What is the cause of often unattractive animation in 3D online games?

Question

3D

Good afternoon.
The question arose - what is the reason for such an uninteresting and sometimes very meager character animation in 3D online games?
For example, in many shooters, the animation of characters and their behavior (running, jumping, walking, falling) leave much to be desired. This often gives games an arcade feel.
So the question is - what is the reason for this:
- engine capabilities,
- failure to pay due attention to such things as animation (deadlines),
- not very high qualifications of animators,
- project budget?
Explain who is in the subject.

Answer 1

Because no one needs it. In most games, all characters can be exchanged for cubes and not notice the difference. Starting from a certain point, increasing the animation detail no longer has a special effect, or vice versa, it can push the player away (the problem of the uncanny valley). In addition, too realistic and sweeping animation can damage the gameplay, if the character crouches and pushes up with his feet before each jump, the controls will seem unresponsive to the player, so there are usually only a couple of frames between pressing the button and the flying phase. Not very interesting, yes, but it feels much better.
Sometimesanimation is deliberately made more primitive and as stylized as possible, because it's faster, more original and that's enough. All the graphic whistles and bells and whistles are often needed only for the first half hour of the game to lure the player, and then the interest must be maintained through the gameplay. If the game is bad, then yes, you can drag the player to the ending at the expense of the graph, for example, this is how they do it in Crytek. Another thing is if you make a game where every character is very important, like Telltale Games do, half of the game is watching animations.
In general, the concept of Minimum viable product is very actively used in game development . If the player understood what they were trying to convey, then everything was done correctly, and the abstract "quality" does not bother anyone.

Answer 2

Still fludovopros.
Why inflate the budget out of the blue? Who even looks at this? Well, yes, five minutes after the first launch you will marvel at how "realistic" everything is. And then you stop paying attention to it. Moreover, MMO consumers, for the most part, do not go there for a photorealistic picture.

Answer 3

Uses hand-drawn animation instead of the more expensive "motion capture".

Answer 4

As for me, this is done in order to reduce the volume of the game itself and the load on Internet traffic. In many countries, even Clash of clans is launched for a whole minute, where can we talk about 3D online games. And of course, I agree with all the previous answers... Especially the first one :)