• In the PS1/PS2/PS3 eras sprites were expensive indeed, but in terms of memory. Raw bitmaps are much heavier than animated vector models so there's only so many sprites you can stuff in the proportionally limited texture memory those consoles had. There's texture compression but you can only use built-in compression, which is lossy and thus not usable for pixel art. Two caveats though: First, in the PS3 era it was mostly true because devs tried to just stuff raw sprites but Skullgirls showed the approach was very viable through streaming only the necessary sprites for a given frame to video memory (which allows any kind of custom compression scheme you want). That's why Skullgirls had thrice the sprite count at a superior definition from any arcsys 2d offering with up to thrice the amount of on-screen characters. Second, it's all mostly irrelevant with current consoles which have oodles of memory unless you want like 4k sprites or something.
  
• Sprite animators are hard to find (and so may be expensive to find)! It's, to some extent, lost knowledge outside of specific environments like indie communities or companies like Arcsys that maintain the know-how internally.They're very likely self-taught individuals that you'll have to retrain internally, the software will likely be custom. 2d animation schools don't teach game-specific knowledge. On the other hand, 3d animators are produced by all animation schools and game-specialized animators are super easily found.
  
• The production pipeline is super standardized for 3d and not at all for sprites. You'll have to build it from scratch. Which leads us to:
  
• Sprites have a very different production pipeline from 3d models. Animating them is drawing them. But for 3d models, you can model them first and animate them later, through a bunch of different people, even animate them first as long as you have a vague skeleton, etc. The animation and the visuals are basically decoupled. This has a number of very useful implications, which follow.
  
• You can outsource model animations much more safely! Even if your model is animated by an incompetent and/or cheap animator, it won't show on screenshots as long as the model is good. Hello NetherRealm! But a badly animated sprite will still look terrible on a still frame. Even better, you can motion capture them and add some real time physics and pretend you don't need good craftsmanship.
  
• You can correct the model or animation separately and much more easily. Incompetent outsourcing messed up your Chun-Li so much that the whole internet is complaining? Easy to change! With sprites you'd have to correct every single sprite where her face is visible.
  
• Nothing is lost when you retime a vector animation. Sprites may very directly be thrown away, making both retakes and retimings expensive. Skullgirls gets around that by only working with sketches until move timings are down, but that means dealing with all the "why does it look like a sketch?" questions from publishers, journalists and potential players (and rating agencies, in a semi-famous Indivisible moment where lab 0 were told streams showing beta character sketchy sprites with clothes not drawn yet would change the game's rating somehow).
  
• Costumes! Since 3d models and animations are decoupled you can make very profitable DLC costumes by just making new models. With sprites you need to redraw everything. That extends to diegetic costumes like Sol's dragon install that was just an effect pre-Xrd but can now afford to be a different models using the same animations.
  
• Sprites are an outdated aesthetic for indies! Well, that's not true, but a lot of the general audience sure think it is! Xrd (and subsequent Arcsys games) would not have made nearly as much of a splash with sprites.
  

Chev fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Aug 6, 2020

Blockhouse fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Aug 7, 2020

PaletteSwappedNinja fucked around with this message at 10:39 on Aug 7, 2020