Welp, I guess we know what's up with the animations now

Frostbite isn't the best game for facial animations, and animations in general are hard unless you're using mocap, which a lot of larger companies do nowadays.

Honestly I think everyone's freaking out too much about it. I come from the era of square boobs and flat faces.

I'll make fun of the animating errors or the seemingly low quality, and i do expect better quality in the future, but as long as we don't get a repeat of Unity's 'missing faces', I'm good.

Everytime I drive by the "KotakuInAction" GamerGate thing on Reddit I can feel my whole body curling up in cringe. They best rename that shit to "DisingenousDetectives" but for what it's worth they do dig up good info. Too bad they all use it to make hiveminded threats or e-assaults.

In honor of my new name I should also say I have a feeling, that is I "guess", this is some of her work



But I can't be sure and it's all baseless speculation. But it would explain why the game goes from having really well animated "gestures" to really puzzling, half-done, scrambled eye expressions in every other scene. Who knows!

Bioware already made a statement about this hours ago. Its on their twitter, and in our twitter thread. She was attacked quite viciously by some people because of her supposed work on Mass Effect Andromeda. Polygon and Kotaku also wrote articles on this. Still refrain from being a dick, though this should go without saying.

My stance is that there is a problem with journalism the way it has been cultivized in gaming, and it's even worse in my own country's game journalism just comparing their article quality, the bias, the advertisement to actual journalism that isn't about gaming or multi-subject journalism that covers gaming as part of a bigger agenda, it's something that needed to be called into action (or whatever the flying fuck it means) but just not in this way. I know half of the GG crowd are just B-tards who jumped on an opportunity-bandwagon for mayhem and the real GG'ers just shot themselves in the foot by starting something akin to anarchy... oh well, I've said enough, but really, there's so much bullshit involved with everthing KIA is, let alone the entire gamergate fiasco.

Wasn't this the Ralph Retort responsible for singling her out? I'm pretty sure he isn't on good terms with KIA.

He isen't, but he was also a major supporter of GamerGate early on and has sort of channeled to into his own hardcore group of followers.

GG is not responsible for this one, but I shed no tears for them anyway since they created the monster and let it run amok. 

The problem is they are likely using a rudimentary toolset for facial animations.. they didn't invest software engineering resources into making a smart animation toolset. This likely means that animators had to very much work by hand or simply let their basic tools try their best to sort out facial animations. CD Projekt Red (witcher 3), spent a few years on software engineering just for the animation toolset.. this is why they could create natural, smooth looking animations on the fly and with tremendous ease with only a few animators - the toolset was well designed and didn't need a lot of hand-holding by the animator.

Mass Effect 1 actually also used a third-party facial animation toolset at the time, which was separate from the Unreal 3 engine (it was integrated into it after the fact by Bioware). The toolset, which Bioware bought or licensed, did a lot of the heavy lifting in facial animations for the trilogy - they simply had to tweak and build upon it.. but they didn't have to invest years developing their own animation toolset.

Clearly the Frostbite engine does not have a third-party toolset that can do this the way Unreal 3 could (either that or Bioware didn't license / buy it). Though it does beg the question why facial animations are noticeably better in DAI than Andromeda despite both using Frostbite.

Suffice to say, software engineering and animation toolset creation is a very low priority for Bioware.

People don't surprise me anymore. They will attack anyone and anything for the smallest reasons.

This is disgraceful.

I really wish this hadn't been turned into a witchhunt, but he actually is right about her position. Her twitter bio literally said "Lead Facial Animator for Mass Effect: Andromeda".

Was she around long enough to be responsible for the animations we see in the game? Who knows. If she deserves any crap than it should come from her employers, not the internet at large. Now all the complaints about facial animation are going to be ruined by gamergate tier garbage.

Some people need to get a life really..