Mass Effect Andromeda’s Animations Have Reduced It to a Laughing Stock

Figured as much, people kept saying the characters are ugly etc, it's not really the character design or implementation it's the animations they are terrible. I'd almost guess someone made a computer automate most of it and no one cares how it turned out.
Seventyfive said:
CD Project Red - 370 employees
Bioware - 800 employees

WTF is going on at Bioware other than a bunch of employees not having enough time to work because they're circle jerking it to pro SJW memes?
Click to expand...
You know i don't quite see as many SJW on internet forums complaining about everything in life as i do people complaining about how everything is SJW fault. It's almost like SJW actually do something with their lives or SJW are nonexistent.
 
Last edited:
People are nitpicking over nothing. This animation is NOTHING compared to AC: France Face Melt . The sheer horror that was that game was atrocious. So the eyeballs don't look like they came from MoCap LA Noire, so what. I'm not expecting a damn perfect game. I'm expecting a FUN game.

There are people who are absolutely blinded to anything else besides finding something to hate on this game for. The dogpile and desire to turn this pretty good game (no I haven't played it, been watching streams of MP for 2 days and all the other videos) lead me to believe that this is going to be a Fun game for Single Player and MP. I'm glad I ordered it and can't wait to play the game on Tuesday.
 
Bigdady92 said:
People are nitpicking over nothing. This animation is NOTHING compared to AC: France Face Melt . The sheer horror that was that game was atrocious. So the eyeballs don't look like they came from MoCap LA Noire, so what. I'm not expecting a damn perfect game. I'm expecting a FUN game.

There are people who are absolutely blinded to anything else besides finding something to hate on this game for. The dogpile and desire to turn this pretty good game (no I haven't played it, been watching streams of MP for 2 days and all the other videos) lead me to believe that this is going to be a Fun game for Single Player and MP. I'm glad I ordered it and can't wait to play the game on Tuesday.
Click to expand...

I actually just got done saying something similar about the screen resolution speculation about Nier: Automata. I agree with you here. There are games that I expect to be perfect for what they are, and then there are games that I just want to be fun. Or even games that I care more about how they look, purely because I want some big budget flash once in a while. However, in the case of this... It's more funny to me than anything. I'll still play and enjoy the game, but you HAVE to admit that some of those animations are truly giggle-worthy, if not plain ridiculous. The characters also don't have the pizzazz of those from the earlier games. I think people were just expecting a progression rather than regression from something big like a Mass Effect game.

memememmemememememe.... mememememememe... :p
 


Let's be serious, BioWare sucks at animation. If the story is good I'll give them a pass, if it sucks they are dead to me. First game I've preordered since Halo 3.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Zuul
like this
I don't see anything out of the ordinary. It's not the greatest animation but it's not hideous or anything. Mankind Divided was really worse as others have pointed out before. The problem is that the character itself looks ugly as fuck, but I never play default anyway so that's a who cares for me.
 
M76 said:
I don't see anything out of the ordinary. It's not the greatest animation but it's not hideous or anything. Mankind Divided was really worse as others have pointed out before. The problem is that the character itself looks ugly as fuck, but I never play default anyway so that's a who cares for me.
Click to expand...

I would go as far to say the characters look ugly as fuck. Might be able to fix one, but fixing em all is beyond me.
 
J3RK said:
I actually just got done saying something similar about the screen resolution speculation about Nier: Automata. I agree with you here. There are games that I expect to be perfect for what they are, and then there are games that I just want to be fun. Or even games that I care more about how they look, purely because I want some big budget flash once in a while. However, in the case of this... It's more funny to me than anything. I'll still play and enjoy the game, but you HAVE to admit that some of those animations are truly giggle-worthy, if not plain ridiculous. The characters also don't have the pizzazz of those from the earlier games. I think people were just expecting a progression rather than regression from something big like a Mass Effect game.

memememmemememememe.... mememememememe... :p
Click to expand...


Yes the animations at times look goofy as all hell and I laughed at them for it. It wasn't one of those "Oh God this game is AWFUL! Look at this garbage!". More along the lines of "oh jesus, we saw this shit in ME3 when my femshep ran like she got plowed by a literal train bow legged style." Still didn't ruin the game for me at all and loved every minute of my journey.
 
Aireoth said:
Ok, no one has said it yet... why does the Salarian look like it has joker makeup on its lips?

Good luck to those that preordered, after ME3 and DA2 I'll never preorder a EA game again.
Click to expand...

I fix for you.

Everything that EA touches, turns to shite.

I've quit buying anything remotely connected to them...If this is what they feel is a AAA title, they can get fucked.
 
Semantics said:
You know i don't quite see as many SJW on internet forums complaining about everything in life as i do people complaining about how everything is SJW fault. It's almost like SJW actually do something with their lives or SJW are nonexistent.
Click to expand...
SJWs themselves are not that numerous that you'd bump into them everywhere especially on tech forums. SJW is just a pejorative umbrella term for everyone who is in favour of pc culture in general, including but not limited to first world feminism.
But the mainstream media gobbles up their rhetoric. And they're loud as hell, and recently they always seem to get their way, which usually means we don't get something nice. Like characters redesigned, or bitching about the nationality or skin color of an antagonist and/or protagonist and such things. They're always so fast to shout racism, when they're the ones obsessed with race.
Unforutanely they do have an effect I've read about entire movie getting shut down in development becuase some organization infiltrated by sjws has dumped on them. SJWs are like cancer you don't need many to ruin an entire organization, they eat it up from inside, and when it's ruined they move on to something else to destroy. They don't care about anything but their virtue signalling ways and their own feelings.
 
Edit: Ugh. Using a "high" preset turns on and locks 1080p autoscaling. That's why the Fury X was doing so much better on High at 4k. Custom settings with everything at same settings for High but no autoscaling sees 25-30 fps @ 4k.

I'll still say that "high" 1080p upscaled to 4k looks better than "ultra" 1080p, but man...
 
Last edited:
Meh. It is known that Bioware cannot animate to save their lives, it is known.

The animations in DA:I were a train wreck as well, and that was on the same engine, it was also a great game.
 
Is that the only animation that is bad? If it is only one animation and the rest of the game is stellar than I don't see any reason why it can't be fixed with an update. Seems overblown to me.

Now the character who said she was the successor, the meshes/textures look horrible to me but maybe that is the way they intended. Who knows...
 
AceGoober said:
Is that the only animation that is bad? If it is only one animation and the rest of the game is stellar than I don't see any reason why it can't be fixed with an update. Seems overblown to me.

Now the character who said she was the successor, the meshes/textures look horrible to me but maybe that is the way they intended. Who knows...
Click to expand...

I think the animation problem is a pretty decent issue, sadly its over shadowing horrific dialogue, watch the video again, filter out the laugh track and what do you have? Its just awful, flat lines, and shit writing.

'Alec is dead?' Pause turn and walk away... who writes this shit?
 
Aireoth said:
Ok, no one has said it yet... why does the Salarian look like it has joker makeup on its lips?

Good luck to those that preordered, after ME3 and DA2 I'll never preorder a bioware game again.
Click to expand...

DA:O to DA2 shows how quick EA sucks the life out of companies.

DA:O was meticulously crafted over years. Just the man hours spent crafting each unique playable origin story (play all six of them for perspective on the world), would probably give an EA accountant a stroke. Why would you ever pay for more than one origin?

DA:2 was a hideous rush job. They actually used the same dungeon map, over and over, and over.... Seriously I think the same dungeon map got used half dozen times. It was garbage.

For ME:A. I saw some comparison to the original from a decade ago where the faces looked better then.
 
termite said:
Meh. It is known that Bioware cannot animate to save their lives, it is known.

The animations in DA:I were a train wreck as well, and that was on the same engine, it was also a great game.
Click to expand...

This is worse. Just spent three hours playing my trial period. I'm now just waiting for Tuesday so I can officially get my refund. I played through DA:I because while the animation was questionable, the dialog wasn't this bad. It's just...sweet jesus, it's just awful.

The action parts of the game are pretty fun, but it's like they didn't have a director *at all*.

*Every* human walks exactly the same way, like they're nursing a lower back injury.

Every line of spoken dialog sounds like the person is right next to you, even though you just watched them run about 30 yards away across a platform (open air platform, not some space suit mic check thing).

Goddamn toons that speak to the main character that have their head swiveled to lock on to the center of your face, even though the rest of the body may be animated as doing something else where they aren't facing you.

It's just so terribly, terribly bad. This would be a poor effort from a community college AP class for a high schooler, let alone a supposed AAA game studio.
 
Last edited:
Snowdog said:
DA:O to DA2 shows how quick EA sucks the life out of companies.

DA:O was meticulously crafted over years. Just the man hours spent crafting each unique playable origin story (play all six of them for perspective on the world), would probably give an EA accountant a stroke. Why would you ever pay for more than one origin?

DA:2 was a hideous rush job. They actually used the same dungeon map, over and over, and over.... Seriously I think the same dungeon map got used half dozen times. It was garbage.

For ME:A. I saw some comparison to the original from a decade ago where the faces looked better then.
Click to expand...

You're looking at things through rose coloured glasses.

DA:O was good, but it's spiritual predecessor, NWN, was mediocre. While I might get flack for this, Jade Empire was also lacklustre compared to Bioware's other offerings.

Bioware just built up some much good will with BGI&II and KoTOR that people were willing to overlook the failings of their other series until EA snapped them up. Then, suddenly, every misstep became EA's fault.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Click to expand...


A lot of similar animation glitches were in ME1 and especially in ME3. I even made a video some years back. I didn't grab the vast majority of them, I only recorded two, but there were plenty. Here are just two examples:


Much, much more of that in ME3. That being said, the facial animations looks fairly poor in ME:A going off of other peoples videos.
 
NeoNemesis said:
You're looking at things through rose coloured glasses.

DA:O was good, but it's spiritual predecessor, NWN, was mediocre. While I might get flack for this, Jade Empire was also lacklustre compared to Bioware's other offerings.

Bioware just built up some much good will with BGI&II and KoTOR that people were willing to overlook the failings of their other series until EA snapped them up. Then, suddenly, every misstep became EA's fault.
Click to expand...


I didn't say Bioware was perfect. Sure they had an off game from time to time.

But NWN is one of my favorite games of all time(It's actually paused in the background right now), the original campaign started as tutorial and was a big cheesy(gets better after the first chapter), but it wasn't a blatant rush job like DA2, and again tons of work went into it. The two NWN expansions (SoU/HotU) were better and it was great RPG Builder engine, with a toolset included, free multiplayer, free online servers. I have easily spent 1000+ hours on community modules.

Unlike DA games full of obvious bugs and quickly abandoned. They also kept patching it for years, running support forums for years, with lots of participation from devs. EA killed that, and even killed it for newer games.

Bioware was a company that really had great customer support. EA killed it all.

IMO CDPR is the spiritual successor to Bioware. A company that really goes all out to support their products can give good value to customers, like Bioware used to.

I want to support CDPR just like I used to want to support Bioware. Now that they are EA. I will just watch a let's play of it on youtube if I get curious.
 
Snowdog said:
DA:O to DA2 shows how quick EA sucks the life out of companies.

DA:O was meticulously crafted over years. Just the man hours spent crafting each unique playable origin story (play all six of them for perspective on the world), would probably give an EA accountant a stroke. Why would you ever pay for more than one origin?

DA:2 was a hideous rush job. They actually used the same dungeon map, over and over, and over.... Seriously I think the same dungeon map got used half dozen times. It was garbage.

For ME:A. I saw some comparison to the original from a decade ago where the faces looked better then.
Click to expand...

DA:O was mostly finished when they bought Bioware but they still managed to mess it up some by DLCing the crap out of it. There was the Shale DLC that they stripped out of the game(then included a code for first time buyers) as part of EA's efforts to get a cut of used sales and the worst was that damn Levi character they put in your camp with a mission marker over his head to shill the day 1 DLC that was likely(though not obviously) cut from the main game too.

It's one of my favorite games of all time but let's not pretend that EA didn't manage to make it worse in the short time they were involved.
 
A little birdie told me this game would be a bit of a disappointment 2 months ago. Guess the birdie was telling the truth from what I can tell.
 
Snowdog said:
The two NWN expansions (SoU/HotU) were better and it was great RPG Builder engine, with a toolset included, free multiplayer, free online servers. I have easily spent 1000+ hours on community modules.
Click to expand...

This. NWN, especially the first one, was an rpg toolset that shipped with what was basically an example module for you to play to get a feel for what the toolset could do. It was pretty amazing, especially for its day. I wish somebody would release something with the same simplicity and modern tech. The NWN2 toolset was buggy as shit and kind of lacked a lot of the same character.

Bioware essentially died when EA bought it. SWTOR was the last dying gasp of a once great studio. Mass Effect 1 was one of my favorite games- probably is still in my top 10 favorite games. Mass effect 2 was where you could really feel the transition between bioware making RPGs and EA making "Shootmanz #23, sponsored by mountain dew extreme (guitar riff)" with the focus on combat, the introduction of ammo pickups for guns that hadn't needed ammo at all originally, the cut down skill tree, the cut down equipment options, etc. I'm sure some marketing guy somewhere decided "we should really make this Mass Effect franchise more appealing to a broader audience by simplifying it!" and the result was something that probably started off great and then slowly turned to, well, mass effect 2. ME3 just continued the trend and we're seeing the apex here with ME:A. If it bombs- and it probably won't, but it likely won't make the staggering numbers the EA GameChurn™ factory requires to consider a game "successful"- some marketing guy will say "Well, it looks like nobody is interested in the mass effect series anymore!" And they'll blame the market trending away from science fiction instead of the fact that they just put out a shit product. And that'll be the end of the IP until somebody a decade from now resurrects it by making a new "Mass Effect" (without a series number) in order to take advantage of nostalgia.

TLDR: Fuck EA.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Click to expand...


Most of the game time is not spent watching animations. Also, I don't know about everyone else but I skip the animations totally once I've played through the first time or two
 
Last edited:
Flogger23m said:
A lot of similar animation glitches were in ME1 and especially in ME3. I even made a video some years back. I didn't grab the vast majority of them, I only recorded two, but there were plenty. Here are just two examples:


Much, much more of that in ME3. That being said, the facial animations looks fairly poor in ME:A going off of other peoples videos.
Click to expand...


I almost woke my 5 month old kid up from laughing under my breath so hard...I almost had tears! :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:
 
Snowdog said:
DA:O to DA2 shows how quick EA sucks the life out of companies.

DA:O was meticulously crafted over years. Just the man hours spent crafting each unique playable origin story (play all six of them for perspective on the world), would probably give an EA accountant a stroke. Why would you ever pay for more than one origin?

DA:2 was a hideous rush job. They actually used the same dungeon map, over and over, and over.... Seriously I think the same dungeon map got used half dozen times. It was garbage.

For ME:A. I saw some comparison to the original from a decade ago where the faces looked better then.
Click to expand...

And the original Mass Effect had the same maps re-used at least a dozen if not more times. While ME2 had no-reused maps. So your timeline is way off. Your biased glasses are biased.
 
Matthew Kane said:
A little birdie told me this game would be a bit of a disappointment 2 months ago. Guess the birdie was telling the truth from what I can tell.
Click to expand...
I'm not so convinced about that. All I see is haters fuelling their rage because they found something to hold on to that proves that EA is the devil.

"AH! Facial animations are mediocre - THE WHOLE GAME SUCKS ASS!!!! -
BUT DA:O was this good an that good! "

That's what I see so far.

DA:O is probably my least favourite game from the big six. So it always makes me skeptical when people cite it as the de-facto standard best Bioware game. So if this is not like DA:O then hooray! That can be a good thing just as much as it can be a bad thing.
 
https://my.mixtape.moe/fbvjpx.mp4


I think the issue with ME: A is simple, for those who don't know this is the first game being developed by EA Montreal. ME1-3 were done by the main Bioware studio, EA Edmonton.

Also the lead writer was new to Bioware as well, Chris Schlerf (He did Halo 4) wrote ME: A. He left last year....

What's sad is that they got the lead writer of ME back last year but put him to task working on SW: TOR instead of fixing up/adding to ME: A.

On top of all of this it doesn't seem like the dev team are as familiar with the Frostbite engine, because it looks NO WHERE near as good as what Dice did with it on BF1/Battlefront or even what Bioware Edmonton did with DA: I. The animation quality literally looks like they took inspiration from Bethesda of all people, wooden characters, terrible facial animation/models. Literally playing through ME3 currently to get ready for ME: A and looking at these videos I think the original games had better facial animation. Hell even Half life 2 from 2004 does this better.

There's really no excuse for a AAA developer backed by a huge publisher like EA to look like this. I mean take this:


That legit looks like something you'd see in a Steam Greenlight game, the writing is terrible, the voice work sounds like it's a first-take and the faces look like something from a nightmare.
 
Seems the lighting and textures are pretty decent, but the animations are OMG bad.

Can you imagine being part of the animation team and seeing your work parodied like that? Might have to leave that one off the resume when the next job hunt rolls around.
 
Flogger23m said:
A lot of similar animation glitches were in ME1 and especially in ME3. I even made a video some years back. I didn't grab the vast majority of them, I only recorded two, but there were plenty. Here are just two examples:


Much, much more of that in ME3. That being said, the facial animations looks fairly poor in ME:A going off of other peoples videos.
Click to expand...


Sadly, the issue here is that these aren't glitches. It's actually how the game is supposed to look. It isn't so much that the facial animation is terrible, but it's largely absent, which is why it's so cringe-worthy when some actually shows up and is subpar. Biotic chick keeps the same half smile whether she's telling you that someone close to you died or is trying to crack a joke.

Facial animation is constrained to:
1) Blinking eyes
2) Moving lips
3) Occasional lifting of eyebrows
4) Occasional half smiles that immediately slide back to...
5) Resting botox/bitch face

Eyes never squint, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen an expression of gritting teeth (and that's just pulling the lips back from the teeth, so I'm assuming they were going for gritting), no furrowed brows and there are *no* sidelong glances. It's like it was animated by someone who had read about what people looked like but had never seen them interact before.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top