Black Myth: Wukong team releases a slightly satirical trailer with motion-captured cats and a glitchy tiger

pcinvasion.com:

Much like in 2021, the developer behind Black Myth: Wukong has released a new trailer for the game to celebrate the Lunar New Year for 2022. This time, Game Science Studios gives us a sneak peak behind the scenes of the game, showing off some expert motion capture tech. Well, okay. That’s certainly what the footage alludes to, but only at first. It doesn’t take too long for this 12-minute trailer to start smelling a bit fishy. The pretense completely vacates once the glitched-out tiger shows up, revealing that the trailer is just a prank made by the Black Myth team.

Of course, the developer doesn’t exactly hide the joke. A disclaimer under the video on YouTube reads: “This is a work of fiction with absolutely nothing to do at all with actual people or events or how we are working on the game. Yeah, right. We are still working on it.”

Still, if you simply jumped into the trailer without the context, you’d no doubt get taken along for the ride. The trailer includes highlights from the, ahem, Game Science team, talking about the challenges faced in making the game. Specifically, it highlights issues that come with creating realistic motion-captured animation for non-human creatures. As the game leans heavily on Chinese myth, it introduces many fictional beasts that you can’t just strap mocap gear to.

This is the Year of the Tiger, so of course Game Science jokingly gathered up a bunch of house cats to animate its tiger enemy. The results? Well, you can see for yourself at 7:50.

As you can see, things take a bit of a bad turn. The tiger, with a sword uselessly floating next to its body, starts snapping around the playing field. Every time it settles in a place, the tiger begins animating like one of the aforementioned cats,