Facial animations and hair concerns

Bethesda always seems to have "criticism-armor".
I have literally heard this from someone:
Person X- Fallout 4 is has flaws a,b and c.
Person Y- Bu-...it 's a Bethesda so it's OK.

Oh, is it already that time in the game hype to pick apart every detail we see? Hooray! 

In all seriousness though, the facial animations are a valid enough critique, but I guess it doesn't concern me overmuch. We're still months out from the release date, and I'd be surprised if fine-tuning facial animations wasn't part of BioWare's polishing stage. Mass Effect's a very story and dialogue driven series, as their games tend to be - I don't see it as an insignificant detail to them. Sure, their games might not have the cutting edge facial animations and detail, but overall I think BioWare's done fairly solid with expressions as time goes on. I don't put much stock in the early gameplay videos being telling of the final version just yet.

As a woman who apparently "swaggers" according to my family, exclusively wears pants, and almost always sits with spread legs because it's damn comfy, I've never been bothered by the femShep sprawled sitting. I'm also very, very glad the dainty hip sway walk is gone, it looked so out of place while wearing military gear. 

I should have said "facial animations" rather than "expressions" - though my overall outlook stands.


A fair assumption, but not necessarily the case. It's not unusual for older builds to be the ones that get showcased; sometimes they're more ready for presentation than the actual newest parts. This is true of games and other large scale projects, speaking from experience. Sometimes you only have enough time to put together an earlier version of something for presentation. That may or may not be the case here, but I'm reserving judgment.

In my experience it is the tendency of the fandom to worry over every little detail (I'm not saying we shouldn't, either - but we can overthink at times, or some of us are just more detail oriented and nitpicky than others, which is also fine). I've been around since Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate, and I've yet to dislike a BioWare title I've played. I've had nitpicks, but nothing that ruined the game for me. I also recall worrying and seeing others worrying that X was bound to happen, only it ended up being Y by time of release and it was fine. Out of fairness, I may be fairly easily to please by some standards.

It's definitely a YMMV thing, so what may be no big deal to me may be serious for someone else. As it currently stands, from the look of things to me the facial animations need work, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're not already further along than what we've seen here, or will be once the game is released.

True... it did, however, feel like something not of this generation, when compared with other AAA titles like Uncharted 4 or COD iW. These days, you either have a setup where you can do facial capture/animations right, or you have to mask the deficiencies with stylization, scene composition, etc. BW did neither, they let stand the animations on their own, and they simply aren't good (right now?).

Again, pears and apples. Facial mocap requires that the 3D character is modelled after the actor performing the mocap, and it's very, very expensive. Full animation isn't much cheaper either. Again, it means customizable characters are out. As for scene direction, they can't conceivably have the camera at Ryder's back everytime she does or say something. We all want to see our protagonist up front, doing something badass from time to time.

I believe their intention here was to show an interrupt in the same environment as everything else they wanted to show, and Sloan is already presented in the second Ai guide video. It limits spoiling a bit. So I doubt it's quite as polished as having it included in this trailer might lead us to believe. The first Krogan down the ramp from the ship has his feet going through the floor, and slides (00.01.10). Sloane does a weird shaky movement (00.01.32). There's some clipping in Ryder's leg just before the disarming scene (00.01.38). The gun slides in Ryder's hand (00.01.45). It definitively is still work in progress, in my opinion.

I understand we all wish for this game to be as perfect as possible, but there's been a bit of overreaction, and unfair comparisons about this.

I think it might be motion capture, but not performance capture... meaning, the general facial movements have been captured, but not the facial structure, skin, etc. which explains the puffy cheeks when sisRyder closes her smiling lips. It looks ALMOST real, but just not quite.

Anywoo... it may be better on launch, we'll see. Still, I don't find it unfair to stack up one supposed next gen AAA title against the other.

that face: "hey, wrong hole". 

As I wrote earlier: Either you got the means to do proper performance capture, or you have to work around it and stylize, or be otherwise creative with your art direction, scene composition, etc. Witcher 3 made it work and so did FF15.

True enough, but it still has to work in general - and we don't yet know if it will.

In fairness DAI looks  a bit like that as well which is why I said what I said on the old forums about faces looking a bit cartoony on Frostbite powered games. It's not the best engine for faces but for making amazing looking locations like DAI's Skyhold it's perfect. That cutscene where you get introduced to the place after being driven out of Haven by Corypheus still blows me away.

Different engine I suppose people and faces in general don't look as impressive to me on Frostbite as they do on some other engines. It does locations and weather conditions brilliantly but it's a bit of a letdown when it comes to people and faces. I think it will improve in time based on Fifa 17 and what we have seen of MEA but only time will tell. The same could be said about the new Tomb Raider games with Lara's animations too but again she's not a customisable character either beyond the changing of outfits anyway. Based  on the latest vid it looks like we have some hair physics at least this time so hopefully it's a step in the right direction. Let's just see what styles Bioware give us to play with and hope they are an improvemrent on DAI's. Based on the number of threads there we re on the old forums bfeore they shut down on this subject. It's something Bioware will likely be acutely aware of that they need to improve in this area. I think the female protag sporting a ponytail that appears to be moving as she runs shows that at least they're trying to rectify this. Only time will tell us if they succeed.