Assassin’s Creed Unity may be taking some lumps from critics, but — not kidding — we need to all appreciate how good the game’s kissing is. Don’t snicker.
Video games have a tough enough time animating individual characters and tougher times animating the interactions between two. Even at that, they can do violent interactions between bodies fairly well, but they struggle with subtler actions like, say, a kiss. Often, games cut away when characters kiss or cut to a camera angle that occludes the character’s mouths.
That’s why Unity‘s kiss, which I captured on my Xbox One, is so exciting. It’s why I also think it caught the eye of our own Kirk Hamilton, who contacted me about it when he saw it. And it’s why it also merited mention by PC gaming YouTuber Totalbiscuit. Today, in a note about the game’s performance on PC, he wrote: “I will say the faces and mo-cap quality is excellent, it actually has a kiss that doesn’t look like 2 robots rubbing their faces together, so there’s that.”
The kiss really is that good. There’s room for improvement, of course. It’s still more of a peck, but… progress!
Note that the kissing scene is using what appears to be higher-fidelity character models than what you see when the game is running interactive sequences (gameplay), but this isn’t a pre-rendered scene, best I can tell. It’s two polygonal characters smooching.
Compare that to the kiss in the last-gen Mass Effect 3 (jump to 2:40):
Or even look at this pretty-good kiss from the PS3’s Uncharted 2 (at the very end of the clip):
Really, I’m not snarking here. It’s exciting to see this kind of stuff come along. Hooray for new-gen kissing!
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