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A Compilation of Hilarious Animations in Mass Effect Andromeda

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R

renzolama

Member
Sword Of Doom said:
Watching Brad from GB playing it. Where is the atmosphere in this game? I've only played parts of ME1 but that game world was just dripping with atmosphere. This game looks so bland with its dialogue, voice acting, and just the general tone of it
Click to expand...

Ok, I've been laughing at all the gifs, but after watching the actual footage from GB for the first time...this looks bad at a much more significant scale than I was expecting. I bought it already and will undoubtedly enjoy it, but the production quality in general looks way below what I would have expected from Bioware in 2017.

Edit: It sounds like maybe the production quality is much higher in environments / motion / etc than in the character dialogues
 
L

Laiza

Member
BiggNife said:
The MP looks fine, but the majority of people play ME for the single player. No one was talking about the MP here.
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It feels weird to be on the minority side here.

After ME3 the multiplayer is the reason I bought this game. I literally am going to skip the campaign and jump straight into multiplayer as soon as I get my hands on it.

To this day I have not even set foot into ME3's single player. I say this as someone who 100% completed ME1 and ME2. Maybe my tastes have changed. Or maybe I just know where to place my priorities knowing that there are far, far better places to get my roleplaying fix than EA's nu-Bioware.
 
P

Phreak47

Member
XANDER CAGE said:
This gif going around illustrates this perfectly. Just like how the relative darkness in Ashley's scene on the right sort of hides the distinction between iris and pupil, the bright lighting in the scene on the left should be blowing out some of the detail. The eyes should have shine.

5qOu2Zd
Click to expand...

Yeah but, was Ashley having to run around getting her fucking face tired all day?
 
U

Unaha-Closp

Member
I'll be honest it doesn't take much for me to want to replay ME1 but um yeah the few hours I played of the trial of ME:A and all the funny shit in this thread is making me think real hard of another playthrough.
 
R

renzolama

Member
Oh man, watching this GB footage...the gifs here don't even do it justice. Just watching the protagonist walk up and down stairs in cutscenes has me in giggling fits. The way the characters pause at random times during the dialogue but their faces/bodies continue performing these odd movements and expressions...it feels eerily similar to watching animatronics. This is going to be a riot, can't wait til my backlog opens up for a playthrough.
 
Jibbajabbawockky

Jibbajabbawockky

Member
Phreak47 said:
Yeah but, was Ashley having to run around getting her fucking face tired all day?
Click to expand...

That line... that whole sequence is just... what? I mean, that's like launch Witcher 1 levels of jank. That line just barely seems like comprehensible English- it's like its been translated into English from a non native speaker and then just handed to some poor voice actor that's been given zero direction and nobody bothered to animate anything on the character.


I know some people have been having a good time with the game but what I'm really worried about is the Dragon Age: Inquisition Hinterlands syndrome here. Where in Inquisition I was blown away by the Hinterlands and actually sort of impressed with the game at that early stage. Its only once I left the Hinterlands and came to the realization that most of what I had done in the Hinterlands was just copy/pasted across every other zone that my disappointment in some of the design decisions ramped up the more I played.
 
S

Slackbladder

Member
XANDER CAGE said:
The weirdest thing about the faces is the total lack of eye reflection. Even the original trilogy on PS360 got this right; the animation in the old games looks relatively robotic by today's standards, but the eyes still have life in them.

Every single human in Andromeda has these weirdly overdefined eyes with zero lighting interacting with them. You can see everyone's irises and pupils in excruciating detail in a way you just do not see in real life, as if they're wooden orbs with details painted on. Adding better specular effects to the eyes would on its own be a massive improvement for this game, even if the animations stayed just as stiff. It's just so off-putting being able to see everyone's eyes like this.

EDIT:

This gif going around illustrates this perfectly. Just like how the relative darkness in Ashley's scene on the right sort of hides the distinction between iris and pupil, the bright lighting in the scene on the left should be blowing out some of the detail. The eyes should have shine.

5qOu2Zd
Click to expand...
And the sclera is too bright and flat looking. Fix that and a fair bit of the facial problems will be solved. In fact there are decent facial animations in the game but there are far too many poor ones and the weird eyes ruin even the good faces.
Combat animations are pretty good and the armours look excellent. I'm just going to have to shrug my shoulders at the rest.
 
T

TharpDaddy

Member
How difficult are texture mods for BioWare games? I know DA:I has some mods, could someone put out a eye texture mod fairly quickly after release?
 
S

Slythe

Member
This thread is really entertaining, but I feel bad for my younger brother who is in the process of building his first PC, mainly to play this game.

He's not a massive gamer but his love for overwatch on my PC and excitement for ME:A has gotten him to invest in building a machine. I preordered this for him for his birthday this week, and we're building the PC next week. I'm hoping he enjoys the game despite all this jank. He's on some crazy hype for this game and is going on blind. What a strange looking game to be his first on PC.
 
T

TharpDaddy

Member
Slythe said:
This thread is really entertaining, but I feel bad for my younger brother who is in the process of building his first PC, mainly to play this game.

He's not a massive gamer but his love for overwatch on my PC and excitement for ME:A has gotten him to invest in building a machine. I preordered this for him for his birthday this week, and we're building the PC next week. I'm hoping he enjoys the game despite all this jank. He's on some crazy hype for this game and is going on blind. What a strange looking game to be his first on PC.
Click to expand...

Honestly beyond the goofy face stuff, I expect some of the environments will be gorgeous if DA:I is anything to go by.
 
S

Slackbladder

Member
TharpDaddy said:
How difficult are texture mods for BioWare games? I know DA:I has some mods, could someone put out a eye texture mod fairly quickly after release?
Click to expand...
It was possible in DA:I so I would assume it'd be possible here. However I'm not sure it was straightforward or required unpacking the game etc. It would be nice if it could be done. Some of the eye mods in Fallout 4, which I know is a different game/developer (but shows good mods exist) are pretty good.
 
M

Matt

Member
The only way the "face is tired" line makes any sense is if it's a remnant of another version of the script (or character), where the scene was played light and the character was kidding around, or if it had another setup and follow through.
 
S

Slaythe

Member
Modding will be EXTREMELY limited due to denuvo garbage.

Matt said:
The only way the "face is tired" line makes any sense is if it's a remnant of another version of the script (or character), where the scene was played light and the character was kidding around, or if it had another setup and follow through.
Click to expand...

Or if they happen to be in quebec and had french writer then awkwardly translated it back into english making no sense at all.

Wait...
 
B

Brazil

Living in the shadow of Amaz
Game's a mess, my God. I kinda wanna hunt down new posts from the guys who piled on me in that other thread for actually believing in John Walker's report just for the kick of it.
 
D

DavidDesu

Member
Oh Jesus I nearly died thanks to this thread. Page one. Poopy pants and then watching the same fucking awful gif with the notion someone said of "is this a glitch or is this the actual walking animation". Oh fuck how I laughed. Jesus fucking Christ this is awful. Hilarious but fucking terrible.

Please may this be the walking animation throughout the entire game. Would buy. 10/10.
 
M

matrix-cat

Member
Now we know the reason for the weird marketing cycle this game had. I'd been expecting a delay for months and I was ready to eat crow when they announced a firm release date, but it really seems like they needed the delay and just didn't take it.
 
S

Slaythe

Member
matrix-cat said:
Now we know the reason for the weird marketing cycle this game had. I'd been expecting a delay for months and I was ready to eat crow when they announced a firm release date, but it really seems like they needed the delay and just didn't take it.
Click to expand...

It's a march release. EA didn't leave them any choice. Fiscal year reason.

Hell they were nice enough to let them waste the budget on garbage for 5 years.
 
S

SL128

Member
So after ME3, they fucked up the logic of our galaxy so badly they needed to pick a new one. Will the next ME game have to be Mass Effect: Bode's?
 
I

Intheflorsh

Banned
XANDER CAGE said:
The weirdest thing about the faces is the total lack of eye reflection. Even the original trilogy on PS360 got this right; the animation in the old games looks relatively robotic by today's standards, but the eyes still have life in them.

Every single human in Andromeda has these weirdly overdefined eyes with zero lighting interacting with them. You can see everyone's irises and pupils in excruciating detail in a way you just do not see in real life, as if they're wooden orbs with details painted on. Adding better specular effects to the eyes would on its own be a massive improvement for this game, even if the animations stayed just as stiff. It's just so off-putting being able to see everyone's eyes like this.

EDIT:

This gif going around illustrates this perfectly. Just like how the relative darkness in Ashley's scene on the right sort of hides the distinction between iris and pupil, the bright lighting in the scene on the left should be blowing out some of the detail. The eyes should have shine.

5qOu2Zd
Click to expand...

The lighting in the game really is strange and unflattering at times. For instance, look at the scene where Ryder steps onto the bridge of the ship for the first time. His face is saturated in blinding white light that causes ugly shadows under his chin, all during what should be one of the key moments in the whole game.

Also, Bioware should consider studying CDPR's procedural generation technique for conversations if hand crafting each of them is too much work.

"The generator requires three different types of inputs: information about the actors, [some cinematic instructions], and finally the extracted data from voiceovers. We use an algorithm to generate markers, or accents, from the voiceovers, so later we can match the events in animation with the sound. It generates camera movement and placement, facial animation, body animations, and the lookats."

The Witcher 3 has some of the best-looking character interaction in any game, and most of that started with procedural generation. If the animators weren't happy with a scene, they could simply press a button to regenerate it, and the algorithm would conjure up something new with a slightly altered mix of camera movements and animators. Tomsinski showed off some side-by-side examples, and it was easy to see the small distinctions between them; subtle differences between head and body movements, the pauses between movements.
Click to expand...

Simply having Ryder and an NPC stare lock-eyed at each other with minimal facial animation is not a good solution. I'll give them credit for actually using cinematic camera angles this time, unlike in Inquisition where the majority of conversations looked like this:

untitled.png
Click to expand...

It's truly bizarre how much they've regressed in terms of cinematic presentation because they were the ones that set the standards back with ME1 and DAO! They're skimping on what was once one of the core principles of Bioware games.
 
M

maxiell

Member
At the time, I couldn't understand why Naughty Dog was porting The Last of Us to PS4 themselves, or why The Coalition bothered to put in so much work on the Gears of War remake, even as it was great to see these important games exposed to a larger audience.

Going back to successful titles, understanding what made them work, and establishing your competence on a new platform is invaluable experience for a development team and renders the individuals whining about remasters that much sillier.
 
I

inky

Member
Intheflorsh said:
Also, Bioware should consider studying CDPR's procedural generation technique for conversations if hand crafting each of them is too much work.
Click to expand...

CDPR absolutely hand crafted every conversation tho. It's just that they probably put way more work into their animation library than Bioware did:

Piotr Tomsinski said:
[...]How does creating a dialogue scene like this look like from cinematic designer's point of view? First of all, it's not only animating. In fact, there's very little animating at all. Animations are delivered to the animation library - a huge set of gestures, moves and facial animations. Cinematic designer working on a scene simply uses those libraries, crafting actor performance from pre-made animation blocks. And it's something no algorithm can do. Does the woman who lost everything in the fire do this or that gesture? Should it happen while she speaks or during a pause? In what pose does she stand? Should she look away? For how long? Should she be expressive or hide her feelings?

We would like to emphasize that creating a compelling scene is more than just ”animating", which can be seen as the process of constructing the acting. Creating a compelling scene is in fact editing, preparing cinematography, staging and applying other cinematic means of expression. Algorithm didn't compose our shots so that they have depth and balance. An algorithm didn't decide when to cut the camera to show the NPC's reaction or when to move from a medium shot to a close-up. The algorithm didn't decide when characters moved or changed poses. It didn't tell us if a scene should be fast-paced with wide-angle shots or slow shot with medium lenses.

[...]

The ”algorithm" or ”generator" as we call it, was used only as a solid base for further development of the scene. It was a shortcut, a tool, but never a goal. More of a production-related thing. It created a rough first pass through a scene, which was always tweaked and adjusted by hand - in all 1463 dialogues. In many, the algorithm wasn't used at all, as they demanded custom approach from the very beginning.
Click to expand...

I also think it's fair to say that they are probably just better at what they do than Bioware is at this point.
 
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