I’m reading the comments on the FoH boards about the video I commented below. In particular I want to save a comment:

Every race shown is the exact same body with a different head attached. They may be bigger or smaller, but the actual model/stance is exactly the same for every one.

I underline this because it’s a general trend in the industry that I already commented. It seems that the graphic is more and more trivialized as what is shown on a screenshot and nothing else.

This is an overly superficial way to consider the graphic layer of a game. The graphic is a lot more and deeply tied with many fundamental aspects of the game. It’s composition, it’s animation, it’s personality and uniqueness in what you are showing and the direct interface between you and the gameplay. The graphic IS the gameplay. It is the feedback you receive and that you’ll consider to make your choices. It’s the same about the world design. You can take and consider it just as an irrelevant background more or less pretty or you can delve deeper. Only then you’ll know that world design is directly gameplay, interaction, a narrative unit and so on.

The animations are more and more considered as “fluff”, not important, not relevant. They just need to be functional and the rest is superfluous. What is considered important is just the dimension of the textures or the number of polygons. The actual animations are trivialized, cloned and reused for every character. We have games that give you hundreds of ways to customize your character, to change the color of the eye, the style of the beard, millions of different armor types to wear completely bumpmapped. But then you’ll keep running as every other character in the world with clipping problems everywhere.

Recently Mythic redid from zero all the character models in DAoC, but they didn’t care to upgrade the animations.
Star Wars Galaxies offered since release an insane amount of customization for each character, but the animations are generic and perfectly cloned for all the races in the game.
Till now the only game with some attention and specific development on the animations has been World of Warcraft.

As if the animations were completely superfluous for the beauty of the graphic and the gameplay.