Motion Capture Animations in Risen 2: Dark Waters

I am currently playing Risen 2: Dark Waters on PC. While playing I noticed that most of the animations of the characters was very jerky and kind of broken movements. There was no finesse and smoothness in their movements. Currently the games that are available in market are of very quality and the animations look very realistic. I know that developers use Motion Capture technology to capture the actions of the actors which then applied over the characters of the game. Also the environment of the game looked of very inferior quality according to current times. The movements of the characters in the main game where I can control was fine, but the jerky and broken movements that I mentioned would be easily seen in Cut scenes and other parts where the characters can be seen from a close distance. I have played Deep Silver’s Dead Island and the quality of animation and the environment was very high, couldn’t they just make this game of same quality. Did anyone else too notice this problem?

I know that animations of Risen 2: Dark Waters are very jerky and look very amateurish. But this wasn’t done on purpose or to downgrade the game. The developers of Risen 2: Dark Waters had declared that this game was delayed in production and thus in release. This game is financed and published by Piranha Bytes, but before its production began, this studio withdrew its 75% assets from this game. Thus the developers, deep Silver had to manage the production of this game in fewer budgets. Less Budget means they had to use the in-house artists for making the game. Also as the game was delayed in production, developers compromised some quality as compared to the quality of its previous installment.

The developers have used motion capture to get the animation for the characters, but the quality of animations is less. Talking about the environment, developers have made a major change to it. In Risen, the levels wouldn’t be in a single formation. You can notice if you have played Risen that the caves were placed in random places, so were the towns and forests. There was lack of formation of terrain. What I mean to say is that, you will suddenly find a cave in between forest area which is very unrealistic. In Risen 2: Dark Waters this problem regarding environment has been solved by creating various islands. Now a single Island will have forest while some other island has caves.

This game is made for PC and is an open world. When the game will be loaded, it will launch all the terrain all together. This might overload the system as much of the area is covered by foliage. Foliage, that consists of trees, plants and other such high mesh objects need huge amount resources from in form of graphic memory and RAM. The team responsible for data reduction and data adoption has tried to reduce it so that it doesn’t overload the system and cause problems for other processes. Thus, you notice the low quality of environmental objects in Risen 2: Dark Waters.

You find the animation in the game more better than that in cut scenes. That is because; the game has playable part more than cut scenes. Thus the quality of animations used in this party is of better quality than that in cut scenes. The combat system is very well developed than that in Risen. To achieve this difference, the developers have used motion capture technology. The way character handles the weapons which includes various types of guns and swords has been improved. The player gets an option to develop his pirate for either gun fights or sword fight. So the animations have been developed to suit the development style. The mechanics used to develop these techniques are changed by the developers. Again there is function for character development in this game, which includes the character to wear armors to handle weapons. These armors and the weapons can have varying weights. So the movements of the character have also been much developed. If your character is wearing heavy armor, than the movements will be restricted and you will also notice the difference in speed of attacking by sword. This all has been achieved by motion capture used by developers.

Developers have also said that many of the animation work which needed motion capture was done by Third Party Company. Due to change in workflow of the game, the developers had to build the animations of the characters and other components of the game from the scratch. I know that this game faces lots of problems in animation, but developing a game is not a child's work. But if you try to find the improvement in Risen 2: Dark Waters, then you will find many. The basic emotions are very well improved in this part as compared to the previous version. The bugs in animation caused due to weight distribution have also been improved. In risen, if you hit the wolf using some heavy weapon, then it would fly off many feet away. Such problems have been solved in this game. The movement of the character’s jump has also been improved. The landing of the character was very unrealistic in Risen and this has been improved in Risen 2. All this improvements have been achieved by using the Motion Capture technique.