Is there a way Bioware can even solve the problem of animations in their future games?

As Yenn would say "Excuses, excuses ... BW hasn't changed a bit".

P.S. Indie stands for independent, hence CDPR is still indie given they haven't sold their soul to any publisher yet.

Indie stands for an independent develop-distribution business model. The main element is bypassing the 'middle man' aka publishers, business overlord, EA etc. It has nothing to do with budget or how many people involved.   Fun fact no.1 CDPR got their first bucket of gold through licensing and publishing Baldur's Gate in Poland. On top of that, TW1 originates from a failed PC port of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance from PS2. So in another word, they are fans of the true 'Bioware, Black Isle" age.  Compared to the current BW - a division of EA. I'm simply speechless. 

He's right. He doesn't need to play it again, and neither do I. The Omega DLC was the worst shit DLC ever released for ME, it is worse than Pinnacle Station, and less fun.

I am so glad we have you to make our minds up for us. Keep it up.

I don't feel like the Witcher3 animation were that better when talking to random peasents.
The thing with MEA there's some animations that are really good, but then you have npcs barely animated AND with too wide opened flat eyes AND with a barely detailed face. The witcher never had people looking like smooth android just out of the factory.
All of those makes matters worse.

There's some scene when main npcs and Ryder are really well animated and some others scene where something just went wrong. Peebee recruitment mission is a mix of really good animations and WTF mixed together.

Anyway possible they cut corners because you talk to a lot of aliens and you can't really tell something is wrong with them.
Well except for Asari , they all have Dr Lexi face. And some humans use the Ryder presets modified.

On a final note in game it did not bother me much or broke mah immersion, you get used to it.

It is true until TW3's success. The rise of white wolf /TW1 console port with Atari almost bankrupt CDPR.  They have to signed over North American rights of TW2 years before the game had been made. "This would be repaying the debts for White Wolf," Atari had declared. Even worse, CDPR scrapped the original planned TW3 and used its unfinished engine to make TW2 instead. They turned fully 'indie' until TW3. So thanks for the experiences in dealing with business overlords like Atari. TW3 turns out to be such a masterpiece.  

Given the declining quality of BW's products and CDPR's success, any claims about CDPR's geological position, more funding and abundant 'resources' are ridiculous.  

Omega DLC is fine. Certainly much better than Firewalker or Overlord.

He was hired at BioWare Austin to work on SecretIP#2 (not the same game as BioWare Edmonton SecretIP and not SWTOR). I think like many others, he helped out on MEA though.

They need to scrap their admittedly excellent Veta (or what it's called) software suite first. That's the thing that keeps interruptions from happening naturally but it speeds up the voice recording sessions like it's nobody's business. They've used this toolset for ages as far back as Mass Effect 2 I believe for every game they've made.

Its interesting that you say that people think the witcher 3 was produced by a small indie team. The budget cost of the witcher 3 is $80 million while the budget cost for mass effect andromeda is $40 million. So the witcher 3 is twice the development cost of andromeda. Obviously then, thats the reason it had better animations, they had $40 million more dollars to burn.
What I'd like to know is why did the witcher 3 take 80 million dollars to make when something like horizon zero dawn took 47 million dollars to make and had better graphics? But since thats not an issue that worries the fans, its glazed over and ignored..

lol @ all the faux outrage. Shitty facial animations are nothing new. 

The reason they look "worse" in MEA is that they tried to add more expressions rather than have blank stares half the time.

I will never-ever understand people claiming that Witcher 3 facial animations are anywhere close to being industry's top tier. They are extremely basic most of the time. Characters speak with middle of their mouths. A lot of times they hardly move aside form lipsynch and light twitches around the eyes and brows.

They're not horrible per se, but you can see even the developer not being confident in them, considering that many emotional cutscenes have been composed to OBSCURE facial expression, or keep them at the distance. 

This scene is a great example of that.


Note that 90% of expressions happen OFF-SCREEN. Characters are either turned back or hidden, only showing flashes of expressions that were fairly easy to render even 10 years ago.

That is actually not criticism - I think CDPR was smart that way; they knew the character expressions could NOT carry the game, so they chose to compose scenes to obscure them and scenes be carried by context, Kuleshov effect or otherwise good body animations.

DAI was also like that in many respects - it's actually been a trick for used the longest time. It's only now that the industry thinks that they can slowly turn camera's focus on faces.

Not to mention that a lot of the reception depends on style of the game - in TW3 many people's faces are either covered with scars or grime (or near gothic make up, esp. in case of sorceresses), or their blank expressions are in tune with game's oftentimes dark tone, with many characters being worn by life.

In contrast MEA is crisp and full of youthful, hopeful folks or frustrated higher-ups and has a very clean-cut style with vivid colors.

... Aaand instead of choosing to obscure the faces in some scenes, the camera is put squarely on them. And as much as I can see a large room of improvements in some regions of animation, I think many criticisms could have been nullified just by different cutscene direction. The camera is sometimes Just. Too. Close. To. The. Face.

I also think that it was a mistake to overcompensate for criticism towards DAI and their zoomed-out conversations - even 'conversation wheel' cutscenes tend to bring camera too close. Addison's "cutscene" is a great example - I can only see people taking a mickey out of that 'conversation wheel' scene; not actual cutscenes with Addison in it.

All in all I think someone in the direction grew a bit too confident with thinking that they can turn back camera to characters faces and letting it carry the scene.

That's not to say that I think all of it is awful. I actually think that some of the scenes really work and there's a great deal of them where there... really is nothing wrong. Sadly, at this point confirmation bias runs rampant and some people pay only attention to when things go bad.