Former Mass Effect animator educates the masses on why Andromeda’s facial animations turned out the way they did

By now we know the deal. Mass Effect: Andromeda's got some problems, not just in the gameplay department (which should be priority #1), but the facial animations have undergone the more intensive scrutiny which in many cases has reached outrageous proportions. Jonathan Cooper is a former animator on the Mass Effect series now working at Naughty Dog and took the time to break down some of the differences in processes between how something like Uncharted and a big game like Mass Effect come together.

Cooper began by going after those who targeted and harassed Allie Rose-Marie Leost, one of the game's lead facial animators. "First though; going after individual team members is not only despicable, but the culprits and choice of target revealed their true nature," Cooper said. "Just as we credit a team, not an individual, for a game's success, we should never single out one person for a team's failures."

Then, Cooper gave a bit of insight into why it's impossible to compare Mass Effect: Andromeda's situation to more linear games, such as Uncharted. Here are some of his tweets.

"That said, animating an RPG is a really, really big undertaking – completely different from a game like Uncharted so comparisons are unfair. Every encounter in Uncharted is unique & highly controlled because we create highly-authored 'wide' linear stories with bespoke animations.

Conversely, RPGs offer a magnitude more volume of content and importantly, player/story choice. It's simply a quantity vs quality tradeoff. 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.

Because time denotes not every scene is equally possible, dialogues are separated into tiered quality levels based on importance/likelihood. The lowest quality scenes may not even be touched by hand. To cover this, an algorithm is used to generate a baseline quality sequence.

Andromeda seems to have lowered the quality of it's base algorithm, resulting in the 'My face is tired' meme featuring nothing but lip-sync. This, presumably, was because they planned to hit every line by hand. But a 5-year dev cycle shows they underestimated this task."