Why did all the characters in Bioshock look like shit?

[Dejawesp]

I mean this is a game that looked pretty fantastic but for some odd reason all the characters look like they where sculpted out of clay. I mean the splicers have the excuse that they they are spliced into freaks but even then they all wear masks which I suspect is an attempt by the developer to hide the poorly designed faces as much as they can.


It just surprises me that out of all the nice looking things in bioshock the faces had to look so terrible.

 

[Zhukov]

Well, the splicers were deformed. I think the explanation was that basically everyone used cosmetic tonics. But once they ran out of adam the effects started decaying.

As for the few non-deformed people... no real excuse. The developer either didn't have the resources or couldn't be bothered.

 

[Nomanslander]

Well for one thing, it's an older game. Second, their character modelers hadn't probably yet been introduced to Zbrush. Third, much of the hard work put into the visuals from what I saw went into the art direction, not the graphics.

 

[Dejawesp]

The game came out 3 years after half life 2 and the same year as crysis. There's no age excuse for the faces looking so bad.

 

[maddawg IAJI]

It uses the Unreal Engine. Can you name one game that had good looking characters and used the Unreal engine? No you couldn't, that's because while the Unreal Engine is easily the most accessible engine to run the game on, its doesn't render human beings all that well. Which is a shame because it always does the environments so nicely.

Edit: I should probably rephrase this, it uses an outdated version of the Unreal engine (It uses 2.5 whereas several games including Mass Effect, Gears of War and Borderlands have used UE 3.) While it is still better then UE 2, it still doesn't compare to UE 3.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Everything had about the same graphic fidelity it's just that you focus on faces more then anything, and because we have been recognizing faces since birth even a minor miss will stand out like a sore thumb.

Overall I think their biggest problem was the idea that everything has to be shinny, so faces immediately came over plasticky.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

Two things. Firstly most characters don't have their own unique model. Atlas and Brigid used recycled enemy models, but as is the case with audio diaries they are represented by a photograph. Secondly the only three characters to have unique models are Sander Cohen, Andrew Ryan and the Little Sisters, one of which is a Splicer and the other an experiment. I always assumed that the shape and design of the faces and models was the art style of the game, look at the little sisters with their unrealistic proportions and huge eyes. Bioshock doesn't exactly seem to follow realism in terms of models.

 

[Dejawesp]

It also adds that the photographs look so good and fit the characters so well and then when you actually run into them they look nothing like the photograph

 

[Burrito With Legs]

I didn't see a problem with the faces, to be honest. I don't think the masks were trying to hide anything that had to do with the developers' not being able to make faces.