Facial animations and eyes, I feel this guy gets it

If you really need someone to point out why you subconsciously don't like the animations, I agree, he explains it well. Otherwise DUH. It's the eye-region of the faces that are both not modeled properly and not animated well at all.

Specifically there is absolutely something wrong with the texturing of the iris and even stuff like diffuse mapping on the eyes. Every time you see a character's face their eyes stick out in how white and flat they look.

In a normal human eye the iris is also technically layered underneath the eyeball between a wall called the cornea. I know especially in the past eyes were textured with the iris on the outside but unless I'm mistaken they worked around this in all previous BioWare games after KOTOR including Mass Effect 1 so that the iris isn't laid out across the 3D sphere, but seemingly lies flat within it.

Say you have an eye texture and an eye model



If you just put the iris texture on top you get an iris that appears stretched because it's just painted on top of the eyeball


...But what you really want is a layered eyeball where it somehow simulates the texture being inside the eye.


This can still be done if the iris texture is put on top of the 3D eyeball model if you shape the texture right. I don't think Andromeda partiuclarly does this.


But look at ME1. I'm not completely sure the eye-texturing itself is any different in the fact that the iris texture is put on top of the 3D model but either the diffuse or specular mapping, or simply Unreal engine's lighting engine makes the eye have more depth.


That alone makes the characters look much more natural. It looks like the eye is actually inside the eye-socket and the eye does not look like a ball of glass.

I've found that the animations don't correspond well with mouth size and placement. If you can find the sweetspot it seems to get alot better. I just started another game with the same look as before. Only changes I made was to lower the mouth one click and widen it two or three clicks. I might be imagening things, but I feel there is a significant difference. Here's a pic of my new Ryder at the exact same spot as the picture for OPs linked video. I think this looks way better:

With default Sara you can't really tell if she's in pain or grinning...

Edit: sadly I have no pic of this from my previous save (before alterations of the mouth) 

This is exactly what I did. I didn't care for how short the character's faces were and I prefer having more chin to frame the face. With that and reducing mouth depth I'd say my Sara is largely resistent to a fair amount of the animation shenanigans. 

Why didn't everyone bitch about Fallout 4s horrible animations and faces.

Seriously that games horrible, which is why there's so many mods attempting to fix such things.

^^^ this. I've never went into a Bethesda game looking into their characters. It's about the open world feeling and doing whatever I want. Plus Bethesda is open and supports their modding community which will just fix it right up anyways (although I encourage Bethesda to never go with the approach "our modding community will fix it anyways so we'll just go halfway across the bridge on this one"). Bethesda at least puts more effort in their character creators too. I do have to also point out decent characters can be made even without the addition of modding, that's not the case with Andromeda if you ask me. 

It's kinda true but it can't save the closeups from sometimes having derpy eyes because the iris texturing looks slightly off.

That said I have noticed since switching from pc to PS4 that the reduced shader, lighting and HBAO on PS4 makes the game look extremely dated at times. It's not nearly as bad on PC. Particularly the rock formations on Kadara and the moon rock planet is just wholly underwhelming, especially because the latter gave me flashbacks to Destiny - a cross-gen game and 2014 game that looked WAAY better doing the exact same thing.

Oh man, this discussion never gets old. I like it.
Every new video about this game, I get to laugh a little more. 

PS. Spot on video. Not that it wasn't obvious from the beginning, but still.