4. Animations
I mean, come on. All RPG's I've ever played have just awfully simple animations. Now, it may seem to blend in with the graphics complaint from earlier, but before you come at me with omni-blades and Wabbajacks, hear me out. In a lot of RPG's, particularly the Mass Effect series, the player is supposed to feel immersed in the game world. However, the simple animations really hold this back. I'll get back on Mass Effect soon, but for now, I'll pick on Skyrim. Everything about the animation system is just plain embarrassing. The facial animations fail to sell these characters as real. The movement looks clunky, and worse of all, the player controlled character is missing animations for reading books, drinking, eating and other chores around Skyrim. It frustrates me that I can't be apart of that. The absolute epitome of laziness in the animations, however, is the duel-wielding. While the actual hitting is fine (in terms of Bethesda standards), there is no animation for drawing a weapon on you left hand. Your right hand pulls your weapon out, but the other weapon just appears in your left hand. What is wrong with that? And the dragon flying and crashing is simply laughable. Now, after that rant, let's talk about Mass Effect. Now, while some may argue my previous protest was unjustified, here is one we can all agree with. If Mass Effect games are supposedly the greatest story telling games on the planet, if their voice acting is so good, and if their characters are still best in class, then why don't I believe them? Simple: the animations. From the awkwardly stiff lip-syncing to the repetitive and stiff facial animations to the constipated and disconnected running, not a single animation in Mass Effect 3 comes even close to believable. While complaining about the tech may seem petty, and I know that some of you will still attack me, it's a shame, really. If Mass Effect used a system like Ubisoft's on the recent and brilliant Assassin's Creed III, which captures actor's face movements as they deliver their lines, then it would make the game so much more immersive. Same goes for the movement animations for the character bodies. If Bioware had just used mocap instead of babies slapping keyboards for Mass Effect's animations, the game would have been so much better. While this is just two examples of poorly animated RPG's, these are the two biggest franchises going around. While I could have mention Fallout 3 and it's brethren, New Vegas, they are both from Skyrim's creator so the same complaints apply. While not ALL RPG's are as bad as these two, for example, The Witcher 2 has some decent animations, I found it necessary considering the popularity of these games.