As pointed out by one of his colleagues, the first instance of a prediction by the alsoran has come to pass. The gamespot videoreview of EA’s NBA Live 06 for the XBOX360 makes a point of stating that “…a lot of the animations by themselves look great…the problem comes in how all these animations blend together, and that’s to say, they don’t really blend together very well at all”.
As videogames are ever approaching realism, (though true photo-realism is estimated to be 40 years away, a view I share), graphics have been improved by the mass adoption of texture materials such as normal mapping, as well as advanced lighting. However, all of this falls apart if the game moves with all the grace of a 64-bit elephant.
As all other areas of development increase in quality, so must the implementation of in-game animation in order to maintain the suspension of disbelief, for now this level of graphical fidelity can so easily come apart with as little as a single popping animation.