The degradation is shown so easily in the mass effect series:
1st game was limited by tech but effort was still made
2nd game showed this was the thought process at Bioware at the time as between Miranda, Tali and Liara it seems that was the focus on female characters although the rest of the body including faces were as attractively feminine as possible with tech available.
3rd game showed the strain especially with the self insert reporter, she looked bad compared to the returning and a new lesbian addition (and sex robot let's be honest here about EDI's design) but connection to previous game stopped a total degradation
Then andromeda happened, oh boy was 'their faces tired' with that game. I think the problem wasn't just that they relied on mocap more, it's that they thought it was a cheaper and quicker solution than having talented artists. The Western studios have lost the artistic talent to know what beauty is especially when they are trapped inside their bubbles.
The male protagonist in andromeda is traditionally attractive and very closely resembles the real life model. The devs deliberately hit the female protagonist with the ugly stick - she looks nothing like the (much hotter) real life model.
That muscular reporter in ME3, lol. I remember laughing because it looked so rubbery, so unnatural (actually a lot like muscular women IRL). Ive never been attracted to women who look like men, would rather a slightly chubby girl (who at least still has some feminine features unlike new Aloy and her porky contemporaries). I couldn’t help but notice when you bang Ashley for the last time that they’d just copy pasted the reporter’s body, what a let down, lol.
Then in comes MEA, featuring purple Shrek, Dolph Lungren mid-transition and “my face is tired” lady.
Worst thing is, once all the bugs were patched, Andromeda was actually quite an aesthetically beautiful game with some awesome set pieces and a lot of cool concepts like the black hole at the centre of the star system, the abandoned Asari arc sections, the desert planets etc. But the characters’ faces were somehow a shittier quality and less realistic than earlier games they’d made a decade earlier.
It’s one of the reasons I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt thinking “oh they just corners because they were lazy” etc. Now that we have confirmation that they deliberately set out to make characters uglier, it’s just made me nope out on half the games this generation.
Dragon Age shows a better progression IMO. First game had slutty lust demons, second game had busty pirate wench, by the third game the women were all ugly old slags and bull dykes, with the men still being chiseled calvin cline models.
Mocap is not why andromeda looked so bad. Mocap was used in 1-3. And mocap also isn’t a magic thing. There is usually quite a bit of clean up and manually adjusting bits of it. if they had relied on mocap more for the faces their facial animations would likely had been better. What they were doing was using a procedural system to make the faces deform with the va work on some of the characters. This system could have been a good idea considering how dialogue heavy the series is, but it did not work well and they shipped with it anyways. The andromeda team had quite a bit of inexperienced people working at all levels of production with an engine they didn’t know how to use and a writing staff with a political narrative they wanted to push. On top of taking feed back from feminist harpies and intentionally making all female characters ugly..
Also, they were using the EXACT same tech and performance capture tech that DICE used for BF3 and BF4, they called it 4D Capture because it was so accurate in capturing detailed features and movements at the time:
https://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/modular-rigging-in-battlefield-3
The crazy part about it is that Battlefield 4 came out years before Mass Effect Andromeda, so there's no excuse about the tech not supporting what they were trying to do.
Everyone blaming the tech is still using Lefty talking points. It was never a tech issue, it was an agenda, as you said, plain and simple.
Exactly, and the argument that frostbite wasn’t built for rpgs is silly considering it also wasnt built for fifa, but I believe that years fifa came out built on frostbite and no one ran around like they just filled up their adult diaper.
Yup, you're right, and if memory serves, wasn't that the FIFA with the cinematic story mode?
I know Frostbite was also used for Mirror's Edge 2 and I think one of the Need For Speed games? Mirror's Edge 2 was a parkour-based, melee-focused, pseudo-open-world RPG. It basically had a lot of the same fundamentals as Mass Effect just without the overt third-person inter-mingling busywork. I don't remember there being any complaints about the faces, animations, or workflow of Mirror's Edge 2 (though the game obviously had other issues).
It's a real shame because the Frostbite picked up a horrible rep due to the corrupt journos at the time and the inept, activist-driven devs blaming the pipeline and engine for the woes of Mass Effect Andromeda, even though BioWare had a far tougher time making the original Mass Effect on the UE3, which was poorly optimised, didn't have a lot of support for what they wanted to do, and they had to use a lot of techniques to hide some of the engine's flaws, at the time. It really shows just a different mindset and skillset between the two generations.
The degradation is shown so easily in the mass effect series:
1st game was limited by tech but effort was still made
2nd game showed this was the thought process at Bioware at the time as between Miranda, Tali and Liara it seems that was the focus on female characters although the rest of the body including faces were as attractively feminine as possible with tech available.
3rd game showed the strain especially with the self insert reporter, she looked bad compared to the returning and a new lesbian addition (and sex robot let's be honest here about EDI's design) but connection to previous game stopped a total degradation
Then andromeda happened, oh boy was 'their faces tired' with that game. I think the problem wasn't just that they relied on mocap more, it's that they thought it was a cheaper and quicker solution than having talented artists. The Western studios have lost the artistic talent to know what beauty is especially when they are trapped inside their bubbles.
The male protagonist in andromeda is traditionally attractive and very closely resembles the real life model. The devs deliberately hit the female protagonist with the ugly stick - she looks nothing like the (much hotter) real life model.
They got his body proportions all wrong and left him looking like a Pete Buttgig manlet.
Eh, at least with proportions an argument could be made that was done for animations sake rather than deliberate uglification.
That muscular reporter in ME3, lol. I remember laughing because it looked so rubbery, so unnatural (actually a lot like muscular women IRL). Ive never been attracted to women who look like men, would rather a slightly chubby girl (who at least still has some feminine features unlike new Aloy and her porky contemporaries). I couldn’t help but notice when you bang Ashley for the last time that they’d just copy pasted the reporter’s body, what a let down, lol.
Then in comes MEA, featuring purple Shrek, Dolph Lungren mid-transition and “my face is tired” lady.
Worst thing is, once all the bugs were patched, Andromeda was actually quite an aesthetically beautiful game with some awesome set pieces and a lot of cool concepts like the black hole at the centre of the star system, the abandoned Asari arc sections, the desert planets etc. But the characters’ faces were somehow a shittier quality and less realistic than earlier games they’d made a decade earlier.
It’s one of the reasons I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt thinking “oh they just corners because they were lazy” etc. Now that we have confirmation that they deliberately set out to make characters uglier, it’s just made me nope out on half the games this generation.
Dragon Age shows a better progression IMO. First game had slutty lust demons, second game had busty pirate wench, by the third game the women were all ugly old slags and bull dykes, with the men still being chiseled calvin cline models.
Mocap is not why andromeda looked so bad. Mocap was used in 1-3. And mocap also isn’t a magic thing. There is usually quite a bit of clean up and manually adjusting bits of it. if they had relied on mocap more for the faces their facial animations would likely had been better. What they were doing was using a procedural system to make the faces deform with the va work on some of the characters. This system could have been a good idea considering how dialogue heavy the series is, but it did not work well and they shipped with it anyways. The andromeda team had quite a bit of inexperienced people working at all levels of production with an engine they didn’t know how to use and a writing staff with a political narrative they wanted to push. On top of taking feed back from feminist harpies and intentionally making all female characters ugly..
This.
Also, they were using the EXACT same tech and performance capture tech that DICE used for BF3 and BF4, they called it 4D Capture because it was so accurate in capturing detailed features and movements at the time: https://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/modular-rigging-in-battlefield-3
The crazy part about it is that Battlefield 4 came out years before Mass Effect Andromeda, so there's no excuse about the tech not supporting what they were trying to do.
Everyone blaming the tech is still using Lefty talking points. It was never a tech issue, it was an agenda, as you said, plain and simple.
Exactly, and the argument that frostbite wasn’t built for rpgs is silly considering it also wasnt built for fifa, but I believe that years fifa came out built on frostbite and no one ran around like they just filled up their adult diaper.
Yup, you're right, and if memory serves, wasn't that the FIFA with the cinematic story mode?
I know Frostbite was also used for Mirror's Edge 2 and I think one of the Need For Speed games? Mirror's Edge 2 was a parkour-based, melee-focused, pseudo-open-world RPG. It basically had a lot of the same fundamentals as Mass Effect just without the overt third-person inter-mingling busywork. I don't remember there being any complaints about the faces, animations, or workflow of Mirror's Edge 2 (though the game obviously had other issues).
It's a real shame because the Frostbite picked up a horrible rep due to the corrupt journos at the time and the inept, activist-driven devs blaming the pipeline and engine for the woes of Mass Effect Andromeda, even though BioWare had a far tougher time making the original Mass Effect on the UE3, which was poorly optimised, didn't have a lot of support for what they wanted to do, and they had to use a lot of techniques to hide some of the engine's flaws, at the time. It really shows just a different mindset and skillset between the two generations.