Castlevania Dev Compares Performance Capture Between Video Games and Movies

The upcoming next-gen consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, will up the ante in terms of graphics and bringing more realistic motion capture performances to the next wave of games. One person thankful for this leap is Dave Cox, a producer on the Castlevania series, who compared the current level of performance capture technology to that of Prohibition-era filmmaking. As he said during a panel during the San Diego Comic Con that was reported on by Gamespot:

"It's a difficult process. It's like we're in the '30s in terms of movie-making in video games. We really are in the dark ages. But we're moving quickly. You see in next-gen, that motion capture...full-body motion capture, facial capture, having actors in the studio; like the stuff that Andy Serkis (who famously appeared as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, as well as King Kong in, well, King Kong) has done with (special effects studio Weta Workshop)...that's coming through to the games industry...So we are catching up, and I think that's when you're going to start getting really strong performances; emotion and everything else, when actors are able to actually be part of the scene,"

Cox, who has experience leading actor Robert Carlyle of "Trainspotting" fame in motion capture sessions for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and its upcoming sequel, believes that the technology needs time to catch up to similar technology found in the television and movie productions:

"I think it's because we're young and I think it's because we're learning. I think the movie industry has been through that evolution, the TV industry has been through that evolution; I think the games industry is playing catch-up right now...So I think it's not anything that we're doing wrong, I think it's just a learning process for us. We learn from mistakes we made on Lords of Shadow 1 and we thought, 'We can't do that again; we're going to have to...make sure that Robert has got more material to work with so we can have a better performance, we can have a better, more emotional game."

Motion capture for video games has certainly evolved in the past few years, and games such as Beyond: Two Souls and FIFA 14 have invested heavily in bringing realism to the game through performance capture. It will be interesting to see how far performance capture can go in the next generation of consoles, and if it can gain the same amount of popularity among respected actors as other versions of the technology.