Report: BioWare 'Outsourced' Mass Effect: Andromeda Facial Animations.

That explains a lot but it still don't explain how a line like "my face is tired" got into the game.

Maybe it was snuck in as a code to the outside world for help. 'Help my face animation team is tired, we worked too hard for little pay and are chained up in basement in Bucharest please help' but the translators were sourced from Bolivia so they only translated part of it.

Mass Effect 1 - 3 used a pretty well regarded Unreal 3 / 3.5 (and UE4 even now) plugin called FaceFx (made by a company called OC3 Entertainment or something if I recall). Unreal itself had no convenient semi-automated facial animations tools for a large number of faces, so this FaceFx plugin was extremely important for Bioware since it could do the bulk of the animation work and then animators simply had to go through it afterwards and make a few adjustments themselves.

The software was / is remarkably effective (I tinker as an amateur animator in Maya and have used it) so long as you aren't aiming for hyper realism.. but it's good at getting smooth and believable mouth and face movements down.

Unfortunately, MEA uses Frostbite and because it is a very closed system (EA only) and not open to mass market like UE3 / UE4, there are very few custom plugins / tools made or sold for it.. thus the developers are forced to either try to create their own tools (not easy when you're focused on making a game and don't want to shift resources on engine creation for a single toolset) or just clumsily brute force the animations by hand via human animators (this works fine in games that don't have hundreds of NPCs.. it's why the faces in a Battlefield game etc animate fine for the most part, they are all basically hand-animated since there aren't hundreds of characters in the story to be animated).

This is part of the reason why facial animations in the original trilogy seldom have jarring moments.. while they aren't cutting edge, they seldom ever go awry enough to make you recoil from the screen for a moment.. they simply had proper tools to work with whereas frostbite doesn't.

I strongly suspect that we would have had a somewhat more impressive game if Bioware wasn't forced to use Frostbite (EA will not allow their studios to use competing engines like UE4)... had they used UE4 they could have used something like the FaceFX plugin or others which would have reduced the workload and problems in regards to facial animation.. instead they had to use weaker or non existant tools and let outsourced animators try to make do with it.

Frostbite can do alright with facial animations (DAI was ok for the most part), but from what I've heard it is drastically less efficient and more cumbersome to work with vs other engines and their plugins... Frostbite is just too damn proprietary, and you can blame EA for that.

that raises a point, were the facials in Inquisition sculpted by hand?