Mass Effect Andromeda has been getting really good reviews with one major exception – the facial animations are absolutely terrible. I’ve been watching my partner play through the game and the animations behind even main characters’ faces makes them look like they’re dead inside – and don’t get me started on the side characters or “filler” npcs. It really seemed like Bioware cut corners when it came to this immersion-breaking issue, and recent reports from company insiders have given some evidence to support that theory. Bioware apparently outsourced facial animations to other EA studios, and the results are not pretty.
The report comes from gaming historian Liam Robertson, who spoke to several Bioware employees anonymously. The company apparently relied heavily on a technology called Cyberscan which maps a person or object with digital scans and builds a 3D model in game. Instead of relying on artists to expertly sculpt the faces of Mass Effect Andromeda, Bioware took the easy way out – and it definitely shows. After the initial scans were taken, Bioware left it in the hands of other EA studios, one of which reportedly being EA Bucharest in Romania.
The fault may not lie with designers, however, as the interviewed sources placed blame heavily on upper management who outsourced the work to cut corners. Even though it’s still an EA studio, work in countries like Romania comes significantly cheaper and must have made things a lot easier on Mass Effect Andromeda’s likely massive budget. According to Bioware the outsourcing wasn’t to cut costs but rather because they didn’t feel the animations needed any more polishing, an opinion that is obviously not held by the gaming community at large.
On the 29th Bioware tweeted an apology to their community and said they were working to correct errors. Only time will tell if this includes the horrible facial animations. Here’s hoping it does.
A message from the @masseffect Andromeda team: pic.twitter.com/PRyeZFBzmT
— BioWare (@bioware) March 30, 2017
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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