It’s the talk about town: the first AAA game of the year to be released in such a shoddy manner: and it’s not Ubisoft this time. Mass Effect: Andromeda has tons of rough edges, and the most prevailing one is of course, the animations.
If you still need convincing, here’s a long compilation montage of all the hilarious and awful human and facial animations (as well as other bugs and glitches):
However, the blow-up on this issue has resulted some unethical actions- including a witch hunt on one particular former animator at EA. While the complaints and critiques are valid points, targeting individuals should not be the way to resolve this. Bioware issued a statement on this a while back to clear up that the said individual was not responsible.
Yet for those seeking answers how the horrid animations managed to ship on launch, Jonathan Cooper has some thoughts about it. Currently at Naughty Dog, Cooper used to do animation work for Mass Effect 1 and 2. Over on Twitter he has a thread that explained how much work it is to craft good animations, and how possibly Bioware underestimate the task.
Here’s a few selection of tweets from the thread that should give you a good glimpse of this:
That said, animating an RPG is a really, really big undertaking – completely different from a game like Uncharted so comparisons are unfair.
— Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017
In Mass Effect 1 we had over 8 hrs of facial performance. In Horizon Zero Dawn they had around 15. Player expectations have only grown.
— Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017
This, presumably, was because they planned to hit every line by hand. But a 5-year dev cycle shows they underestimated this task.
— Jonathan Cooper (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017
Suffice to say, the bar of great animations, and expectations from fans, have raised up ever so high in 2017, and it will only rise even more as games keep pushing for photorealistic visuals. The game to beat now when it comes to animations is of course, CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher 3, released back in 2015. AAA games are getting more and more expensive to make: even a reported $40 million budget can be not enough. Consider also the state of Bioware at the moment: most of the original talent that championed the games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age has left the building. And it’s telling that the current team is struggling to recapture that magic.
We will have a review of Mass Effect: Andromeda soon. Despite a lot of rough edges, there is still fun to be had with the game.