"Responsiveness" is a popular topic among designers lately, and I get the impression that the conversation is spreading. Our industry is focusing so heavily on looking good, that playability is taking a back seat to sub 60 frame rates and animation bound motion.
I understand that good looking screenshots and trailers attract people. And smooth, proper animations with weight and character are great to watch. But the last time I checked, we're in the business of making games. What sets games apart from photos and movies is interactivity. When we make looking good the priority, interactivity falls by the wayside.
And then some designer complains about responsiveness.
But haven't we already made this mistake before? In the early 90s, the industry was falling over itself on the buzz of interactive movie-games. With the introduction of the CD-ROM, games would be able to be made up entirely of full motion video with 16 bit audio. Everything that Hollywood had to offer could be made available with the added experience of interactivity. Maybe you remember such titles as Critical Path and Night Trap? No? How about Mad Dog McCree? This experiment has failed. I'll concede that this was fine for adventure games and puzzle games, where action on screen happened between player interactions (ie MYST, 7th Guest, Blade Runner), but the games where this is an issue are games that require constant input from the player.
So we find ourselves tripping down the same trend again. GTA4, Assassin's Creed, Tomb Raider, Mass Effect, Bioshock (360): All these games are running at perceivably slow frame rates, and all of these suffer from varying degrees of unresponsiveness. Do your own tests by running in one direction, and jam the stick in the opposite direction. You'll notice a distinct difference between the time when you hear the clack of the stick and when the avatar actually moves in the direction you commanded. For a scientific approach, see Mick West's post on Gamasutra.
We're working in a world where each piece of hardware and software is adding response time to every interaction, and every frame of animation in the name of fidelity is chipping away at the playability of our games. Designers need to place a stake in the ground early to mark the minimum bar. For some games like Devil May Cry or Okami, creator Hideki Kamiya expects that the animation bar to be at 3 frames, and the games he makes run at 60 fps. Maybe your game isn't as fast paced, but what you need to do is play the game and establish a metric. If your animation team is fond of interpolation (adding frames to transition between animations), play with different values and give the animation team a value that works. Play at different frame rates, and lock down that metric early (especially hard to do since you are most likely up against senior programmers and art directors on this one).
Every animator that I end up working with hates me for the first couple of weeks, and rightly so - I always feel like I'm dropping a bomb when I let them know that an animation needs to be 4x faster, or that an animation is simply unusable. In the end it's the animators that make the game look awesome, all I do is try to make it play awesome. However, when we're able to succeed at both, the result is better than the sum of the parts. In Part two, I'll go into methods I have used to marry the goals of fidelity and playability, and ways I've found to work harmoniously with artists, programmers, and animators.
For now, think about the game you are making or want to make. Think of the competitive bar, and where your game will stand in relation to responsiveness and fidelity. Most importantly, think about the player's experience.
