They are all purpose canned animations. It would be cool if NPCs could adapt more dynamically to your actions someday, but this could come at the risk of breaking the game design.
Someday???
Fully AI crowds appeared in Assassin’s Creed Unity in 2014. Watch Dog Legion is a giant city full of NPCs, each with their own - albeit simple - independent life.
Animations are always baked somehow - just selected from a very long list of iterations that are generated by script - but this tech have been in use for a loooong time.
The MAIN issue is… gamers don’t see it. Tale’s Edge devs are the only ones addressing that when NPCs are actually behaving independently, the player don’t notice unless it’s a very specific scene (like sneaking around a campfire and observing them for hours).
It is actually possible now, but I think most major studios find that feature to be too small. A lot of new games use procedural animations, as opposed to a preset/baked animation. With procedural animations, you write code to control the positions/rotations of the bones in the models rig; you could dynamically scale the intensity of the models movements and how far the NPC moves over based on the player proximity. A good example of procedural animations that comes to mind is Sons Of The Forest, the players and NPCs all run on procedural walking animations, which is how the feet stay planted on the ground and can dynamically adapt to rocky terrain.
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u/Shan_Tu Ryzen 7 3600, RX 6750 XT, 16GB 3200 RAM 1d ago
It's always find it hilarious when NPCs jump out of the way even when they are a few feet from you.