Does anyone else think animation is a complete waste of time?

[Sheik100]

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I know I said I wanted to stop saying opinions but I thought Subverse was an avoid from what I heard about it? Did they later deliver? Ofcourse my information source were Redditors (that apparently played lewd games). Reading about reviews here just now it seems there is controversy on the animation quality in the end? Ill give it a look at the least.

Edit: Nevermind, figured I could find the scenes online and the quality is good. People are just upset theyre on a loop or something.

 

[Ophanim]

Some of my fave games, adult or otherwise, are primarily text based, or feature minimal graphics, so I'm largely on board with this. It's quite rare for me to see animations in a game and think 'gee willickers, that really sold the scene and made me forget the shitshow going on down in the text window' but that's just how games make me feel. Like, writing and and sound design are a million times more effective for selling a scene to me, is my point. And as we've previously established, porn writing suuucks, particularly if you're not a straight man, because almost everything is written from the same straight boy perspective. Animations can make or break atmosphere, I think, because they bypass the imaginative part of interpreting erotic writing. Which means bad animations are almost always less sexy to me than a well-framed CG, and can actively work against what the writing is going for. So chalk my opinions up for 'it depends', leaning towards 'animations are usually not worth the time and effort', I think.

A big exception for this would be, as others have said, the 'Ultimate Steam GOTY Osmium-encrusted Perfected Edition' release once all of the game's subsystems and content is mostly in place, but I'd also like to mention that there are also games that don't rely on text at all. Erotic platformers, like FOBS, Succubus Affection, Oh So Hero!, etc, would be nothing without their animations, and their sex scenes live and die by each squashy, stretchy frame. Erotic fighting games, likewise, although those sometimes have cut-ins with dialogue.

And yes, the people I see screaming in the comments sections of games about how 'X game is trash because it doesn't have animations' are actually awful. Were I a game dev, I think I'd find them pretty saddening to scroll past every time I checked my thread, or my review section. It would probably put a bit of a damper on my desire to make a game, thus hampering my ability to make it and hastening feelings of burnout. But hey, that's just my superhuman powers of empathy talking. They're the same people who turn up on gay games to complain about the lack of straight, or on NTR games to scream about how the game is cucking them. Yes, it's a gay/NTR game. That's the point, fucker. The same people who turn up in translation threads to ask 'v2.X translated when?' in exactly that many words, while the translator is still working, for free, on v1.2, and then refuse to link a copy of the updated version.

Is animation bad? Idk, but some people are just the worst, and will continue to be so come hell or high water

 

[tuvrelm11]

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an animation is worth a thousand pictures. Personally I love animated scenes. They add something that a static CGs just can't.

That being said, the part about a thousand pictures is not a poetic play on words. I really means that the devs will have to put in an order of magnitude more effort in to their games. Bloating total dev time to the moon, update once a year if you're lucky, and the animation that you will get itself is likely to contain some janky-ass 1-2-3-2-1 awkward dry hump loop. So I'd much rather have the static CGs. Then at least the games will have actual content.

With Illusion and KiSS going down the shitter, western devs preferring to milk patrons instead of deving - the era of animated games is coming to a close. So, again, I'd rather devs focus on static CGs instead of trying to fly too close to the sun.

 

[haksaw]

Animations belong in fully animated games. Like with actual gameplay. If it's a visual novel, basically a book, they don't bring that much, actually they even take away. With static pictures your brain understands that that picture represents only part of what's going on and author can write whatever he wants with all the details. Scenes can easily be 30+ mins read. With animations it doesn't work like that, what you see is what you get. Usually that means short simple scenes, like literally couple minutes read with 10-20 seconds worth of animation on a loop.

 

[Diconica]

Honestly, the whole thing was bugging me so much as I thought about that I even ended up putting it in my sig as a PSA. I think the onset of animated 3D sex scenes and people thinking their games 'need' to have animation or they'll be considered outdated has done truly incredible damage to western erotic game development. Hear me out.

While at first blush animation would appear to be a straight upgrade over still images, in truth it's anything but. Let's be frank here: in the best case the animated scene will be some absurdly extravagant SFM you just know it took the dev a calendar month to visually compose and animate, where in the same timeframe he could have crafted five separate normal sex scenes instead, and that's in the BEST case. More often, like I say in my sig, it's some stiff five frame loop that's awkward as fuck and strictly inferior to a good still image. Being able to compose a visually well designed, erotic still is already something that takes a lot of work to master, and animating it is geometrically harder to do for not much more erotic gain. It raises the barrier of entry for game dev so much higher and discourages creators that could have maybe made a good, satisfying game otherwise but think no one will care if it's not animated from even trying. It makes scenes monumentally more complex to design and render, massively slowing down development, and I have no doubt it makes devs subconsciously think twice about casually adding any sex scenes because of what a labor animation makes them, yet it's exactly those not-strictly-necessary extra sex scenes that makes games so much more satisfying.

All in all, I really think animation is nothing but a shiny trap that's done nothing but harm to the scene. I deeply wish devs would stop falling for it and that people would stop pushing for it.

Yes, and no.
It depends on the type of game.
If you are talking Visual Novels were you are talking rendered or drawn images. It is a waste in my opinion. Usually there is at most a few seconds of animation looped which is annoying because in most cases you have to wait far to long to get out of it.

If you are talking an actual 3D game such as using 3d person or fps camera view or even a 2D side scroller or something like porn empire even the animation fits. In most cases is needed.
Life of Holy, 90 second slave, Breeders of Nephelym, Insexsity, porn empire,

 

[nulnil]

Depends. If I am playing a Unity/Unreal/3D game, I am going to expect animations.