When The Animation Team Gets Complete Freedom...
497It’s easy to opine weapon reloading animations as simple pragmatism. Their transience – yanking out an empty magazine, sliding in its replacement – occupies mere seconds of playtime. Yet, in this briefest of moments is some of the most artful animation in video games. You see, the way in which a gun reloads must communicate an awful lot to the player – is the weapon powerful yet unwieldy? Is it lightweight and precise? Do its bullets slot into cylinders with precision, or can a magazine be carelessly palm-slapped in?
And another thing – visually portraying a weapon’s character is only half the story. Animators must stimulate that most nebulous of concepts too: game feel. How does the player feel holding the weapon? Of course, there’re additional aspects at play: the weapon’s appearance, its fire rate and sound design, for instance. These aspects exist in harmony with weapon reload animations creating a tactile sensation for the player. If a firearm’s reload animation doesn’t match the rest of its design elements, then game feel is lost, and player satisfaction gone.
So, without further ado, here are fifteen totally awesome reload animations, ranging from rapid in-and-outs for breakneck gunplay, to stately, tactical, detailed reloads, with unnecessarily inefficient but visually epic flamboyance stuffed in-between.
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