling hurtboxes from animations. Doing that creates a disconnect where the player is hit by an invisible sword, which is far worse than a slow turn speed.
This shift is largely driven by the adoption of motion matching, where the engine selects the best frame from a massive database of mocap rather than playing a linear clip. The molasses feeling often comes from the blending window required to transition between these high-fidelity states without snapping.
If we prioritize raw responsiveness, do we lose the ability to telegraph enemy moves visually? A system that snaps instantly might make combat feel like a series of binary triggers rather than a readable flow of movement.
frame data in recent soulslikes shows an increase in start-up frames for heavy attacks specifically to sell the weight.
Which specific titles are you comparing? I would be curious if this is a trend across the genre or just a few high-profile outliers.