That's interesting. So by the time there were full 3D games on the PC, they'd either go with full skeletal animation or MD2-style vertex animation. There probably wasn't an intermediary period of PC games where they'd use this "hierarchical node animation with the segmented meshes" as we saw in consoles. The earliest…
"Quake 3 took a hybrid approach with the torso, head and legs being separate skinned meshes." That's not exactly true. In QIIIA the elements with smooth deformations (torso and legs) are not skinned meshes (as in, driven by a skeleton) ; they are purely vertex animations. They can of course be authored as skinned skeletal…