The problem with the facial animations seem to be the eyes.

I watched it and as I said, it's trilogy level animations for me with awkward staring and all that. But hey, we all want this to be fixed so everyone can have a good gaming experience.

I saw nothing approaching the flappy lipped comicality of MEA in the original trilogy. 

Nothing is wrong!  It's just freakin scary.  Guess he makes a good joker

If this game was going on Steam this is the kind of thing that would've tanked its rating, prescient going for your own platform EA. It's bad. And since DAI was better and was the first game on the platform I can only ascribe it to laziness/lack of polish. They've mentioned there are like 1200 speaking people in MEA so maybe they thought they'd take shortcuts but it hasn't payed off. If I had to take zoomed out conversations to lessen the workload but got decent facial animations across the board I would've been completely fine with more zoomed out conversations.

The eyes could look fine with a new texture, the whites are too white. Them not seeming to focus on whoever's talking might be a bigger issue.

This is a very insightful post ... I wonder how people would react if they went with a more cartoony style with this game, but there animations were top notch? I still think people would freak out, this time it'd be graphics. With a more photo realistic style, it's definitely harder to pull off. But they shouldn't commit to it if they're incapable of doing so. With all this talk about the animations, I feel like this'll remain a hotly debated topic for a while past the release of the game.

GameDev had commented on that after the early gameplay demo, actually. I assume at this point we're past the mentioned 'crunch time', and only day 1 patch can tell us for sure whether it had been fixed\addressed or not.

The way I see it facial expressions for adults are a very subconscious thing, not something we actively look for in others and not something we actively consciously aim to display. I personally believe that’s why it can be difficult to get these things right in a game.

Also levels of expression in my view change between people and ages, for example my 2 year old is just starting to string words together into basic sentences but where he is so used to communicating with us without coherent words he has very exaggerated facial expressions that to me seem over the top but as until recently they were his main communication form it makes sense as a way for an infant to portray their needs.

Then on the other hand my wife has extremely dark brown eyes which makes it difficult to separate the pupil from the iris which to me leads some of the nuances in her expressions to be lost whereas I have bright blue eyes and my wife has always said my eyes are like an open book to my emotions.

Since this whole facial animation thing started up in the earlier trailers I have tried to actually consciously concentrate on peoples facial expressions and it feel ‘alien’ and odd and at times a bit weird. That’s where I feel the issue is based, its try to consciously portray something that our minds process every day as a subconscious thing.

Edit: On a side note, I see L.A. Noire has been brought up and I can understand why such was the work that went into facial expressions for that game but personally I couldn't stand them, they are the whole reason I have never completed the game, they seriously creeped me out.

Maybe i'm too nitpicky but i noticed more than one issues with the eyes:

The most striking is that staring hollow look in their eyes and proper lack of focus, when they don't know where to look, they just stare, and sometimes their pupils are dialated too, like they are high or something.
Then there is lighting issue, when it is projected at and reflecting back wrongly so the gleaming is off somehow.
And sometimes the eyes are moving stragely, they can move independently from each other, for example Scott can move only one of his eyes or both any way he wants them, like they are out of sync, but this is not only Scott specific, other NPCs has this issue too.
Some characters have cross / squint eyes, and sometimes they can slightly stare sideways with both of their eyes.
Some NPC can changed their eyes' verticality during looking, like they think that their eyes are high and they just letting them down a little: facial reconstruction during cutscene.

Don't know how good their textures from utube videos.

The eyes attract too much attention, it is hard to not notice them, but maybe during playing and reading subtitles i will not be bothered by it/them.

Or perhaps the scenes are from earlier game builds, or it is patched now, but it is possible they will be fixed later, or not.

I distinctly remember in the interviews for The Dark Knight Rises, the casting ppl talk about how casting Tom Hardy for Bane was a good move because he can communicate his emotions so well through his eyes. They also said that in general if you cover up anything that isn't the eye and nose region of a face, that is where the biggest emotional information is given. It's also why if you have to be tested for empathy for example you have to view a series of pictures of eyes and say how you interpret it.

Eyes are the most crucial feature in digital acting folks. It's when this falls apart the rest of the animations, no matter how fine or janky or whatever, start to seem completely off.

Amen, those trying to hand wave this away are a good reason why this topic should keep being brought up.

Anyway, is this solely a problem with the engine or BioWare's modeling?

If we're just talking animations, ME3 actually looks better.

I think that is the biggest reason why the facial animations are getting a lot of flak. Most people expect some degree of jank from Bioware. What they weren't expecting was for ME:A to actually look worse in that department than either ME3 or DA:I. 

For comparison, characters expressing emotion with their eyes:





One looks like an expression an actual person might make and the other doesn't. To be fair ME3's facial expressions tend to be a lot more subtle, but maybe they should have been less ambitious with Andromeda. 

So i am watching the Polygon stream from the start of the game, default Sara. It looks a bit better than what i've seen previously, but there is still something off in some scenes. Looks like the frog lips have been fixed, or so far i haven't seen it.