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This has loads to do with attempting to keep away from breaking immersion with oddly-shaped tools for the needs of the motion being depicted within the cinematic sequence.

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Imagine a scene the place our protagonist makes an attempt to coerce a confession out of the villain. She attracts her weapon and holds it up towards the villain’s throat in a threatening method whereas the digicam zooms in to get a close-up shot in profile between our protagonist and villain. Seems easy sufficient, proper?

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Clearly, the positioning of the weapon on this cinematic sequence would should be very totally different if the protagonist is primarily a dagger wielder in comparison with a sword. You can’t maintain a dagger and a sword in the identical place to threaten – in case your sword level had been on the enemy’s neck, holding a dagger on the similar place would put the dagger’s level laughably distant. If you held a sword the place the dagger level can be on the villain’s throat, your blade would already be penetrating by means of the opponent’s neck. This will get worse the extra sorts of weapons we assist, particularly if the weapon doesn’t have a blade – axe, spear, employees, bow, fist, gun, two-handed sword, mace, membership, one-handed sword, crossbow, and so on. will all have very totally different contexts when held to a throat.

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In such conditions, creating a unique animation for this one cinematic for every sort of weapon we permit ends in a combinatoric explosion until we severely restrict the scope of the weapons in some way. This is why Dragon Age II utilized the well-known “murder knife” for a lot of of its cinematics – it was a dependable well-defined weapon that could possibly be utilized by any protagonist class and nonetheless made visible sense. Similar constraints additionally exist for outfits and tools. That profile shot would look actually bizarre if, for instance, the protagonist was sporting huge World of Warcraft-style shoulder pads that obstructed the view as a result of they was emitting huge screen-obscuring particle results. We need to standardize sure issues so as to hold the scope of the cinematics from ballooning uncontrolled.

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