They created an actually intelligent AI that's simulated live on your PC and to keep them performing the right scenes they have to threaten it with the virtual equivalent of a gun to the head
We had a similar system at Telltale that got really robust and detailed over the years. For example, You can tag moments of intensity so the procedural acting system could know when to punctuate certain moments with gestures and whatnot. The overall system got so good that you could build whole scenes in a matter of hours and they would look passible.
Yes, making it look passable is easier than this implies (in the grand scheme) but failing to even accomplish that, is suggestive of MANY large failings (likely from the top down). Bottom Up failures usually mean just poor...everything.
The team that made Andromeda was entirely different from that that had made the first 3 Mass Effect games though they did do the multiplayer in ME3. The realistic development schedule was only about a year with a lot of their previous work scrapped and multiple different teams from multiple different time zones making it even more difficult to work on.
Watch some of the cutscenes in The Witcher 3 again: Even when idling, characters are noticeably breathing, moving their arms slightly, gradually adjusting their weight from one side to the other. When they turn to face the player, often they'll adjust not only where their head and eyes are looking, but also the rest of their body with it. The animation showing Yennefer is a great example, where she not only moved her head, but her torso with it as the target moved out of the comfortable range of her head movement. In the process, her arms move too, making it looks like she was moving to better support her shifting weight. They also incorporate hand and arm movement in conversation, even if the hands aren't visible, since this introduces realistic body movement with it that makes the character look like they're more naturally conversing. In comparison, Andromeda's characters move like robots: Often with extremities often in odd fixed positions, even when the character is moving (at 12:22 - What is Cora - the person on the left - doing with their arms? Why aren't they moving? And why are her hands pointing straight downwards with her arms at that angle?!), any fidgets seem to be either back and forth in a set timed motion, or noticeably jerky and short, making them look canned, rather than someone adjusting their stance, and that's if they have any fidgeting at all (Sara's body isn't moving at all for a solid second or two at 12:28 when listening, for example). The close up headshots during conversation are even worse, with the head being the only thing that moves, while the shoulders remain eerily still (see 12:58).
I don't think its fair to compare the two. We now know that Andromeda was made in a rush and the final build was made in about 7 months. The animations were automated and weren't animated by actual people, well at least not polished by them.
@@CoreStarter Most of the budget probably went into the prototypes. I'm just saying it would cost a lot to keep rebuilding a game again and again. Not only that but the morale of the devs probably went down the more the game was rebuilt. And at that last 7 months the devs were probably dead inside and Bioware had only a portion of the money that they started with. And before anyone says something about Obsidian making New Vegas within a year, remember that they already had most of the work done for them. They didn't make New Vegas from scratch.
@@CoreStarter nah, WItcher 3 had a budget of around 80 million and Andromeda a budget around 100 million (yes it is more, but not that much, considering the dimensions . . .)
I would have been fine with the shitty graphics and weird looking asari and angara, bugs and all if the writing was at least good... But asking for a good story nowadays is too much to ask of bioware I guess.
@@OdisraFlyrunner I wouldn't say Inquisition is entirely bad writing, but I will agree that it's main story could stand to be much better. The next Dragon Age is shaping up to have an interesting story, but who knows when or if that'll get released, and how consumer friendly and well built it'll be.
The Witcher 3’s dialogue animation system is just mind boggling. It’s such a huge jump from Witcher 2. That game can last like 120 hours even without DLC and somehow it all manages to feel carefully directed
It was all auto generated, no manual touch ups. According to devs, they even volunteered to come in on weekends to do the work, but management thought it was good enough. Management sunk Andromeda (as well as the writers imo).
@@Kai-tn4yx Even if what you say it's true Andromeda's development cycle was a complete trainwwerck, most of the actual development was made in a year. That's shorter than even Majora's Mask and that game at least used a ton of assets from Ocarina of Time.
@@Kai-tn4yx Witcher 3 was not horrifically understaffed during development and was produced in a studio that had made other Witcher titles before in an engine they were familiar with, plus it did not have drastic content reductions 18 months prior to release. Inquisition looks better than Andromeda, but there are still some issues and the game honestly isn't great in comparison with other Dragon Age games. It just didn't get lambasted the way Andromeda did because it at least looked competent and still had the same characters as previous DA games, so fans were more forgiving.
@@jobdylan5782 oh, it's definitely relevant. Had Andromeda been given 2 or 3 years of actual development time, the end result would have likely been a lot more polished. With the perfect storm of everything in the development cycle going wrong: lack of a cohesive vision, disagreements and lack of communications between studios, unfamiliarity with the engine, not enough time spent in actual development, etc, it's honestly amazing that Andromeda came out as decently as it did.
Personally, I assumed it was a rigging problem. The animations just moved weirdly, the lips moving everywhere, and the exaggerated floppy expressions they were giving makes it look like the weight paints had changed or something like that.
Ryan Radcliffe Part of me thinks some of the default characters were preset with that smile, which the script was not intended to modify, because as you see there not ALL the characters have the same issues, thus meaning the characters are not rigged or modeled in the same way.
i have a feeling it might have a problem with the data strings.. as the video also said the way the characters move makes me feel like at some points movement strings aren't pulled at all and at others the wrong ones are pulled.. most likely coding gone haywire or scenes that after editing something else about it decided to break
I feel like generally their biggest issue was simply the eyes. Everyone seems to have their eyes wide open, and have unbroken eye contact, it's so unnatural...
yeah humans can keep an eye contact for around 6 seconds. anything more than that feels like they plan on killing you. what's also weird, is that their eyes move behind their upper eyelids, if they look up. you can't really do that in real life.
I love how real you are and how you lay it all out for us. Instead of attacking bioware you show us how it all works and why its not an easy task. Thanks for shedding light on this
I agree. Under it all is a decent game with fun combat and, at times, breathtaking environments that was unfortunately crushed by its predecessor's legacy
Exceptional coverage of the flawed animation in game development. This is what I have been hunting for years. Thanks for a very enlightening peek into the nity grittys of game animations.
Would love to see you break down Horizon Zero Dawn's animation system for dialogue and how they improved upon it in the expansion "The Frozen Wild". I think it might simply be a matter of -mo money, mo custom animations-, but still I found it fascinating how they added waaaay more character and style to the conversations in the expansion in contrast to the main game (which was also good, but not better-than-Witcher-3 good)
@@DantesInferno96 The textures and models are really very good, I think, but the animations are maybe not on the same level. Still, the result is very good. The prologue, playing as a kid, is really well done as well and I also liked the animations of the kiddo.
@@danielm.3511 it could be better in HZD but that studio hadn't made a game on that scale before so I'm willing to give them a break. As for witcher 3, the game itself is phenomenal so I guess we could overlook a few flaws.
08:56 >that the current reigning champ is CD Projekt RED with The Witcher 3. If you haven't seen it, you should, because their conversation system is ***breathtaking***.
*HOLY SHIT!* The analysis of the genius level creativity this channel is capable of is amazing! Even with the very long schedule, this channel is worth subscribing to.
I believe there was some controversy over the MC's looking too attractive so they were 'normalized' to make them look more 'normal' and that caused a lot of issues with MC's facial animations looking all over the place. Which was pretty noticeable.
@@Warhamer116 which is weird because the same people wanting them to be "normalized" are the same people that will tell you there's no such thing as normal.
This is such a great video. It takes vital relevant knowledge about the subject to give the discussion a proper context, and genuinely tries to understand the problem while acknowledging assumptions. Best of its type I've seen. Subbed.
This video got me interested in learning about how games are made. I wanted to rewatch it now that i'm in school. Been searching for hours. So glad i found it
Very new to animating 3d models and I'm really not enjoying it, but watching New Frame Plus certainly excites me and puts me in a modelling mood, so thank you for that. This series has been phenomenal help.
I have a lot of respect for the fact it takes very long to animate everything, and therefore a system like this is necessary, but I think they really need to, in some cases, look at "my face is tired" or "my father is dead" and realize that default animations are going to throw the entire scene's emotion out of whack, thus ruining their work creating that scene to begin with. Some scenes need that extra bit of personal animation to touch it up wherever normal animations won't cut it. In that sense, there's really no excuse. It is just a matter of them trying to rush everything out the door so quickly that they failed to notice the little things like that, which ended up being such a big deal that they helped perpetuate the admittedly over-exaggerated claim that the team didn't give a shit about animating anything, whereas the truth of the matter was that custom high quality for every single scene are basically impossible with the time constraints they have. Of course this circles back around to the ever-popular theme that publishers and shareholders constantly pressure these development teams into time crunches that are unfeasible when trying to deliver something of quality. Despite this, taking a few hours or days to tweak some of the mass-produced animations used in scenes with a large amount of emotional weight to them will heavily contribute to your game's animations not being meme'd on so hard, and thus affecting sales. If producers/shareholders could see this fact, a fact devs I'm sure are all too aware of by now, then we would not continue to have this issue with various "mass-produced" type games. You see the same thing with another BioWare game, Star Wars the Old Republic, where so many scenes that are supposed to be very suspenseful or action-packed have mass-produced animations filling them, thus ruining any weight of the moment.
if you spent millions of dollars on a product nearing deadline that seemed like it might never be ready, you'd probably rather try to get some money back for next time, instead of tank a hit that large EA has always come across to me as a company dangling by a thread and I betcha it was the difference between releasing a bad product and not releasing anything at all ever again
@Andy: Electronic Arts is an 8.5 billion dollar company. If a delay of a few months to avoid releasing an unfinished game is enough to cause them to go out of business, then they have serious problems.
@@ariochiv I think it may be by design that EA presents itself like that. "Oh no, we're SO far in the red with this rushed AAA title! We just HAVE to add in gambling, or we'll go bankrupt! Please, don't yell at us! We're so fragile!" Yeah, yeah, I'm sure the yearly sports game company is about to go out of business from one or two AAA flops. Cry me a river.
Theres tons of that type of content its just hidden behind a mountain of crap. If you like movies I recomend Folding Ideas or George Rockwell Smith. If you like History you should look at the great war.
I just discovered your channel. You are amazing! You are thorough, honest, resourceful and most importantly, OPTIMISTIC! You immediately gained a sub. Great stuff! Keep it up and cheers! :)
I spent a day at BioWare in the summer of 2016 as part of the Audio Engineering Society chapter at my alma mater. I signed an NDA back then but I think everything I could have learned then is basically out in the open now. There were a ton of problems here that I don't think were BioWare's fault, which mainly comes from interference from EA. The team didn't want to use Frostbite, because it was a lot more than a conversation system they had to build, they had to add all the RPG elements to the engine, because at the time the only games released in Frostbite were COD clones, it was perfect for linear FPS games, and EA just wanted their tech to be what delivered the new game. Which also meant the tools were not up to the standard the UE had with such a larger user base of creators. (keep in mind EA does not license Frostbite to outside studios) To exacerbate this, all of the EA studios pull from the same repo for the engine, meaning that when DICE made a commit to frostbite, it would break a bunch of stuff that BioWare was working on with both Andromeda and Dragon Age. Even simple things like spending weeks on the procedural part of how footstep sounds were triggered by foot and floor geometry, an update from the engine would come from another studio and it would break the system, and the studio would not be informed of the changes in the update, let alone the teams that worked on the detailed things like animation and sound. It was an uphill struggle for them from the beginning and I don't think the pressure ever let up. The glitches and breakage probably happened right up until the end. I remember thinking that I wasn't sure exactly how much they had done, because they didn't show us much content from the game, but it was only 8 months or so until release and I was wondering if it was going to be delayed or not. Those guys definitely poured their heart and soul into the game, but they probably broke themselves doing it. Corporate interested rarely align with artistic endeavor. Add to this the fact that they had entire floors of their office working on a "super secret project" they wouldn't tell us about even with the NDA (we werent even allowed on the floors the super secret team was working on), and in hindsight, that game was obviously Anthem. So they were developing 3 games concurrently, and I have no idea if Anthem was something they really wanted to do or not, I haven't heard good things. It all sucks. I hope Mass Effect isn't shelved forever because of this. The perils of corporate ownership under EA. Or Activision. Or in some cases, Zenimax.
man MassEffect 1 faces still look fantastic, and the faces in Andromeda dont even come close. Unfortunately ME Andromeda had a lot more problems than just the conversation animations, both visually and technically.
Csumbi that's what you get when your publisher is ea. They only had one year to make this game. And compared to "anthem", which was main bioware's game, being in development for 6 years, guys responsible for andromeda did their best.
Again, thanks for that video! I've learned a ton of things, on subjects i never really questionned myself. It really helps to put things in perspective. Plus the additionnal links are welcome !
if one piece break, the entire scene can fall to pieces. ...and here I'm thinking about cyberpunk, with typical dialogue where the whatever the NPC is holding, will eventually fly away.
I just rewatched this today a week after the Sonic animation video came out and was surprised to see the sonic video linked at the end of this one. Unless there's some sort of automatic system for putting those links in a bunch of videos at once I'm impressed you went this far back to add that.
nah, I'm pretty sure he just chose his most recent video to be linked at the end screen of his videos. TH-cam will automatically update the video with the most recent one. instead of manually linking specific video's at the end of each video, he decided to simply task youtube with linking his most recent video.
it is worth mentioning that frostbite was made for 1st person shooters like battlefield, and has been molded to work for multiple genres many of which have notorious issues. the framework for the engine even when originaly concieved was pretty touchy for anyone who wasnt dice, like a step up from the creation engine at best.
Please do an episode on Kindom Come: Deliverance. The key animations in dialogues are hilarious, and few enough to become acutely noticeable after a few dozens of hours of gameplay. I love the double index finger up for emphasis. 😅
Glad to see these videos again. This one was particularly insightful, so... Thanks! By the way, could you do a video in the future about Fighting game animation (Particularly looking at Skullgirls and Guilty Gear Xrd for examples)
3 years later and we are now all talking about a game CD Projekt RED made and it's this video that has given me a better perspective on why they truly do deserve a chance
I appreciate these insights (especially the Witcher info), but I think it's pretty safe to say that whatever happened, it was rushed out the door regardless. And I think most people understand that mistakes happen, problems occur, etc., but for it to happen so often in the very first hour or two, during which only so many things can happen anyway? Even if they only had time to polish 10% of the dialogue scenes, you'd think they'd focus on the "first impression" moments.
from what i understood there was a large array of problems working against the ME. From tech issues, engine incompatibility, inter-studio interference and so on. There appeared to exist rivalries between studios back then and each was actively trying to sabotage each other when possible. Changing engine half way through development was a disaster. They were already about half way done when EA demanded they switch from UE3 to frostbite. Everything had to be done from scratch in an engine that was not prepared for RPGs but very solid for FPS games. They not only had to re-do all the work for the game, but write new functions and systems for the engine itself so it would be easier to support RPG elements. And somewhere down the line some departments in the studio were using Maya for moddeling, others were using (i think) 3D Studio Max, which tend to be incompatible when put together. As an example, Maya uses the Z axis as its forward axis. UE4 uses X axis as its forward axis. If you make a model or animation in Maya intending to port it to UE4 and not take into account that difference in orientation, then the results will be disastrous. And trust me, it's very easy to forget and overlook something as simple as orientation. I personally ran into that issue not two weeks ago for example.
All of the cutscenes in Buffy on the XBox, in 2002, were done using our proprietary Dialog System, which had myself (Lead Designer) and the company Creative Director editing camera offsets and animation cues hand edited in an Excel spreadsheet, while the phoneme system handled head-tracking, blinking and lip sync.
That's Keith David. He's also Goliath from Gargoyles, Dr. Facilier from The Princess and the Frog, and the voice-over guy from the Obama-era Navy commercials.
Andromeda must have undergone some serious improvements since release, as I played it for the first time recently and was actually quite impressed by the facial animations. During the first mission (where Ryder has their helmet on the entire time) I remember thinking during one of the cutscenes, “well, at least she has expressive eyes” - it was only afterwards that I remembered that expressionless eyes were one of the chief complaints about the game.
RPG conversation animations are combination of gesture animations and lip syncing, though some do it better than others. Personally, I like Dark Souls approach for third person game with no close up cams for conversations.
Awesome video, I always had the curiosity to know how the fuck conversations in RPGs worked, especially after seeing the godly work in TW3, and you clarified it greatly
Game development is fascinating! and games in general are a pretty new media, there's SO much to improve, so much to learn!!! I love it xD even though I'm not a dev, I have so much fun learning how these systems are made and how everything's put together, heck sometimes I have more fun watching GDC content than playing average games :P maybe I become a dev someday as well xD I'm super young anyway :P
Actually early versions of videogames already in the 60s. Similar with VR already tried out in the 30s. It is a lot of hit and miss and hype and no-one cares. I think game developers have to relearn that graphic isn't everything. As long as the animation isn't uncanny you can simplyfy it a lot. I think htey just moved to fast with the new engine without knowing if it realy fits.. Masks and helmets would had helped, too. Mario looks like he does because the developers wanted to avoid to animate his face.
oh my gosh playing the witcher 3 I was so amazed at how beautiful the world was I completely forgot about the faces. The faces just feel so natural. It feels so natural it's hard to even find a complement for it because it just feels like it is real.
Speaking as a sometime character modeller, rigger, animator, and programmer, Andromeda's character models just look poor. The animation highlights how poor they are, but they're just not very good. The female Ryder's neutral position facial expression is an unnatural smirk. Adding any kind of animation on top of that is going to be weird. A lot of the blankness of the other characters seems to come from poor rigging, or possibly missing bone animations in the system -- there's almost no upper face or brow movement, for example. The eyes -- I've done a lot of work on eyes -- they're just dead. That often comes down to shaders failing to get wetness and reflection right. Human beings really care about eyes. But in the end the biggest part of the mystery is how the quality control went so wrong, and that's not a technical issue. Great video!
Thinking about this further, what I'm describing is a lack of co-ordination between groups, for example the modellers didn't communicate properly with the riggers or the animation system devs. That reveals a naive production-line mentality at the studio and a lack of artistry and quality at the higher levels. I blame the management, basically.
Characters: the angara are so expressive! All female angaran facial expressions: :| Ya know, I used to think the most obnoxious eye glitch possible was in me3 when Shepard's eyes occasionally went through her eyelids (like in the citadel dlc cutscene where she beats James' pull up record), but then I started playing andromeda... I don't know what the hell went wrong with the eye tracking but Ryder's eyes are all over the place and it drives me insane.
well yeah, most of the time used on MEA's development goes to the planning on paper sheets (not including the office politics that made the entire situation worse) and also the biggest problem in the animation department was the change in both the software and the engine. If i'm not mistaken, on Jason Schreier's article about MEA the change in the animation software use resulted in something akin to folder wipe so they have to make many things from scratch again and combine that with the looming deadline caused by floundering pre-production phase then we got ourselves a Mass Effect that is way worse compared to previous Mass Effect
I mean, this is a bit of history on part of what went wrong in the game that came before Battlefront 2, which is when all tolerance for EA was lost. It *has* aged well, just in a different way.
When you stated that the previous Mass Effect games had been built in Unreal 3, I thought of something: the fact that Unreal 4 had come to the public sometime in the year Andromeda released makes me think if they had started the project around the time UE4 had released or if EA had decided to get a license before the engine was public just how much better this game could have come out due to the conversation system alone needing only some conversion from any differences between UE3 and 4.
![Mass Effect: Andromeda - A Trail of Hope Walkthrough [HD 1080P/60FPS]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/WQd3VGm88N4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Mass Effect: Andromeda - A Trail of Hope Walkthrough [HD 1080P/60FPS]](/img/tr.png)
i just love how all the characters look like they're talking with a gun to their heads
Plot twist: Bioware mo-capped it all, and it looks that way because EA was holding guns to their heads IRL.
They created an actually intelligent AI that's simulated live on your PC and to keep them performing the right scenes they have to threaten it with the virtual equivalent of a gun to the head
I laughed so hard my sides hurt 😅
We had a similar system at Telltale that got really robust and detailed over the years. For example, You can tag moments of intensity so the procedural acting system could know when to punctuate certain moments with gestures and whatnot. The overall system got so good that you could build whole scenes in a matter of hours and they would look passible.
Are you being rehired for the resurrected corpse that is the new Telltale?
@@connernickerson5509 guess not.
Yes, making it look passable is easier than this implies (in the grand scheme) but failing to even accomplish that, is suggestive of MANY large failings (likely from the top down). Bottom Up failures usually mean just poor...everything.
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Oooohhhh, you probably have LOTS of tales to tell about Telltale!
What jumps out at me with Mass Effect is the eyes. The human's eyes are moving erratically, and in general they all look like they're on acid.
in an entire year, this comment is so irrefutably true noone has replied
@L Train45 dolphin puffer fish drug
Easiest way: Give every character a mask that covers up their entire face
The For Honor approach.
Or the Absolver approach (for most characters)
The original Mass Effect was guilty of this too, though you could count on one hand the amount of times it happened
In Bloodborne many characters are behind doors and you just talk to them without even seen their faces.
Borderlands used to do this. Especially the first game.
The team that made Andromeda was entirely different from that that had made the first 3 Mass Effect games though they did do the multiplayer in ME3. The realistic development schedule was only about a year with a lot of their previous work scrapped and multiple different teams from multiple different time zones making it even more difficult to work on.
Vorance Surves so you saw the 1 year later vid too huh
@@koohikoo I know I did. I also saw a few others.
@@koohikoo This has literally been known to the world since before the game was released...
Watch some of the cutscenes in The Witcher 3 again: Even when idling, characters are noticeably breathing, moving their arms slightly, gradually adjusting their weight from one side to the other. When they turn to face the player, often they'll adjust not only where their head and eyes are looking, but also the rest of their body with it. The animation showing Yennefer is a great example, where she not only moved her head, but her torso with it as the target moved out of the comfortable range of her head movement. In the process, her arms move too, making it looks like she was moving to better support her shifting weight. They also incorporate hand and arm movement in conversation, even if the hands aren't visible, since this introduces realistic body movement with it that makes the character look like they're more naturally conversing.
In comparison, Andromeda's characters move like robots: Often with extremities often in odd fixed positions, even when the character is moving (at 12:22 - What is Cora - the person on the left - doing with their arms? Why aren't they moving? And why are her hands pointing straight downwards with her arms at that angle?!), any fidgets seem to be either back and forth in a set timed motion, or noticeably jerky and short, making them look canned, rather than someone adjusting their stance, and that's if they have any fidgeting at all (Sara's body isn't moving at all for a solid second or two at 12:28 when listening, for example). The close up headshots during conversation are even worse, with the head being the only thing that moves, while the shoulders remain eerily still (see 12:58).
Buddha yep absolutely they’re really amazing it’s just one of those things that are so easy to overlook
I don't think its fair to compare the two. We now know that Andromeda was made in a rush and the final build was made in about 7 months. The animations were automated and weren't animated by actual people, well at least not polished by them.
@@CoreStarter Most of the budget probably went into the prototypes. I'm just saying it would cost a lot to keep rebuilding a game again and again. Not only that but the morale of the devs probably went down the more the game was rebuilt. And at that last 7 months the devs were probably dead inside and Bioware had only a portion of the money that they started with.
And before anyone says something about Obsidian making New Vegas within a year, remember that they already had most of the work done for them. They didn't make New Vegas from scratch.
@@aldenmcgrath9722 And it was still massive stress for the Obsidian
@@CoreStarter nah, WItcher 3 had a budget of around 80 million and Andromeda a budget around 100 million (yes it is more, but not that much, considering the dimensions . . .)
I wish andromedas only issue was the animation, i think the writing got worse sadly
Yup, and both problems together make it an unrecognizable ME experience.
The same can be said about Inquisition imo. Good game, bad Dragon Age game.
I would have been fine with the shitty graphics and weird looking asari and angara, bugs and all if the writing was at least good... But asking for a good story nowadays is too much to ask of bioware I guess.
@@OdisraFlyrunner I wouldn't say Inquisition is entirely bad writing, but I will agree that it's main story could stand to be much better. The next Dragon Age is shaping up to have an interesting story, but who knows when or if that'll get released, and how consumer friendly and well built it'll be.
Yeslipoi That’s what happens when a project gets functionally scrapped several times and slapped together over the last year under threat of firing.
These videos are infinitely rewatchable, aside from the topics at hand the production is timeless. Brilliant job
I'm kind of in awe of how he pegged pretty much every problem with the production a month after the game came out.
The Witcher 3’s dialogue animation system is just mind boggling. It’s such a huge jump from Witcher 2. That game can last like 120 hours even without DLC and somehow it all manages to feel carefully directed
It was all auto generated, no manual touch ups.
According to devs, they even volunteered to come in on weekends to do the work, but management thought it was good enough.
Management sunk Andromeda (as well as the writers imo).
@Mister Guy But games like Inquisition or Witcher 3 have more dialogue than Andromeda, and they turned out fine.
@@Kai-tn4yx Even if what you say it's true Andromeda's development cycle was a complete trainwwerck, most of the actual development was made in a year. That's shorter than even Majora's Mask and that game at least used a ton of assets from Ocarina of Time.
@@Kai-tn4yx Witcher 3 was not horrifically understaffed during development and was produced in a studio that had made other Witcher titles before in an engine they were familiar with, plus it did not have drastic content reductions 18 months prior to release. Inquisition looks better than Andromeda, but there are still some issues and the game honestly isn't great in comparison with other Dragon Age games. It just didn't get lambasted the way Andromeda did because it at least looked competent and still had the same characters as previous DA games, so fans were more forgiving.
@@joseagustincuesta that has nothing to do with what they were replying to
@@jobdylan5782 oh, it's definitely relevant. Had Andromeda been given 2 or 3 years of actual development time, the end result would have likely been a lot more polished.
With the perfect storm of everything in the development cycle going wrong: lack of a cohesive vision, disagreements and lack of communications between studios, unfamiliarity with the engine, not enough time spent in actual development, etc, it's honestly amazing that Andromeda came out as decently as it did.
Personally, I assumed it was a rigging problem. The animations just moved weirdly, the lips moving everywhere, and the exaggerated floppy expressions they were giving makes it look like the weight paints had changed or something like that.
Ryan Radcliffe Part of me thinks some of the default characters were preset with that smile, which the script was not intended to modify, because as you see there not ALL the characters have the same issues, thus meaning the characters are not rigged or modeled in the same way.
i have a feeling it might have a problem with the data strings.. as the video also said the way the characters move makes me feel like at some points movement strings aren't pulled at all and at others the wrong ones are pulled.. most likely coding gone haywire or scenes that after editing something else about it decided to break
I feel like generally their biggest issue was simply the eyes. Everyone seems to have their eyes wide open, and have unbroken eye contact, it's so unnatural...
yeah humans can keep an eye contact for around 6 seconds. anything more than that feels like they plan on killing you. what's also weird, is that their eyes move behind their upper eyelids, if they look up. you can't really do that in real life.
Also, the darts are constant. It’s so.... much. It feels a computer forgot to stop darting all the time.
And no eyebrow movement
7 years later, Star Wars Outlaws has the exact same issue and it's not even made by Bioware
I love how real you are and how you lay it all out for us. Instead of attacking bioware you show us how it all works and why its not an easy task. Thanks for shedding light on this
2 vids in and I’m hooked. Never had an interest in the specifics of animation before, you’ve proved how wrong I was. Keep it up!
Whenever andromeda comes up, I feel nothing but sadness for the Dev’s who might have have worked very hard to make this game great.
I agree. Under it all is a decent game with fun combat and, at times, breathtaking environments that was unfortunately crushed by its predecessor's legacy
Exceptional coverage of the flawed animation in game development. This is what I have been hunting for years. Thanks for a very enlightening peek into the nity grittys of game animations.
Where has this channel been all my life? This stuff is so interesting.
Would love to see you break down Horizon Zero Dawn's animation system for dialogue and how they improved upon it in the expansion "The Frozen Wild". I think it might simply be a matter of -mo money, mo custom animations-, but still I found it fascinating how they added waaaay more character and style to the conversations in the expansion in contrast to the main game (which was also good, but not better-than-Witcher-3 good)
Love HZD. Would love to see anyone talk about it. I can't wait to see what a sequel brings
The faces in HZD look more realistic than the ones in witcher 3
Yes, I love that game, too. The cutscenes were a bit stiff at times but still looking really good and the writing is the bomb.
@@DantesInferno96 The textures and models are really very good, I think, but the animations are maybe not on the same level. Still, the result is very good. The prologue, playing as a kid, is really well done as well and I also liked the animations of the kiddo.
@@danielm.3511 it could be better in HZD but that studio hadn't made a game on that scale before so I'm willing to give them a break. As for witcher 3, the game itself is phenomenal so I guess we could overlook a few flaws.
Andromeda characters look like Pingu when talking. NOOT NOOT
Even Pingu has better animations
omg my childhood
Wow! I never knew about any of this or just HOW painstaking these animations were to make in RPGs. Thanks for educating me!
To be fair, when dialog is well written you may not notice this, but andromeda caracters sound like they look, like clunky robots.
08:56
>that the current reigning champ is CD Projekt RED with The Witcher 3.
If you
haven't seen it, you should, because their conversation system is ***breathtaking***.
You are breathtaking!
Their conversation system isn't breathtaking, their facial animations is pretty good though
*HOLY SHIT!*
The analysis of the genius level creativity this channel is capable of is amazing!
Even with the very long schedule, this channel is worth subscribing to.
The Andromeda main character's facial design in the first place just looks weird as hell.
I believe there was some controversy over the MC's looking too attractive so they were 'normalized' to make them look more 'normal' and that caused a lot of issues with MC's facial animations looking all over the place. Which was pretty noticeable.
@@Warhamer116 which is weird because the same people wanting them to be "normalized" are the same people that will tell you there's no such thing as normal.
She looks like a caricature.
This is such a great video. It takes vital relevant knowledge about the subject to give the discussion a proper context, and genuinely tries to understand the problem while acknowledging assumptions. Best of its type I've seen.
Subbed.
Great to see the new channel up and running. I am looking forward to whatever comes next.
2:39 - a wild Laura Bailey appears
the music analogy was brilliant, great video :)
This video got me interested in learning about how games are made. I wanted to rewatch it now that i'm in school. Been searching for hours. So glad i found it
Very new to animating 3d models and I'm really not enjoying it, but watching New Frame Plus certainly excites me and puts me in a modelling mood, so thank you for that. This series has been phenomenal help.
I have a lot of respect for the fact it takes very long to animate everything, and therefore a system like this is necessary, but I think they really need to, in some cases, look at "my face is tired" or "my father is dead" and realize that default animations are going to throw the entire scene's emotion out of whack, thus ruining their work creating that scene to begin with. Some scenes need that extra bit of personal animation to touch it up wherever normal animations won't cut it. In that sense, there's really no excuse. It is just a matter of them trying to rush everything out the door so quickly that they failed to notice the little things like that, which ended up being such a big deal that they helped perpetuate the admittedly over-exaggerated claim that the team didn't give a shit about animating anything, whereas the truth of the matter was that custom high quality for every single scene are basically impossible with the time constraints they have. Of course this circles back around to the ever-popular theme that publishers and shareholders constantly pressure these development teams into time crunches that are unfeasible when trying to deliver something of quality. Despite this, taking a few hours or days to tweak some of the mass-produced animations used in scenes with a large amount of emotional weight to them will heavily contribute to your game's animations not being meme'd on so hard, and thus affecting sales. If producers/shareholders could see this fact, a fact devs I'm sure are all too aware of by now, then we would not continue to have this issue with various "mass-produced" type games. You see the same thing with another BioWare game, Star Wars the Old Republic, where so many scenes that are supposed to be very suspenseful or action-packed have mass-produced animations filling them, thus ruining any weight of the moment.
the problem is someone approved on releasing this full price game in these conditions.
if you spent millions of dollars on a product nearing deadline that seemed like it might never be ready, you'd probably rather try to get some money back for next time, instead of tank a hit that large
EA has always come across to me as a company dangling by a thread and I betcha it was the difference between releasing a bad product and not releasing anything at all ever again
@Andy: Electronic Arts is an 8.5 billion dollar company. If a delay of a few months to avoid releasing an unfinished game is enough to cause them to go out of business, then they have serious problems.
Arioch IV Excepecially since they add loot boxes to all of their games.
Yeah. EA
@@ariochiv I think it may be by design that EA presents itself like that.
"Oh no, we're SO far in the red with this rushed AAA title! We just HAVE to add in gambling, or we'll go bankrupt! Please, don't yell at us! We're so fragile!"
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure the yearly sports game company is about to go out of business from one or two AAA flops. Cry me a river.
It’s nice seeing mature, educational content on TH-cam. I was getting pretty close to leaving the platform
Theres tons of that type of content its just hidden behind a mountain of crap. If you like movies I recomend Folding Ideas or George Rockwell Smith. If you like History you should look at the great war.
This was so educational! Love your work Dan, both here and on Playframe with Dan Jones and Carrie
your professional insights into the industry are super interesting. nice video!
I just discovered your channel. You are amazing! You are thorough, honest, resourceful and most importantly, OPTIMISTIC! You immediately gained a sub. Great stuff! Keep it up and cheers! :)
I spent a day at BioWare in the summer of 2016 as part of the Audio Engineering Society chapter at my alma mater. I signed an NDA back then but I think everything I could have learned then is basically out in the open now. There were a ton of problems here that I don't think were BioWare's fault, which mainly comes from interference from EA. The team didn't want to use Frostbite, because it was a lot more than a conversation system they had to build, they had to add all the RPG elements to the engine, because at the time the only games released in Frostbite were COD clones, it was perfect for linear FPS games, and EA just wanted their tech to be what delivered the new game. Which also meant the tools were not up to the standard the UE had with such a larger user base of creators. (keep in mind EA does not license Frostbite to outside studios)
To exacerbate this, all of the EA studios pull from the same repo for the engine, meaning that when DICE made a commit to frostbite, it would break a bunch of stuff that BioWare was working on with both Andromeda and Dragon Age. Even simple things like spending weeks on the procedural part of how footstep sounds were triggered by foot and floor geometry, an update from the engine would come from another studio and it would break the system, and the studio would not be informed of the changes in the update, let alone the teams that worked on the detailed things like animation and sound. It was an uphill struggle for them from the beginning and I don't think the pressure ever let up. The glitches and breakage probably happened right up until the end. I remember thinking that I wasn't sure exactly how much they had done, because they didn't show us much content from the game, but it was only 8 months or so until release and I was wondering if it was going to be delayed or not.
Those guys definitely poured their heart and soul into the game, but they probably broke themselves doing it. Corporate interested rarely align with artistic endeavor.
Add to this the fact that they had entire floors of their office working on a "super secret project" they wouldn't tell us about even with the NDA (we werent even allowed on the floors the super secret team was working on), and in hindsight, that game was obviously Anthem. So they were developing 3 games concurrently, and I have no idea if Anthem was something they really wanted to do or not, I haven't heard good things.
It all sucks. I hope Mass Effect isn't shelved forever because of this. The perils of corporate ownership under EA. Or Activision. Or in some cases, Zenimax.
man MassEffect 1 faces still look fantastic, and the faces in Andromeda dont even come close. Unfortunately ME Andromeda had a lot more problems than just the conversation animations, both visually and technically.
Csumbi that's what you get when your publisher is ea. They only had one year to make this game.
And compared to "anthem", which was main bioware's game, being in development for 6 years, guys responsible for andromeda did their best.
Again, thanks for that video! I've learned a ton of things, on subjects i never really questionned myself. It really helps to put things in perspective. Plus the additionnal links are welcome !
I say it is Studio meddling which EA is very well known for.
I am seriously shocked you are not more famous. Great videos! Thank you.
if one piece break, the entire scene can fall to pieces.
...and here I'm thinking about cyberpunk, with typical dialogue where the whatever the NPC is holding, will eventually fly away.
I feel like Bioware is on a hair's breadth of being shut down after this game and Anthem.
EA's next victim.
I just rewatched this today a week after the Sonic animation video came out and was surprised to see the sonic video linked at the end of this one. Unless there's some sort of automatic system for putting those links in a bunch of videos at once I'm impressed you went this far back to add that.
nah, I'm pretty sure he just chose his most recent video to be linked at the end screen of his videos. TH-cam will automatically update the video with the most recent one. instead of manually linking specific video's at the end of each video, he decided to simply task youtube with linking his most recent video.
"My father's dead..."
*smiles placidly*
it is worth mentioning that frostbite was made for 1st person shooters like battlefield, and has been molded to work for multiple genres many of which have notorious issues. the framework for the engine even when originaly concieved was pretty touchy for anyone who wasnt dice, like a step up from the creation engine at best.
Easy way: the Dark Souls way, they just didn't bother in any dialogue animations.
Poor little Andre gets ignored
@@Markus-8Muireg beat me to it by 2 days
Those who put a helmet on their head doesn't have to animate their mouth.
-Oscar the fateless-
Metthew Shesam - Dark Sauce 3 Seasoned ash
It is only human to commit a sin. KEHEHEHEHEH.
aye true gameplay driven game being literally gameplay driven 😁
Character: My father died in the war, I will never stop crying
Character: (:
Lol why is everybody smiling
Please do an episode on Kindom Come: Deliverance. The key animations in dialogues are hilarious, and few enough to become acutely noticeable after a few dozens of hours of gameplay. I love the double index finger up for emphasis. 😅
The finger always takes me right out of the immersion, oh wait the entire game does that
I've just figured out your channel, every video I watch is gold! Congrats!
Glad to see these videos again. This one was particularly insightful, so... Thanks! By the way, could you do a video in the future about Fighting game animation (Particularly looking at Skullgirls and Guilty Gear Xrd for examples)
and then he did several Smash Bros videos.
Well, he got there!
2:40 eyy, i love seeing the critical role cast in places i don’t expect
Best video of this series by far
8:59 No you’re breathtaking!
I hear that starmap music i get chills and nostalgia. Great way to get your mass effect fans to stick to the end!
3 years later and we are now all talking about a game CD Projekt RED made and it's this video that has given me a better perspective on why they truly do deserve a chance
You made me realize I need to appreciate the work that goes into game making.
I appreciate these insights (especially the Witcher info), but I think it's pretty safe to say that whatever happened, it was rushed out the door regardless. And I think most people understand that mistakes happen, problems occur, etc., but for it to happen so often in the very first hour or two, during which only so many things can happen anyway? Even if they only had time to polish 10% of the dialogue scenes, you'd think they'd focus on the "first impression" moments.
Wow this is so amazing! Thankyou so much for going over the process, it was really interesting :)
Wow, how did I miss that?
Been follow your channels since before you changed the names and just today it got into my playlist.
from what i understood there was a large array of problems working against the ME. From tech issues, engine incompatibility, inter-studio interference and so on. There appeared to exist rivalries between studios back then and each was actively trying to sabotage each other when possible. Changing engine half way through development was a disaster. They were already about half way done when EA demanded they switch from UE3 to frostbite. Everything had to be done from scratch in an engine that was not prepared for RPGs but very solid for FPS games. They not only had to re-do all the work for the game, but write new functions and systems for the engine itself so it would be easier to support RPG elements. And somewhere down the line some departments in the studio were using Maya for moddeling, others were using (i think) 3D Studio Max, which tend to be incompatible when put together. As an example, Maya uses the Z axis as its forward axis. UE4 uses X axis as its forward axis. If you make a model or animation in Maya intending to port it to UE4 and not take into account that difference in orientation, then the results will be disastrous. And trust me, it's very easy to forget and overlook something as simple as orientation. I personally ran into that issue not two weeks ago for example.
All of the cutscenes in Buffy on the XBox, in 2002, were done using our proprietary Dialog System, which had myself (Lead Designer) and the company Creative Director editing camera offsets and animation cues hand edited in an Excel spreadsheet, while the phoneme system handled head-tracking, blinking and lip sync.
Wow thanks for the breakdown of how and why. I heard that halfway through the project the animations/build were scrapped and they had to start over.
Great video. I knew nothing about conversation systems beforehand and I learned alot. Thank you!
6:50 The voice of the black president from Rick and Morty's "Get Schwifty" episode
That's Keith David. He's also Goliath from Gargoyles, Dr. Facilier from The Princess and the Frog, and the voice-over guy from the Obama-era Navy commercials.
I hope this channel gets more views soon. Really good stuff.
Andromeda must have undergone some serious improvements since release, as I played it for the first time recently and was actually quite impressed by the facial animations. During the first mission (where Ryder has their helmet on the entire time) I remember thinking during one of the cutscenes, “well, at least she has expressive eyes” - it was only afterwards that I remembered that expressionless eyes were one of the chief complaints about the game.
The problem is that SWTOR, a BioWare MMO released in 2011, has better modular phonemes.
I really appreciate this educational and level-headed look at Andromeda. Thanks!
8:54: It is funny how you chose to use "Its Breathtaking", considering that meme now lol.
Ahhh that was such a great moment
Watching this video made me want to replay the Mass Effect Trilogy. Thanks, I think you cured my boredom of games.
RPG conversation animations are combination of gesture animations and lip syncing, though some do it better than others. Personally, I like Dark Souls approach for third person game with no close up cams for conversations.
Ah, excellent soundtrack selection, and excellent video my dude
I've never even really thought about this. Great video
Well.... I am just discovering the channel and I am overwhelmed.... videos are amazing and informative
Awesome video, I always had the curiosity to know how the fuck conversations in RPGs worked, especially after seeing the godly work in TW3, and you clarified it greatly
I learned so much about game animation from this video, thank you so much for the insight.
*I genuinely didn't realize the Witcher 3's dialogue scenes weren't manually animated. Oh my god.
This video seriously needs to be seen by more people.
9:00 "Their conversation system is breathtaking"
*No, You're Breathtaking*
Game development is fascinating! and games in general are a pretty new media, there's SO much to improve, so much to learn!!! I love it xD even though I'm not a dev, I have so much fun learning how these systems are made and how everything's put together, heck sometimes I have more fun watching GDC content than playing average games :P maybe I become a dev someday as well xD I'm super young anyway :P
Actually early versions of videogames already in the 60s. Similar with VR already tried out in the 30s. It is a lot of hit and miss and hype and no-one cares. I think game developers have to relearn that graphic isn't everything. As long as the animation isn't uncanny you can simplyfy it a lot. I think htey just moved to fast with the new engine without knowing if it realy fits.. Masks and helmets would had helped, too. Mario looks like he does because the developers wanted to avoid to animate his face.
I’ll say this much, this video made me respect the work ir goes for cutscenes
Holy shit. That was the first time I've seen Uncharted animations. Jaw dropping!
oh my gosh playing the witcher 3 I was so amazed at how beautiful the world was I completely forgot about the faces. The faces just feel so natural. It feels so natural it's hard to even find a complement for it because it just feels like it is real.
seeing a video on animal crossing's speach system works would be cool!
How did I miss the existence of this channel? I missed your animation commentary. Guess I have some catching up to do
Speaking as a sometime character modeller, rigger, animator, and programmer, Andromeda's character models just look poor. The animation highlights how poor they are, but they're just not very good. The female Ryder's neutral position facial expression is an unnatural smirk. Adding any kind of animation on top of that is going to be weird. A lot of the blankness of the other characters seems to come from poor rigging, or possibly missing bone animations in the system -- there's almost no upper face or brow movement, for example. The eyes -- I've done a lot of work on eyes -- they're just dead. That often comes down to shaders failing to get wetness and reflection right. Human beings really care about eyes. But in the end the biggest part of the mystery is how the quality control went so wrong, and that's not a technical issue. Great video!
Thinking about this further, what I'm describing is a lack of co-ordination between groups, for example the modellers didn't communicate properly with the riggers or the animation system devs. That reveals a naive production-line mentality at the studio and a lack of artistry and quality at the higher levels. I blame the management, basically.
in Uncharted we not playing game. But we experience a story, and adventure. Amazing story, lovely dialogue and gorgeous graphics.
Characters: the angara are so expressive!
All female angaran facial expressions: :|
Ya know, I used to think the most obnoxious eye glitch possible was in me3 when Shepard's eyes occasionally went through her eyelids (like in the citadel dlc cutscene where she beats James' pull up record), but then I started playing andromeda...
I don't know what the hell went wrong with the eye tracking but Ryder's eyes are all over the place and it drives me insane.
2:40 Jester, in a motion capture suit.
well yeah, most of the time used on MEA's development goes to the planning on paper sheets (not including the office politics that made the entire situation worse) and also the biggest problem in the animation department was the change in both the software and the engine. If i'm not mistaken, on Jason Schreier's article about MEA the change in the animation software use resulted in something akin to folder wipe so they have to make many things from scratch again and combine that with the looming deadline caused by floundering pre-production phase then we got ourselves a Mass Effect that is way worse compared to previous Mass Effect
8:59 O Lol. Is Keanu there? You didn't predict it, did you?
He's from the future.
This freaked me out, maybe CDPR is so good that "breathtaking" is a universal term for their work, even before the keanu moment
No, you're breathtaking
This... didn't age well now that EA has officially abandoned the game and quite possibly killed one of the greatest franchises in the genre 😅
I mean, this is a bit of history on part of what went wrong in the game that came before Battlefront 2, which is when all tolerance for EA was lost. It *has* aged well, just in a different way.
OMG this is so interesting. Great content! Now i want to re-play TW3 just to enjoy their incredible system.
9:00 This dude just spoiled Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077 and we didn't notice a thing.
yep!
When you stated that the previous Mass Effect games had been built in Unreal 3, I thought of something: the fact that Unreal 4 had come to the public sometime in the year Andromeda released makes me think if they had started the project around the time UE4 had released or if EA had decided to get a license before the engine was public just how much better this game could have come out due to the conversation system alone needing only some conversion from any differences between UE3 and 4.
Couldn't stop watching even though I had seen it earlier. Amazing video!
New to your channel; what great education you’re providing here! Keep it up!