Making Faces - A Bioware Story

[pearcinator]

Eh, I see where you're coming from but the 'Bioware Face' doesn't bother me. I kind of like it actually, I recognise it and it feels like I am playing a Bioware game. I engage more with the 'Bioware Face' than I do with Bethesda games. Sure, mocap would be much better but the expenses would be astronomical!

If anything, Bioware needs to work more on animating hair. Smaller details like that would improve the 'Bioware Face'. If hair moved more naturally then it would seem closer to an animated movie like How to Train Your Dragon. Instead the characters heads are more akin to Woody from Toy Story. We have seen realistic hair animation in many games, and same goes for cloth animation (I imagine that long hair would be similar to cloth?)

 

[NaelokQ]

We are no where near seeing realistic hair in many RPGs this generation, hair physics can bring a higher end PC to its knees with far simpler games. Without dedicated physics processors and with those weak CPUs the current gen consoles will never handle it, so outside of the few developers that do it for PCs "just because" it isn't happening.

Man, I wasn't even thinking about hair physics. That would just be a distant pipe dream. It can stay cemented in place just as it always is.

All I would like is to be able to get long hair that doesn't clip through my shoulders and neck. Hell, in DA:I my Elf's hair clips through his ears regularly even with max settings. This has been an issue with hair for over ten years and, to this day, no one's bothered to attempt a solution.

 

[CitySquirrel]

You know it is a great game when this is the biggest complaint he has!

 

[vallorn]

So... in essence what makes Bioware dialog and animations so wooden is that they compose it in a similar manner to that of a Baroque period opera?

I say this since you do hit the nail on the head of 1 emotion at a time which is often called the Doctrine Of The Affections. with respect to the era.

 

[Jake Martinez]

Character design seems better this time around as well, the NPCs, especially the women look far better than before, the design of Cassandra and Sera being far superior to the doll faces of Miranda and Ashley

Wow. This is hysterical.

Miranda's face in ME2 is a rendering of her VA's actual face, Yvonne Strahovski.

So basically, you just said that Sera's completely made-up, fugly butterface is "superior" to the face of an actual living woman.

I know we are living in Bizzare-World 2014, where anything attractive is "problematic", but this goes beyond the pale.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

I never know what the hell he's talking about when he brings this topic up.

I'll describe it in the point below this one...

Facial animations are a forgivable sin if the voice acting is good, the characters are likable, and character designs are well-done.

Actually that is *precisely* the problem and I'll try to briefly explain why. The "uncanny valley" is the point where our empathy for fake humans turns to revulsion. It applies particularly to the fields of computer animation and robotics. The more realistic a human looks, the more realistic we expect them to behave and animated characters usually fall into the valley when there's an inconsistancy between what we see and what we expect to see.

For example, if your best friend/sibling spoke to you in an electronic robot voice it would throw you for a loop. Or a man with a woman's voice (and vice versa). Conversely, if a robot that clearly looks like a fake human had the voice and perfect facial mannerisms of a human, we'd probably also find it creepy.

The issue Yahtzee describes is that the voices are great, the inflections and nuance of the conversation is believable (because it did after all come from a human voice actor), but the facial mannerisms don't match the voice, emotion or dialogue *quite right*. There's something off. If they made the faces less realistic it would solve the problem since we wouldn't expect realistic facial expressions to match the realistic voice. The reason for that is in the point below...

In fact, I think that Bioware manage to get emotions out of characters like Wrex, Garrus, and Tali is pretty impressive, considering that their faces are totally concealed or completely inhuman.

Actually, that makes it significantly easier. Because they're alien enough, we don't psychologically have the same expectations from them as we do from humans. With Wrex, Garrus, etc. they could just use some little tell-tale signs of emotion which we *do* recognise (wide eyes, lowered brows, frown, smile, etc) and it's enough to convince us that that is what they're feeling.

With humans tho, it's much harder. Consider the nuances in our faces when we smile f.ex. There's a crinkling around the eyes, the cheeks change slightly, there might be dimples, etc. If a real person smiled and nothing but their mouth changed, we'd think they were cold (metaphorically), or botoxed, or "dead eyed". The uncanny valley isn't an issue with non-humans, it happens at the point where humans appear so realistic but their voices/facial expressions aren't quite right. That's what Yahtzee was talking about.

 

[Imre Csete]

Meh, I got my tolerance level raised high enough to BioWare dialogue quirks after the Twi'leks of KotOR raped my mind with their three sentence speech patterns.

Although Solas' right leg popping stood out like a sore thumb whenever I spoke to him, but atleast it wasn't as bad as speaking to Cullen with dismembered arms flailing swords around him (when they weren't attached to headless soldiers). Never thought I'd prefer the auto dialogue to this new fix-on-approach dialogue camera they conjured up from the bowels of cinematic sins.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Yeah, the faces were pretty but the animations were the same awful ones they used in Mass Effect. They've got a great system set up with Inquisition. They should put more focus on that in the next installment. Also more Scout Harding.

I'd say it's worse. The clipping issues in DA:I are off the fucking charts, and the main protagonist's gorilla walk is worse than ever.

OT: Honestly, at this point the "Bioware face" and canned animation is kind of a charming staple. It tends to lend itself well for some funny moments, like the Shepard dance, or watching your party in DA:O hold a conversation right after a battle and they're all covered in blood. I think Bioware takes what is, for now, an unavoidable trade-off in "make your own story" RPGs and atleast puts an amusing spin on it.

 

[Proverbial Jon]

I always had that Cookie Monster dialled in, even as a child. It always seemed like more cookie fell out of his mouth than he actually ended up eating. I'm on to you, Cookie Monster.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

Character design seems better this time around as well, the NPCs, especially the women look far better than before, the design of Cassandra and Sera being far superior to the doll faces of Miranda and Ashley

Wow. This is hysterical.

Miranda's face in ME2 is a rendering of her VA's actual face, Yvonne Strahovski.

So basically, you just said that Sera's completely made-up, fugly butterface is "superior" to the face of an actual living woman.

I know we are living in Bizzare-World 2014, where anything attractive is "problematic", but this goes beyond the pale.

Actually I think they pulled a sly trick with Miranda's face by mirroring one half to make it perfectly symmetrical; which almost no naturally occurring face is. It's a subtle clue to her being genetically enhanced but it's also one possible reason so many people think she looks odd. I personally didn't mind her, but I think Ashley's ME1 face was far nicer than her one in ME3.

That said, give me Liara and/or Traynor any day

 

[Wulfram77]

Wow. This is hysterical.

Miranda's face in ME2 is a rendering of her VA's actual face, Yvonne Strahovski.

It's a really bad rendition of Yvonne Strahovski. Not quite as bad as Jessica Chobot in ME3, but still really off looking.

 

[EvolutionKills]

I get where Yahtzee is coming from, and I do agree. I think that games that try for a particular aesthetic style almost always age better than those trying for photo-realism. Borderlands will age far better than Crysis, much in the same way that Final Fantasy 6 has aged better than 8. Bastion will still look good a decade from now, and so will The Darkness II, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, and (one of my personal favorites) Valkyria Chronicles.

I mean, there is still nothing that looks quite like Jet Set Radio, Killer 7, or MadWorld.

Would it be too much to hope for that the next DragonAge game looks more like the character portraits and tarrot cards from Inquisition, rather than diving into the Uncanny Valley again?

 

[SNCommand]

Character design seems better this time around as well, the NPCs, especially the women look far better than before, the design of Cassandra and Sera being far superior to the doll faces of Miranda and Ashley

Wow. This is hysterical.

Miranda's face in ME2 is a rendering of her VA's actual face, Yvonne Strahovski.

So basically, you just said that Sera's completely made-up, fugly butterface is "superior" to the face of an actual living woman.

I know we are living in Bizzare-World 2014, where anything attractive is "problematic", but this goes beyond the pale.

Just because it's modeled after the voice actor doesn't mean it came out looking right, they took away every little detail on the face which makes her look like she caked on with the make up,I know in the lore she is supposed to be a perfect clone, but it drops the face right into the deep end of the uncanny valley

Let's just compare them, I just think Sera looks more like a person and less like she should be haunting some old mansion

 

[Denamic]

This topic seems really odd to me. There are many far more pressing issues with the gaming industry, even in just DA:I. A two page rant about their faces seems really petty. You could have complained about how the gameplay severely suffers from the shitty tactical mode, like how the 'free moving' behaves like a walking character that's restrained by terrain. Or that there's no command queue. Or that the AI ignores everything you say and immediately suicides into AoE attacks the moment you stop controlling them. Or that there was a DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG crash in cutscenes for a lot of people for weeks.

But no, the character's faces are just okay; that'll be my topic.

 

[JennAnge]

Like a lot of others in this thread, I find I can accept Bioware Faces if that means I get the kind of interaction with my companions that we got in DA:I. Though I do wish they'd kept the art style of DA2, which allowed for better looking visuals and better emote timing, IMO, even if that meant sacrificing virtually all of the sliders in the character creation kit. But hey, I'm not too bothered, I love this game anyway.

Except when characters in DA:I laugh. Oh god, the laughs. They will haunt me to my grave.

 

[Howling Din]

Grandia has an amazing set of expressions for each character. It's a stylized game, but I'm not sure why I even brought that up as a negative. Realism can go gratify itself in private where I don't have to see.

 

[infohippie]

I don't mind it in RPGs like that. It's not just Bioware. It's Bethesda, Obsidian, CD Projekt RED etc. In every RPG with conversations that occurs. I really don't care.

I dunno, The Witcher 2 had some pretty dynamic and expressive faces during conversations.

 

[XDSkyFreak]

Oh yahtzee ... you and the rest of the onternet are so cute. complainng about hair styles and facial animations WHEN THIS SHITY GAME IS FUCKING UNPLAYABLE AND BUGGIER THAN A BETHESDA RELEASE!

Ok ok calm down ...phew. I just can't fucking understand this. Every time a bethesda release comes out the whole internet goes "boo, you released it bugged as shit and expect us to fix it, lazy devs", yet here lies inquisition, a game that had and still has a retarded amount of bugs that should never have gotten past play testing, a game where every patch manages to cause more problems than it fixes (want to talk faces? How about patch 2 which managed to remove all forms of facial scarring or unique features, ruining the way my inquis looked and making what was supposed to be a horribly scarred and mutililated victim of torture look like a new born baby? Immersion ftw!), and no one cares. And by that I mean I see no serious reviewer calling out bioware on their bullshit. How about the game content which seems suspiciously chopped up (there are areas on several maps that indicate more was supposed to be there but was removes, The Skyhold is a total incomplete joke that screams "feature removed for DLC" and alot of areas just seem token and boring with no reason to go there and no interesting story attached, the qunari having only 3 armor models in the entire game (though to be fair humans have like 5 or 6 ... soooo yeah, not much variety there either) and frankly incomplete and subpar. I mean for fucks sake, outisde the Deep Roads in DA:O I can recite by heart every major story of every area in the game. In DA:I? Tell me now without checking a wiki or anything what was your major story reason to go to Hissing wastes. Or Emerald Graves. Or Emprise du Lion, or Exalted Plains or any fucking area in this god damned game outside Crestwood, Western Aproach and the bloody Hinterlands. And no, "gaining power for the inquisition" does not count. I'll say it out loud: I'd rather have the rehashed reycled dungeons of Dragon Age 2 if I actually get a story behind them. Inquisition is quite frankly an shity incomplete game, for 2 reasons IMO: one is classic content removal for DLC whoring later, and the second is the fact that bioware are not capable of making an open world game. They can make a preety sand-box, but they can not make it interesting and they can not give it a good story. How is it that the actual highlights of this game, the good bits, are all the scripted mission happening in a very small dungeon like area like thay had in DA:O, and all the open world is a barren boring preety looking desert?

Urgh ... and to think people will call this buged, incomplete, average game GOTY ... and my friends still ask me why I think gamers are beeing infected by the stupid virus.