This looks Amazing, but one thing I found jarring was the animations. It feels like game developers haven’t improved how NPCs walk since GTA 3. I don’t know if it’s because every NPC has the same gate or something but it’s odd.
I thought the exact same thing. Relatively to everything else, it almost feels like game developers aren't giving it any attention. Obviously they are, so what is it about NPC animation in particular that makes it so difficult? Even facial expressions seem pretty good nowadays...
In this specific case I could imagine it’s just a very low priority. It’s a first person shooter where the vast, vast, vast majority of the time you are exchanging gunfire with enemy characters or other players. Except for small sequences like the one in the OP, you are very rarely ever interacting with NPCs in a non-violent manner outside of cutscene (makes for some easy talking points about the state of the AAA games industry) so I imagine those animations don’t receive many resources budgeted towards them.
CoD Infinite Warfare (I.e. “the one in space”) had sequences in between every mission where you could talk and interact with the crew of your spaceship and the NPC animations were a lot better there. Also they had a lot of NPCs modeled after celebrities for some reason (e.g. F1 driver Lewis Hamilton) so there was likely pressure to animate the NPCs better.
GTA 4 was a breakthrough in ped animation due to their Euphoria engine. GTA 3, on the other hand, is memed to this day for the way they made women move their hips when walking. :)
