Dark-Cloudz
Member
So basically they were placeholders that they didn't have time to finish?
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Naughty Dog animator explains ME's animation
- Thread starter bananafactory
- Start date
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John Kowalski
Banned
You know, to suggest that the work on TW3 should be a standard really detracts from the workmanship that went into it. TW3 is a product so successful in so many ways that it should never be taken as a measure of standard for other developers.
Also i really dislike this perception of games as something that can be taken as a product of engineering, like there's some game engineering boy that standardizes certain ways of doing a game. Games are not like that. They are much more about the formal aspects of an art than that of a web service, for example, which are subject to how they conform with the artists' intentions, which is a very different job than just systems engineering.
So basically they were placeholders that they didn't have time to finish?
Mighty No. 9 is proof Miyamoto was wrong.
Rellik
Member
And people on here still have the nerve to call these guys lazy.
Jimmyfenix
Member
also bioware has spent 5 years making this game. Longer than TW3 dev time iirc
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
That's solely mocap/keyframing like a traditional cutscene, not what this dude is talking about.
BTW, Jonathan Cooper is actually quite amazing, his portfolio includes being the cutscene director of ME2, being the animation director of AC3(he's the one responsible for those glorious run cycles), and working on a metric fuckton of the set pieces for UC4. He keeps the biggest archive for game animation reels on vimeo, as well as a website dedicated to all things game animation. He's currently writing a book on the subject.
TW3 had its share of rote, presumably computer-generated animations, but the effort they put into designing so many of their minor conversations really floored me. It must have taken an unfathomable amount of time and sweat.
For instance, near the end of the game, you have a conversation with a recently escaped convict in a bar. During your conversation, a waitress comes by, and the convict blatantly looks down her shirt as she bends over to serve the table. No one remarks upon it in the dialogue -- that is, it wasn't at all required by the script -- but it's a funny moment that I assume took specific effort to include. And this occurs in a unimportant conversation in a minor main-story quest late in the game.
Dark-Cloudz
Member
Do you think the animations would have eventually been done? It sounds like they were not and EA forced them into launching to meet the financial year.
The last Guardian took nearly 10 years.
The last Guardian took nearly 10 years.
So basically they were placeholders that they didn't have time to finish?
Duke Nukem Forever says hi.
Wishmaster92
Member
This.
Especially a Mass Effect title, sorry but i never expected the faces, eyes and animations to look as bad as they do. This isn't even talking about the funny glitches.
DAROCK2300
Member
I also feel the same way. He's trying to come to the aid of his fellow game developers but his explanation sort of falls flat. A game of this size, budget, expectation, etc. should not have this type of negative press from the the start. No excuse.
the witcher 3 was made by Polish people on crap wages
Its always great to read insight like this from people who actually know what they're talking about. The biggest culprit for ME:A;s graphic and narrative issues may not be laziness, it may be deadline and poor time management. I'm not saying it lets them off the hook, but I think if they get the proper time to fine tune the thing, we probably end up with a better final product.
This rush to get shit out the door by fiscal year end bit them in the ass for DA2, it looks like the same thing here IMO.
This rush to get shit out the door by fiscal year end bit them in the ass for DA2, it looks like the same thing here IMO.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
The Last Guardian took ten years moreso due to hardware constraints, not because of the workload for character animation.
Wasn't TW3's budget bigger than Andromeda's? Can't remember where I saw this but I don't think TW3 was that cheap to make. CD Projekt isn't 4A Games.
SmoothRunningGun
Member
How about the shitty combat in w3? That's ok because it has good facial animations? You guys have strange priorities.
ChoklitCow
Member
This twitter thread made me want to quit my career and become a programmer. Those articles were a lot of fun to read.
Though I do remember Ueda saying one of the things that was still worked on during the hiatus was animation. The delay gave Ueda and his guys a lot of bonus time to make that shit awesome. And it definitely shows.
Allnamestakenlol
Member
I enjoyed the combat. To each their own.
BiGBoSSMk23
A company being excited for their new game is a huge slap in the face to all the fans that liked their old games.
Very interesting. I always noticed in the Witcher how smaller side quest dialogues had the jankiest animations compared to main quests.
Sucks for the Andromeda team.
Deadlines are a bitch.
Sucks for the Andromeda team.
Deadlines are a bitch.
These are separate issues handled by different members/interactions of the game's dev team, so bringing up "but the combat" in a thread about facial animation is moot/derailing from the purpose of the thread.
Allnamestakenlol
Member
So animating modern AAA is hard to do and they did not have the skill level to pull it off/time management/ realistic scope and here is what happened? More of a post mortem.
bad game execution is still bad. Management needs to get shuffled. Having s studio with mass effect MP and other DLC projects(sims etc ) as experience, make this AAA game in addition to the culture there and lack of mgmt ( both allegedly) = bad news. They were set up to fail.
bad game execution is still bad. Management needs to get shuffled. Having s studio with mass effect MP and other DLC projects(sims etc ) as experience, make this AAA game in addition to the culture there and lack of mgmt ( both allegedly) = bad news. They were set up to fail.
One's cheaper than the other, yet has disproportionately more influence on (my) enjoyment of the game!
It's such a no-brainer. To me, anyways.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Impossible for an RPG even one third as big as ME, unless the goal is to, like Team Bondi, bankrupt the studio. Even worse, is that there are plenty of performance capture solutions that produce similar results to L.A. Noire with the added benefit of avoiding uncanny valley differences between the bodies and the faces.
I have another ME 1 animator and script designer that thinks Andromeda is a disaster and that the animations are "unintentionally hilarious".
He also said he saw many animations from ME1 are being reused and wrongly because the tools used by characters don't match the animation in Andromeda.
https://twitter.com/TheRealCLZ (on his cast)
He also said there was no hope to fix them in a patch given the amount of work. He said they probably ran into a big issue because their pipeline had to be entirely remade for frostbite and they couldn't port it properly. (the ME one)
Also, bluntly, yes, in a game as talky as ME or TW3, it's probably better to have average combat and great animation than great combat and average animation. And, despite the more hyperbolic takes I've seen on these boards, TW3's combat is nowhere near as bad as ME:A's animation.
I've rather enjoyed my time with ME:A so far, but I have spent much more time talking than shooting, and I think that's probably just the way these games play unless you just mash your way through every dialogue (in which case it's the wrong genre for you). I spent more time walking and talking in TW3, by far, than fighting.
Ammogeddon
Member
Great to get an explanation like this from someone in the know.
He is right about the discerning gamer too and as such developers should be prepared to reap the whirlwind if their game is below par. They have eyes, we have eyes so let's cut the crap.
He is right about the discerning gamer too and as such developers should be prepared to reap the whirlwind if their game is below par. They have eyes, we have eyes so let's cut the crap.
Wow. Thanks for the link.
R_thanatos
Member
in a game of this size and scope , it can't be one person fault.
As much as the team get praise when the work's good , the whole team made a mistake when the work's bad.
Trying to point fingers is a bad idea
So basically they were placeholders that they didn't have time to finish?
Implying this game was rushed after 5 years of development.
Yeah, if it was more top-down like Dungeon Siege or Neverwinter Nights, probably no one would give a damn.
Oh, I hear you. The no-brainer thing wasn't meant to be in comparison to facial animations, but just... why is video game writing so bad. why is RPG writing so fucking terrible.
like, i swear to god, just read a book. read any book.
Suzushiiro
Banned
So basically his guess is that while most games of that scope rely on frequently re-using algorithms and "canned" animations for dialogue and other simpler scenes, Andromeda initially planned on doing all of them "by hand" similar to how games with smaller scope:budget ratios like ND's games did, then they ran out of time and had to scrap that, resulting in garbage or nonexistent "canned" animations.
Excuses are for kids. In real life it's all explanations, so not sure what you're looking for. Everything is "just an explanation".
Not long enough. Time by itself means nothing. You can't just say "but X years" without knowing how time was spent.
No. Miyamoto's quote is 100% infallible.
Any game that is bad could just be delayed longer. There's no proof this is wrong, because it's an inpossible setup. Miyamoto mental checkmated you.
Game is bad? Delay it.
Delayed game is bad? Delay it longer.
So basically they were placeholders that they didn't have time to finish?
Which is not true and has been proven so. I really hope people realize this.
RPG writing can be excellent. Some of the greatest writing ever seen in video games has come from RPGs.
One problem is there was a huge exodus from the original Mass Effect writing team. Literally the only guy left is Mac Walters and he wasn't even technically on the writing staff this time (though I think it's not unreasonable to think he contributed once the lead writer from Halo 4 bailed, considering Mac's previous lead writing experience.)
That ME1-ME2 bunch is still one of my favorite writing crews in games. They really knew how to make the science fiction universe, and its characters, matter to players.
BTW, it's not just small scenes that got the bad quality.
This unacceptable piece of shit is from a romance scene :
...why does that remind me of a mix between Bob Hoskins and Danny DeVito...
DOWN
Banned
Also keep in mind that unlike Horizon which people still complain about lip sync in, Mass Effect has whole lot of changeable face issues to deal with and interchangeable squads. You character may have huge lips while somebody else made the lips tiny, and now it's a little harder to make the lips as perfectly aligned with the base animation that every player face will have. It's not as simple as Horizon or Witcher and nobody is quite doing the level of facial customization with choosable dialogue that BioWare is doing.