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On March 18 2017 07:07 Clonester wrote:
Its only the animations, it comes togeather with a screenwriting, that is... questionable..
"hey yeah, where is your dad?"
"Well, he is dead, I took his job" *insert braindead smiling
"Alec dead?" *insert no facial expression of whatsoever
*Moves away without further comment.
This girl just lost its father, her brother might not be awaken of the cyrosleep any time soon and nobody and all she does is smiling like a braindead and acting, like that is just normal? Nobody questions if she is okay, how to deal with it?
Its not the really really terrible facial animations, its not the terrible character designer, funny enough with a limited amount of skins colours, its the combination of all that togeather with the acting and the script, that makes people joke about the game and turn people away.
Yeah, gameplay is important, story is important, but an RPG lives of more: Characters, emotions, immersion. And you cant transport these things with such hard flawed things like the writing, the acting and the animations.
And exploration? That splits the community in half anyway, as one half likes it and the other half will say "hello no mans inquisition".
The short preview version obviously doesnt show the complete game and ME 3 got shitted on for its demo version (ME 3 has very very terrible animations for the crew members and everytime you see a crewmember sprinting like Anderson in the prolog, cringe factor got maxed out) but this time its different, because its not just the animations: It hurt the core of a story driven RPG, when the screenwriting is combined with the animations/expressions so off, that you cant take the game seriously to get into it.
And when you see that ME 1 had better facial animations and better looking charactermodels, then you can only take it with a grain of salt, how it can be worse 10 years ago and how the modern frostbite engine is so much behind the old Unreal 3 engine of 2007.
I don't want to defend it too much but you are aware that the video above is heavily edited? It's paused/slowed to cut the laughter in each time and the turn around and walk away isn't the end of the conversation. Far from it she (and the group) walk to a display and then the real talk starts.
As i said in my longish post this game has some flaws (quite deep ones) but it also has its upsides. Frankly the screenwriting could be improved but mostly that has to do with exposition dump and you can actually skip that or ignore that. Was visiting with a friend this evening who had the english version of origin pre installed and you honestly can't believe how much of a difference that makes. The Turians actually sound like Turians again with overtones added for example (and yes the german version somehow doesn't have that makes my mind boggle...) I can ignore a lot of stuff on the screen if the voices actually convey emotion in conversations.
And yes I am still not quite sure how EA has managed to somehow get worse at facial animations in 10 years, but it isn't quite as bad as the cut/outtake stuff you can see on the internet.
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I see your point.
In terms of ME1 having better facial animations, I disagree. In terms of character models, I agree and also disagree. There are some prettty poor character models in ME1 while there are some great ones. Wrex being one of the great ones. The poor ones you pretty much have to look around for and sometimes come across by chance. The facial animations, to me, looks basically the same. They don't look better or worse, just same-ish with ME1 being like 5% more animated. Which I understand, is a problem. A game of today shouldn't have the same kind of quality of a game from like 10 years ago. Granted, Andromeda has been in development for like 5 years but still, I can see the argument.
The choice of engine they decided to go with is questionable though.
I'm enjoying the story for what it is. So far, its nothing great but its not bad. If I went into games and being all nitpicky and complaining over the small things that add up over time then I wouldn't enjoy it because I'd care too much about those small issues instead of playing and enjoying the game and the universe I step into. I can't really talk more about the story because I don't know exactly what it is or wants to be until it releases.
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I am currently playing andromeda on Origins prerelase thingy and I got as far as most of the playthrougs that are around on youtube, so my experience is very limited and only covers the turtorial planet and a bit of the first planet you are sent to with the Tempest.
In general I have to say I like the game so far. It has a mass effect feeling to it and some nice cinematic/cinegraphic additions. I already preordered the full game and I will play it for many hours and will have my fun, but there are several issues I want to adress.
I choose a female Ryder because I always play female characters if available and the animations are bad. They seemed to have fixed some of the worst issues I have seen on you tube but the thing that bothers me the most are the facial expressions. The lips are always twirling, you always see huge parts of the teeth, which looks unnatural.
Also the eyes are quite horrible.
On my first Ryder I wanted to have a bit of a soft colored taint looking a bit like someone from for example india. In some perspectives it looks really nice, on others it looks dark orange like Donald Trump ... I really do not want to know how the colors would look like if I choose a very black character, I can only imagine horrible.
On my secoond character I choose a caucasion taint and other facial features and it certainly looked a bit better but still had issues with facial animations from time to time.
The player character especially looks horrible in some scenes, even the other characters look better and I dont understand why they didn't put more time into the main character animations...
The character options are quite limited and they are not really special to Ryder but all these resources seem to be shared across the board with the npcs running around. So you will run into many NPSc that look alike and on my first character I managed to more or less copy another character from the crew unintentionally (just with darker skin color).
The graphics in general, seem to have some improovements when it comes to lighting and the souroundings itself, but in general they are not a great step up if it all from Mass Effect 3.
The character graphics have animation issues and just do not live up to a game released in 2017.
In my opinion Dragon Age 3 has better looking characters and don't get me started on how much better characters from the witcher look.
How does the character feel and the team mates?
Its not shepard and I need to get them to know better to give a really qualified answer.
There is funny banter and jokes the make me laugh and some crewmates really seem nice.
I only started to get to know Liam who seems well done and funny and Cora who seems somewhat strange looking and a bit off ... and Peekaboo I saw her only a few minutes. Alec Ryder my father looks like a Nanderthal or ape...
Female Ryder herself, can be serious, can be funny, I just hope that the dialog options I choose have some impact on the game, maybe not as simple as the paragon system but something that gives my character character.
Speaking of character: Ryder seems a bit disconnected. I mean her brother is insured or in a coma, her father dies and saves her life, she unexpectedly becomes pathfinder and has to shoulder the weight of responibility, the golden worlds are a bust, the nexus is in shambles.
These are very tough and hard experiences and yet Ryder does not really seem impacted by them. I think there might be a problem with the writing? I hope it gets better in the future.
The developers said that the worlds or the game is X times bigger. I just hope they didn't just go for width and length but also for depth of the game and story. In dragon age origin I really hated the gathering and the benine sidequests that made the game feel like a single player mmo, putting in the grinding but leaving out the social experience of an mmo...
Since I have just done the tutorial and parts of the first planet I can't really put my finger on it. There are a few signs that there will be Dragon Agey things to do like gather and collect stuff and some of the sidequests also feel like meh ...
The main quest has me hooked, because there are mysteries I want to solve and things I want to know about, I just hope they didn't screw up the writing and I hope Ryder will show a bit more of an emptional impact as the game progresses.
The combat feels good (only encountered some easy enemies as of know) but it still has the cover system that is core of mass effect it only feels more fluent and engaging now. Also the booster is a nice addition.
All in all, as I said I will like the game and play it for hours, but I think that there will be some issues that will hurt the general experience while playing the game which can not be easily ignored ...
I just hope that they would have gone for more quality in the animations, story and characters than for quanitity in planet size and small side quests and gather stuff ...
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ok fair enough, ill show another example of how LAZYLY this game has been produced.
https://i.imgur.com/lGrQTdF.gif
in this short scene there are like 5 lazy shortcuts.
bottles break uses window shatter animation, after the attack the char just stares dead into the void, how to headbutt, headbutt physics, whats happening with the table did a water baloon explode? No....chair.......
This whole thing honestly in parts looks like some indy team tried to do some cutscenes in unity.
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On March 18 2017 07:44 Holy_AT wrote:
I wanted to have a bit of a soft colored taint looking a bit like someone from for example india.
On my secoond character I choose a caucasion taint and other facial features and it certainly looked a bit better but still had issues with facial animations from time to time.
Just an FYI... the word you were looking for is "tint" though in this case you're better served with "skin tone."
Taint means something else.
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On March 18 2017 10:12 Yoav wrote:Show nested quote +On March 18 2017 07:44 Holy_AT wrote:
I wanted to have a bit of a soft colored taint looking a bit like someone from for example india.
On my secoond character I choose a caucasion taint and other facial features and it certainly looked a bit better but still had issues with facial animations from time to time. Just an FYI... the word you were looking for is "tint" though in this case you're better served with "skin tone." Taint means something else.
Haha thanks for the unintentional hilarity of the day. <3
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On March 18 2017 09:43 LaNague wrote:ok fair enough, ill show another example of how LAZYLY this game has been produced. https://i.imgur.com/lGrQTdF.gifin this short scene there are like 5 lazy shortcuts. bottles break uses window shatter animation, after the attack the char just stares dead into the void, how to headbutt, headbutt physics, whats happening with the table did a water baloon explode? No....chair....... This whole thing honestly in parts looks like some indy team tried to do some cutscenes in unity.
There is the 6th shortcut, the female getting headbutted stares dead next to the one she smashes a bottle on instead of watching her target.
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On March 18 2017 10:12 Yoav wrote:Show nested quote +On March 18 2017 07:44 Holy_AT wrote:
I wanted to have a bit of a soft colored taint looking a bit like someone from for example india.
On my secoond character I choose a caucasion taint and other facial features and it certainly looked a bit better but still had issues with facial animations from time to time. Just an FYI... the word you were looking for is "tint" though in this case you're better served with "skin tone." Taint means something else.
Thanks for pointing it out. English is not my native tongue and I misspelled the word anyway.
I meant "teint" instead of "taint", which in french or german means complexion and I got a bit turned around 
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ALLEYCAT BLUES50121 Posts
I for one am glad the shitty face animations remain.
Looking forward to all the videos now, ass defect mandromeda.
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There is a massive lack of AAA sci fi games, so if I have to live with bad animations, so be it. It's not like Mass Effect 2 had amazing animations, yet it's still one of the best games I've ever played.
I'm starting to think that it's edgy/hipster/trendy to hate on this game at the moment. Personally I haven't found the issues people complain about to be a big deal. Especially the movement I find to be much better than the atrocity it was in ME3. Well at least the male Ryder movements seem quite natural to me.
And the game is a really nice breath of fresh air. I was honestly getting a bit tired of the whole "end of the world" shtick we had to deal with in ME3. Mass Effect to me was always about adventure and exploration, and so far Andromeda provides.
The only thing I've found annoying thus far is when I exit the Nomad my squad sort of pops up mid air, and the squad movement in general. I don't know why they have such a hard time with squad gameplay, they even switched engines and they still look like ragdolls and are mostly there to eat bullets to the face.
Minor gripes are the cover system which sometimes doesn't work and the fact you can't pause the combat and order your squad what skill to use. In fact so far I only know how to tell the squad where to move to and who to attack. The rest is pretty much automatic or maybe I'm missing something. I guess I can live with this though.
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Whatching the start of the game on youtube its very werid that they don't mention the original trilogy at all and the people are all Human at the start.
Also the Main father is much better drawn and animated then anyone else. Why wouldn't you play as him. How many main characters have their children with them?
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On March 19 2017 02:01 Sermokala wrote:
Whatching the start of the game on youtube its very werid that they don't mention the original trilogy at all and the people are all Human at the start.
Also the Main father is much better drawn and animated then anyone else. Why wouldn't you play as him. How many main characters have their children with them?
The last of us used that well, slowly growing into a parental role and showing it from both sides.
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On March 19 2017 02:01 Sermokala wrote:
Whatching the start of the game on youtube its very werid that they don't mention the original trilogy at all and the people are all Human at the start.
Also the Main father is much better drawn and animated then anyone else. Why wouldn't you play as him. How many main characters have their children with them?
They really went all out on Alec.
+ Show Spoiler +
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On March 19 2017 02:01 Sermokala wrote:
Whatching the start of the game on youtube its very werid that they don't mention the original trilogy at all and the people are all Human at the start.
Hm.. That's not entirely true though? I remember quite well that right at the beginning of the game somewhere, i've read about Liara and her research. Or where do you mean?
The "all human" at the start is correct, but also kinda necessary. I assume you watched some of it, so it's not too bad a spoiler to say it's a human Ark. The other races have their own.
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The Liara stuff doesn't show up until a little while after the tutorial mission. Couple of hours depending on how you play or if your in a hurry. Liara is the first and won't be the last reference to the previous games.
Of course we won't know how many and what kind of references until it fully releases.
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They even had a reference to the Omega DLC for ME3. Not sure how many people actually played that.
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On March 19 2017 02:01 Sermokala wrote:
Whatching the start of the game on youtube its very werid that they don't mention the original trilogy at all and the people are all Human at the start.
Also the Main father is much better drawn and animated then anyone else. Why wouldn't you play as him. How many main characters have their children with them?
Only if you play default chars. As soon as you start to customize your PC weird things start to happen with him. Can't screenshot now since my trial is done but I referenced what happened to him earlier and I still stand by it being so bad that that alone made me restart and go to default (didn't know at that point how soon he would be removed and yes my own PC was also so bad that the decision wasn't really hard).
I'd love to know what exactly happened here with the animations but since it is highly unlikely we'll ever get an "inside view" with the NDAs at EA I guess we'll have to remain ignorant. Still I'm honestly astonished that this engine (one of the more expensive ones on the market) is so bad at facial animations. Considering how many in-engine cutscenes are common nowadays I thought that would be something they invest quite a few bucks in...
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I'd love to know what exactly happened here with the animations but since it is highly unlikely we'll ever get an "inside view" with the NDAs at EA I guess we'll have to remain ignorant. Still I'm honestly astonished that this engine (one of the more expensive ones on the market) is so bad at facial animations. Considering how many in-engine cutscenes are common nowadays I thought that would be something they invest quite a few bucks in...
It really depends on the focus. The older Mass Effect engines weren't great at expressions either, and i'm pretty convinced that they wouldn't be able to do what the frostbite can do: quite vast open world stuff that looks good on top. Not to mention, i don't actually know if the Witcher 3 engine (which had its moments too btw) is available for licensing - but even if, the frostbite engine is "in house", so most likely free or dirt cheap. Still not defending the expressions, they're just bad - but honestly, if the options are either A: a pretty open world filled with stuff but meh facial expressions, or B: "another mass effect", i'd actually go with A. Especially with the new combat system. Don't get me wrong, i love the older mass effects, but with the new combat system, tube levels would just suck.
But everyone as he needs/likes, if someone just can't live with those quirky/bad animations, sucks - for me, the rest makes up for it. So far anyway, only played the trial obviously, which left me with a feeling of "fuck off, i wanna see the rest now". Which is good.
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Well i had a blad with the free trial and can't wait for tuesday to keep playing the full game.
Can't wait!
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On March 19 2017 02:01 Sermokala wrote:
Whatching the start of the game on youtube its very werid that they don't mention the original trilogy at all and the people are all Human at the start.
Also the Main father is much better drawn and animated then anyone else. Why wouldn't you play as him. How many main characters have their children with them?
Well, my Alec Ryder looked like a Neanderthal ape, I would even find a Krogan better animated thoughtout and drawn than Alec Ryder ...
I really hope they did not mess up the game with Inquisition type Quest and exploration style, because the RPG element suffers heavily because of the immersion breaking animations and the most incompetently modeled faces I have seen in years.
Bioware or EA should immediatly fire the guys in charge of this, because their work is subpar at best and doest not deserve to be in a AAA game in 2017 at that pricing level.
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EPT
