This is simply the result of the years Ubisoft spent bleeding talent. This is first hand experience: When you hire incompetent people in management, the first thing they do is get rid of competent people.
I don't think it's bleeding talent. I think it's "make cheaper and even more cheaper product but get same or higher profits". Happens to food industry, clothes industry, furniture industry, movie industry (CGI and effects). Classic "if consumer does not care about it we will spend even less care and money on a product." Everything is just worse now.
@@koshetz You described how private equity works, cut corners raise profits...that works for a short time. Ubisoft does some of that, but they also take risks like the Prince of Persia, something private equity would never do these days. The issue lies in that management listened to the wrong people, like most western AAA companies.
@@koshetz You think Skulls & Bones and Outlaw are cheap games? If anything the problem with these big corpo like Ubisoft, Disney or Sony is that they paid these people too much, yet the products came out and it's terrible.
@@VanceHelw well, all budget went to exacutives and hire-ups sallaries. I have a friend ex-ubisoft dev (worked around 2014-2020) and he always been vocal about being underpayed and overworked, people being hired and leave constantly for same reason resulting of games being created by newcomers who don't know how to do anything (because the lack of experience). Skull and Bones are entirely different topic since it's beein into development hell for a decade. And yeah, most games in development hell lose tons of money while resulting in mediocre product. Star Citizen comes to mind,
It doesn't matter that it's in a different engine. The average consumer doesn't know or care about the difference in engine they just see that it looks worse
@@D4C_LoveTrain1 I think the size is the problem. Too little or heavily mediated communication between devs, especially different teams working on the same project.
It’s annoying when the discourse around kay is meant to be ugly. Rather than the simple answer is the model isn’t finished and the game is mess that Ubisoft launched early.
@@NaviRyan Kay IS meant to be ugly in order to please all the uglies at HQ. Her actual face model is gorgeous but it seems they’d rather settle with The Crimson Chin.
Kay looks like some skinwalker with constantly changing androgynous faces, it's so weird and unsettling, wtf is going on at Ubisoft and the industry in general?
I honestly think it's because many studios aren't hiring the best people anymore. They're hiring the best from the pool of people who are left after eliminating candidates that don't meet certain social requirements. It's not even a conspiracy theory, most major studios flat out say this is their priority on their websites.
It is important to start looking at indie games, many of which make more impressive art and visuals than AAA, just the length of the games might be lacking. Understandable since you can't compare length when there are only so many people.
@@lancesniper This. 90% of what I play now are indie or AA games. Hell, probably more than 90%. The last AAA game I played was Elden Ring, whereas I can list off dozens of smaller studio games I've played recently.
Why should the customer care what tool the developer chose to use? It's like a carpenter who excuses his shoddy work because he chose specifically to use a dull saw. Well, that's on you....
@@annika3265That's not how being ahead of one's times should be. And Andromeda dev was under really bad conditions too... Btw, one thing they apparently discarded because they couldn't make it interesting was procedural planet exploration.
@@nicolasferreiro4492 Boy howdy, I wish Starfield HAD discarded that because they couldn't make it remotely interesting either and still fobbed it off on players lmao
Ever since they went the RPG route, it appears like Ubisoft uses generative animations in their cutscenes. Their eyes are always staring into space, and their mouth moves based on the sounds coming out, instead of being moved by an artist, or tracked by mocap. It completely misses all the soul of their past characters. I don't believe I'm looking at a real person in any games past Origins. They had this nailed down since AC2. I really don't know how a company can fall from grace so hard.
@@alaskanyeti907Every RPG uses this technique, mocapping every little scene for an Open World rpg is time consuming. CDPR has a talk about how they made the different kinds of cinematics at the GDC.
The contrast in personality is pretty astounding too. The two dudes in AC just talking normally, while Kay Vess does her quirky, stuttering, sarcastic, self-aware Millenial nonsense in which she is incapable of just talking seriously and in complete sentences
I can render a 100 trillion polygon sphere and stick it in a game engine and say, "Hey I have a model with THE MOST POLYGONS EVER running on a gaming engine!!!!" That doesn't mean it's going to be good. Numbers are just numbers. Artistic direction and quality is what makes a game at least, look good, not poly count.
Tell this to every AA game that is using the exact same photogrammetry assets of rocks and trees and making identical looking games, it drives me crazy. art direction is a dying breed.
Watched a video of a indie studio experimenting with complex textures to make amazing looking areas instead of high poly count. THey were using just flat surfaces but with the textures they were using it looked like one of those cave demos of nanite...was pretty incredible
@@jeremysumpter8939 I thought we already learned this lesson with Windwaker and Twilight Princess, when they both launched WW was criticized because it looked so cartoony and TP was praised because it strived for realism but as time went on the graphics in TP started showing their age more and more meanwhile the graphics in WW didn't age a day. It's hard to pinpoint but when it comes to graphics there seems to be a line where too much realism goes back around to where you start losing details, just compare the graphics of Peter Jackson's King Kong game in their original version and the ported version for Xbox they did a few years later. And chasing realism is ultimely pointless cause there will come a time in the future when it will start looking dated no matter how many polygons you render, it's specially bad if focusing on high fidelity makes you neglect more important parts of the game like the gameplay and storytelling, in Astrobot for example can you imagine if they focused on putting realistic textures everywhere instead of playing around with game mechanics and physics like they did? Or if the Alien Isolation devs focused on having more expressive human models instead of working on the Alien AI? Come on, thousands of Indie games come out every year and they can't afford all this fancy realism, they survive by working even harder on everything else. I'm a firm believer that graphics are the least important part of a game, if you can do them well and deliver a good game on top of it that's great, but for me at least there's no game that can coast by if that's the only thing they do well.
It should be mentioned too, all of those Assassins's Creed cutscenes from every game were ALL real time non-pre-rendered cutscenes. And they used the SAME exact detailed models as the gameplay. People forget that during this era, most AAA games with cutscenes were either pre-rendering cutscenes OR if it was in-engine, games would use far higher detailed character models and textures specifically for cutscenes. Assassin's Creed games always had lower fidelity character models compared to AAA games' cutscenes at the time, but far better mo-cap, animations and cinematography. And yet, compared to today, the old AC games look leagues better than what we get now.
@@binhaldon5078, just run the game and have a look. And try to remember the famous "no face" bug in cutscenes. It happened because a slow computer could not load the detailed model in time.
I hate to break it to you, but all games today have cinematic versions of characters. Hello, game dev here with many years of experience. They're either clever about the transitions to them, or they just fade to black when switching to them. If they were always using the cinematic versions of the characters, it would be a waste of data at runtime. Most, if not all AAA characters use a combination of bone deformation and/or blendshapes (interchangeable name). The truth is having 150+ bones active at all times would destroy performance. It's ok if you don't believe me, but take it from a Technical Animator that's worked in AAA.
@@DannysHauntedJourneythat infos all fine and dandy but isn’t the main point here that outlaws is using *cinematic models* and still looks pretty bad comparatively to assassins creed black flag while it use in game renders? Or am I missing a point?
Technological advances mean nothing when the talent utilising it has declined, and this is what we are seeing in western game studios This is to say nothing for the fact that , again, western studios have become over reliant on "new" advancements vs good utilisation,epic story telling and solid gameplay
Idk why people aren't focusing on that. It's clear as day what the problem is. The talent isn't getting hired based on merit anymore and a lot of people they're hiring are more worried about certain issues than they are with making a good game. But let's just keep acting like we have no clue why it's happening.
Given that we see massive amounts of studios going for the Unreal engine all of a sudden. My guess is to outsource work going forward instead of having in-house devs, easier when it is an engine people know like Unity or Unreal. We are gonna see a bigger decrease in in-house talents I imagine.
This is a typical example of the Uncanny Valley Effect, she looks human but there is something very wrong. From her expression, voice to the position of her facial features, everything is wrong. This makes her look more like an alien pretending to be human, to be honest, I feel a little scared when looking into the main character's eyes.
Han Solo was a good scoundrel, but it wasn’t necessarily because he was good. He was just in opposition to the Empire, which is unequivocally worse than being a smuggler… Having a character who is conflicted or toes the line between good and bad isn’t necessarily poor character design. A good RPG however, would let us pick how we develop that character as we progress further into the story. (i.e. Fable or Red Dead)
A leaker basically described that Ubisoft had to have a female protagonist that she had to always hit up instead of down aka empire and cartels, and that she can’t attack or rob or hurt civilians because of Disney. Yes a game with title of outlaws you can’t even be much of an outlaw.
@@NaviRyan I mean, I suppose that’s what happens when an IP is sold to a company who makes media primarily for children? Also, being an “outlaw” doesn’t inherently imply that you go around murdering innocent civilians for fun. But yea, it would have made for a more interesting game if it had a morality scale as well as the faction favor.
It's certainly a Reddit thing to go for extremes. If you are not 100% on board with the subreddit consensus then you get downvoted and potentially even banned. People have been making opposition subreddits to a topic for a reason.
Fr last ac game where the characters felt human, there even multiple side missions with mocap cutscenes, while nowadays they can’t afford to mocap the main story.
Care in your craft is usually a personal thing. Is not just the direction, is the care that every part of the production puts on the work. The lack of care, means the developers, from the ground level to the director dont care. Most likely, the people that is doing the games now, dont give a crap about their work. Which is very how current generation people do things. Plus all the office politics I am sure its going around. The product's quality is a reflection of the people that make it.
Polygons, stretched pores and individual hairs aside… the main issue is how “alive,” a model feels. For comparison, take a cutscene from AC Mirage and AC Black Flag. Mirage has the superior polygon count, detail, etc. of course it does and that is its own achievement. But the cutscenes and dynamics of the models in ACBF were superior. They felt (not looked, but felt) real, and immersive. It is proof that fidelity is worthless without artistic direction, camera movement, immersion, and dynamic cutscenes that are not mostly people standing and speaking to each other in idle poses.
I saw a talk by a Ubisoft developer WAY back in the day right after they used manual facial animation for the last time. They said that the facial animations were taking up too much time under budget constraints and would be moving to AI assisted facial animation along the lines of what Andromeda was using. And you could see as it transitioned from I thing Unity to Origins where there was a clear shift in how natural facial animation and lip-syncing appeared. It was purely for cost and man-hours. And every game since then has looked horrible.
AC Unity is such a good game...I still go back and play it routinely, because it has the best parkour, and probably the series' most gorgeous world. Unity is a classy, quality game, and I'm so sad that its first-impression with most people was that of....bugs.
Been an animator in the industry for about 5 years. Your right, facial animation in games now uses text to speech to generate expressions. Devs no longer have the money/time to pay animators to hand animate the face.
@@-Zakhiel- Greed. Fast food companies and clothing companies do the same despite also having billions. They want to do the cheapest product possible but to get all profits. That's why gaming companies try to save finances by not making proper facial animations or lighting.
Why haven't the tools or processes used to create facial animations kept up or been improved enough to make the process just as cost efficient as it was in the past? Why isn't facial performance capture the standard in the industry now? It's so jarring going from a game like RDR2 to something with hand animated characters that look so robotic by comparison.
Which is crazy when you consider SSKTJL, for its faults, looks amazing. You can point to the water and say "Arkham Knights looks better", which is true, but look at the facial animations and compare them to AK. The expressions are wide ranging, characters move casually, you can even see the pours in the skin and the sweat too. AK facial animations look pretty bad by comparison, it's just it did everything else better.
Ubisoft was never amazing even at their peak and Rocksteady was the crown jewel of gaming. Rocksteady deserves all the bile coming its way. Ubisoft goes away, nothing is lost of value.
@@johnnyflannigan136 wasn't saying Rocksteady doesn't deserve the blame. Just saying Luke is being extremely forgiving with whatever Ubisoft is putting out. (Also he's pals with JorRaptor, another youtuber who praises anything Ubisoft puts out) All in all, Luke makes solid points on a lot of things. Just the Ubisoft parts seem very soft
I honestly believe that there's a significant skill issue among certain dev teams today relevant to a decade ago. Especially at companies like Ubisoft. It's already established fact that some of these companies have drastically altered hiring practices over the past decade in such a way where merit and skill level aren't necessarily going to be prioritized in every situation. That's going to come with some seriously negative impact on quality results in any workplace, but especially something like game development. I just don't see any situation where that wouldn't be the case, at least to some extent. That's not to say there aren't still very talented devs at Ubisoft. There clearly are. But it does add up when there's such strong contrast in comparison to 10yrs ago, and across seemingly every facet of some games.
Most of these problems come from the fact that they are trying to automate most of these animations using programs and AI. It use to be that animators would spend hours polishing facial expressions. Now they just feed it to the computer to save time, barely anyone passes after the AI to polish it up and it’s a big mistake.
I always explained it to myself like this: the Tech to make it look good has been around for many years, but it doesn't scale well and costs too much. So they replaced it with some automated process that achieves 20% of the visual Fidelity, but at a fraction of the cost. As consumers, we don't want that, but as Ubisoft...
The biggest things are A: the eyes having no movement in SQ cutscenes and only looking movement in main cutscenes (meaning no squinting or anything like that, just looking and blinking) and B: Absolutely no eyebrow movement. We get so much information about emotion through eyebrow movement and the fact that even in main cutscenes there is nothing is ridiculous because you have no idea the emotions the characters are feeling.
Having watched so many of your videos these past couple of months, I have to say that you are way too easy on Ubisoft. Meanwhile you absolutely obliterate BGS whenever you have the chance. You have a very obvious bias. Both of these companies deserve all of the criticism they receive.
That's what you get when you hire based on boxes they tick bc you have to have this % of this group and that % of that group. People aren't being hired on merit and it shows, yet people want to act like this isn't a thing, hell even the companies are acting like they aren't doing it, even though it's plastered all over their website that's what they're doing. They're proud of it right up until gamers, aka the customers, started noticing dips in quality and then noticed they were all preaching the same message and started calling them out on it.
2:00 SW Outlaws also has some features made for Anvil, particularly, grass. If you look at it, grass is the same as Ghost recon breakpoint (which uses anvilEngine)
I think it's more the focus on creating more quests that made them loose the facial animations: More quests in open world = More time to animate = Much more expensive. To use Dynamic Facial Animations means you basically removed all the time needed to animate any facial animations for any quest you wanna make, which means you can just churn out as many quests as you want.
I think the issue is mostly due to Star Wars Outlaws being, well, a Star Wars game. It's not their own IP, it had a bigger budget and a larger scope, therefore the whole production is prone to major changes and revisions that they could not foresee. So it makes sense for them to decide not to use motion capture performance for the facial animation and went with AI assisted animation instead, to save time and effort. Ideally the animators would tweak them further but that probably would have been a costly endeavor. Of course older Assassin's Creed games would have better facial animation, back then you either do it with performance capture or animate them manually. It is a bit ironic that while developers have more options to do things now, those options don't necessarily make better games. It still comes down to how they use it. But hey, I'm sure the facial animation will be a whole lot better in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
Ubisoft has been guilty of having games that have character models that do not look anywhere near as good as their competition. Its like they decided that they will just force out games with character visuals still around from the PS3/360 era. Ubisoft in general at this point has no draw to me.
Story of the last ~decade is that studios sacrifice things we really care about in order to improve things we don't want as much. Undermining the core experience to make the window dressing really nice, while putting ridiculous budgets into said window dressing and trying to pass the cost to us consumers.
The facial animations bave nothing to do with the engine. Snowdrop is a damn good engine. It’s on the animators, riggers, modelers, lighting effects, even the cinematography and rigging of the morion capture crew, etc.
There was a detail in AC 3 and also in Unity that only Origins brought and that was the great work developers did with the facial expressions and animations. In AC3 I remember even the nose animations moved in a very realistic manner and the light went through the skin. That was jaw dropping for me at the time
One of the biggest downgrades to assassin creed games is the cinematics, since they moved to their current engine (origins and onwards), all the character look and move like robots, it stops all immersion for me for the stories of these games
I wouldn't say Snowdrop is not "capable" of handling face animations. Division 1 was developed in Snowdrop and the cut scenes and animations look great.
"this game isn't as good as one you made ten years ago" "You have to understand, it's a completely different team and engine" "Ok... This team and engine don't make games as good as the team and engine 10 years ago" How is that an excuse 😂? If anything, that's just admitting it's bad because you actually got worse?!
About the lip syncing: idk about other languages, but in german usually the localisers try to find sentences and words, that better match the mouth movements. This probably happens less in video games than in high budget movies, but it usually is still really good for a high budget game. And even if it is not a high budget, i´d still prefer natural movement than 100% lip sync movement. Also, now with AI, those lip movements can be adjusted rather easily. We already have that in a few games and even a movie (forgot the name of the movie).
Horizon 2 and I guess the first now also, have by far the best dialogues scenes, If a game claims to be a AAA game now this should be the standard they should they to reach
Yes its worse than 10 years ago because of late stage capitalism. They are spending less and less money on the production so they can rush to sales . When products get worse over time its because they are cutting costs to make even more profit
Actually, they are are spending more money than ever. But at the same time it often looks like there is no passion behind it. Because probably there isn't. The rank and file devs get told what to do with little to no creative input in large companies. Writing is outsourced to questionable consultation companies. In such an environment any and all creativity dies. Either a slow death by being rejected within the long chains of approval process or a quick death because the devs just stop caring and do what they are told. One of the more infamous consultation groups said it out loud: "Pay me to shoot down your white male lead game ideas".
Origins had really expressive facial and body animations but with Odyssey they got pretty stiff. When Valhalla came out it tried to bridge the gap between those previous 2 but it was still stiff.
When I worked for EA I remember when they called all of us into a room to happily announce that based on preorders our game was already considered to be a success so it would be going to gold almost immediately. I was baffled by this choice as we had only barely tested half the game and the other half wasn't even finished, we just had still to give you an idea of the concept we were going for on those levels. I never even got to see those levels before it was shipped out
Not just their facial animations, but faces in general. This push to make main characters ugly and “relatable” is incredibly idiotic. It ignores market and psychological data we have had for years.
Someone can be not attractive and still not feel bland. And attractiveness doesn't prevent blandness automatically. Yet most contested characters nowadays are either bland, if they aren't, obnoxious, or even somehow both at a time.
@@nicolasferreiro4492 I would agree with this. However, generally, with the data we have it shows people gravitate towards characters that are "better" than them in key ways. Men tend to prefer masculine characters. The Captain Americas, Thor, Joel. Things of that nature. Female preferences are different. However, the data still suggest they gravitate towards pretty women, especially when influence is considered.
Another thing to remember is that things look good or bad depending on if everything else in the scene is of similar visual quality and artstyle. That one NPC's face looks worse than it otherwise would because Kay's face is of noticeably better quality.
I think the reason why we see worse, well everything, is that devs with more experience has either left or been fired because those in charge wanted to save money. Those devs have then been replaced by less experienced devs that cost less, and if they ever gain enough experience they will also be fired so those in charge can save money. In my mind at least this would explain a lot when it comes to decline in quality. As for why development now cost so much more, no idea, most likely poor managment from those in charge.
Played through Half-Life 2 again recently and it was amazing to see the faces. The faces just have a life to them despite the simpler graphics. It surpasses so much we see today...still!
Things like models, rigs and animations are made outside the engine anyway, probably with Maya or 3ds Max. And yes, Ubisoft has a lot of similar series, Far Cry is basically first person Assassin's Creed, they can share a lot of technologies and wisdom. Do you need NPC behaviour trees for the inhabitants of a city, boom, we've done that a lot in the past and improved, I'll send you my description and you can either implement or reverse engineer it. You need a detection script for stealth, we have that literally at home. With their approach, which should work very well for the developers but I'm shocked that it worked that long for the customers, I've had enough of it after the first AC when I'm honest...
This is why STYLE held up against time. I love playing old games even though it's low poly it has styles that I don't really see in modern game that chasing realism
Combine a lacking engine, a young and and sensitive talentpool with a scared leadership and you got Massive Entertainment. THATS why you get games like Star wars Outlaws.
Little to no mouth/facial animation in anime style characters is something we have seen before, so its up to some degree expected. Having realistic looking chatacters that definitely don't move/emote/act the way you expect them to.
I think it is the layoffs and the fact that new developers are expected to bring the same level of expertise as people that are 20 years by one company.. this creates pressure and forces crunching which can not make up for the experience lost with people leaving. In addition the layoffs happen across the board so even if you get help it is from a team diluted by so many new developers expected to bring the same level of expertise as... well it just goes on and on..
The problem with a lot of Triple A companies is they are not retaining skilled employees. They all have revolving doors so they constantly have new employees playing a game of keep up, trying to learn the stuff that the people who left already knew. This is why Larian is doing so good, because they try to keep their talent.
The high level reason is inflation. It’s insidious. It makes everything harder and more expensive than it once was. You’re witnessing it real time in the video game industry
4:19 its subjective, but I feel the same way about No Man’s Sky. Even though it is impressive on paper, it really doesn’t impact me in a way that makes the tech worth it yet. I strongly believe things like the Nemesis system or something roguelike with continuity involving the player could be added to create a missing link that grounds you in a world with NPCs or persistent worlds..
i remember watching a long video about stealth animation and movement in splinter cell chaos theory, peak stealth gameplay, i loved the ef outa the game, we have truly regressed as a species when we cannot improve upon systems like that.
Yeah, people were pointing out this and other things. And people painted everybody like they were bothered it was a female lead, they were sexist, and that they just wanted gooner bait and more. No doubt that there exist people that were that way. Just disagree with how the whole discussion went into trench warfare. Can't point out issues like this on certain platforms without being dishonestly painted as the worst person in the world.
The issue isn’t just facial animation. It’s that the characters are stiff and stand around and the camera doesn’t move. Cutscenes in rh roast has characters move around and the cinematography was creative
Ubisoft really had something special going on during the ac bf an far cry 3 time, it was so unique an beautiful, they also did amazing stuff with far cry 4 an 5, even new dawn, they do amazing animations for the weapons & for the animals, how they go around an do thier thing, how they attack the player or other things in the world, sometimes the animals fight eachother, you can tell they put a lot of effort into that stuff an it looked amazing, That is why i believe they should do the dinosaur far cry, that could be like turok on a beautiful jp like island, that would be epic. But heck even if we go back to stuff like splinter cell black list & ghost recon future soldiers, those games looked amazing as well, an had super crisp animations, hardly any bugs. Whoever they had working on those games really needs to come back an work on more of them or something.
The reason why faces animation are baerly existent is because snowdrop engine is used for RPG like the division, is not an engine for story mode high production games, also ubisoft got lazier and takes less money to get the mocap and face animation, look at watch dogs ac odysey and valhalla there all runing in the RPG engine
I mean if they've facial animator layoff frequently to give bonuses to shareholder and executives then hire a new one to fill it up every time they had new project then it doesn't matter if you use Unreal 5, Unity, Anvil or even the holy and eternal BGS Creation Engine (may long it reign) it will always look worse since it's not the engine problem it's the human problem that's causing it
So in other words, it's like a home builder trying to sell a new 3,000sq ft home that builder claims is modern for $500,000, but is only worth $200,000. The builder built a house utilizing cheap materials, but wants someone to pay top dollar. Ubisoft is releasing games on an outdated, glued together engine and releasing games for $50-$60
Men with experience left, women who kicked them out have no experience. Easy as. Also I think they used AI to drive the facial animation like Starfield, so they either didn't capture facial animation or they captured a cheaper less accurate setup and relied on Ai.
For me I could forgive bad face animations, bad stealth, and all of that if things like the combat in general had more to it. Like mad Max came out almost 10 years ago and they couldn't have made the vehicular combat at least equal to that? I get they're using an engine this isn't really designed for, but for how long they've been working on this a lot of things feel quarter baked, not even half baked.
Not just animations, all the advanced mechanics like parkour, enemy AI, etc. are basically lost technologies. They required experts, and with the terrible situation at Ubisoft studios, people are leaving without documenting everything they've worked on. Leads at Ubisoft Singapore only hold meetings in French language, and they don't care if their developers don't understand it. That's how bad it is. It's not some kind of experiment with mecanics, they simply don't know how to do it anymore.
This is simply the result of the years Ubisoft spent bleeding talent. This is first hand experience: When you hire incompetent people in management, the first thing they do is get rid of competent people.
absolutely correct 100%
I don't think it's bleeding talent. I think it's "make cheaper and even more cheaper product but get same or higher profits". Happens to food industry, clothes industry, furniture industry, movie industry (CGI and effects). Classic "if consumer does not care about it we will spend even less care and money on a product." Everything is just worse now.
@@koshetz You described how private equity works, cut corners raise profits...that works for a short time. Ubisoft does some of that, but they also take risks like the Prince of Persia, something private equity would never do these days.
The issue lies in that management listened to the wrong people, like most western AAA companies.
@@koshetz You think Skulls & Bones and Outlaw are cheap games? If anything the problem with these big corpo like Ubisoft, Disney or Sony is that they paid these people too much, yet the products came out and it's terrible.
@@VanceHelw well, all budget went to exacutives and hire-ups sallaries. I have a friend ex-ubisoft dev (worked around 2014-2020) and he always been vocal about being underpayed and overworked, people being hired and leave constantly for same reason resulting of games being created by newcomers who don't know how to do anything (because the lack of experience).
Skull and Bones are entirely different topic since it's beein into development hell for a decade. And yeah, most games in development hell lose tons of money while resulting in mediocre product. Star Citizen comes to mind,
It doesn't matter that it's in a different engine. The average consumer doesn't know or care about the difference in engine they just see that it looks worse
Also the only limit the engine has on animation is usually the bone and morph limits . Any new engine should be able to get close to Maya animation
They know good animators are rare and especially ones who can polish mocap face animations. They're saving money @@jacobpipers
@@jacobpipersstudios normally use 3dsmax or Maya anyway for animation and just import the data.
For a studio with 700 people they ought to do better
@@D4C_LoveTrain1 I think the size is the problem. Too little or heavily mediated communication between devs, especially different teams working on the same project.
Yes, and many will say that they believe that it's being done deliberately so the showflakes can't pretend to be offended.
Kay looks like an alien who has put human skin on her face to appear like a human but was only semi successful.
That's exactly what I thought when I was playing the game. In fact, some aliens looked more human than her.
It’s annoying when the discourse around kay is meant to be ugly. Rather than the simple answer is the model isn’t finished and the game is mess that Ubisoft launched early.
it looks like a character who had hundreds of changes from the initial design. Forced by or made by non-designers.
Now that sounds like a more interesting game.
@@NaviRyan Kay IS meant to be ugly in order to please all the uglies at HQ. Her actual face model is gorgeous but it seems they’d rather settle with The Crimson Chin.
Kay looks like some skinwalker with constantly changing androgynous faces, it's so weird and unsettling, wtf is going on at Ubisoft and the industry in general?
I honestly think it's because many studios aren't hiring the best people anymore. They're hiring the best from the pool of people who are left after eliminating candidates that don't meet certain social requirements. It's not even a conspiracy theory, most major studios flat out say this is their priority on their websites.
Racially ambiguous, androgynous they/them neoamerican pxrsyn
It is important to start looking at indie games, many of which make more impressive art and visuals than AAA, just the length of the games might be lacking. Understandable since you can't compare length when there are only so many people.
@@lancesniper This. 90% of what I play now are indie or AA games. Hell, probably more than 90%. The last AAA game I played was Elden Ring, whereas I can list off dozens of smaller studio games I've played recently.
That is what I am doing. Indie games ftw@@lancesniper
Why should the customer care what tool the developer chose to use? It's like a carpenter who excuses his shoddy work because he chose specifically to use a dull saw. Well, that's on you....
Their faces are probably tired from all of this........
It's been almost 10 years and that meme is more relevant than ever.
@@annika3265That's not how being ahead of one's times should be.
And Andromeda dev was under really bad conditions too... Btw, one thing they apparently discarded because they couldn't make it interesting was procedural planet exploration.
@@nicolasferreiro4492 Boy howdy, I wish Starfield HAD discarded that because they couldn't make it remotely interesting either and still fobbed it off on players lmao
Ever since they went the RPG route, it appears like Ubisoft uses generative animations in their cutscenes. Their eyes are always staring into space, and their mouth moves based on the sounds coming out, instead of being moved by an artist, or tracked by mocap. It completely misses all the soul of their past characters. I don't believe I'm looking at a real person in any games past Origins. They had this nailed down since AC2. I really don't know how a company can fall from grace so hard.
I think this is it. These facial animations scream AI
It's cheaper to animate this way than use a mo-cap. That's all it is, they've cheaped out
Talented devs left and the neophytes that replaced them shouldn't be considered employable tbh.
Many such cases
@@alaskanyeti907Every RPG uses this technique, mocapping every little scene for an Open World rpg is time consuming.
CDPR has a talk about how they made the different kinds of cinematics at the GDC.
Greed, apathy, hubris.
The contrast in personality is pretty astounding too. The two dudes in AC just talking normally, while Kay Vess does her quirky, stuttering, sarcastic, self-aware Millenial nonsense in which she is incapable of just talking seriously and in complete sentences
You didn't play the game if you think this is her characterization throughout the entire game.
There's no room for human attention to detail in an assembly line.
I can render a 100 trillion polygon sphere and stick it in a game engine and say, "Hey I have a model with THE MOST POLYGONS EVER running on a gaming engine!!!!" That doesn't mean it's going to be good. Numbers are just numbers. Artistic direction and quality is what makes a game at least, look good, not poly count.
Tell this to every AA game that is using the exact same photogrammetry assets of rocks and trees and making identical looking games, it drives me crazy. art direction is a dying breed.
Watched a video of a indie studio experimenting with complex textures to make amazing looking areas instead of high poly count. THey were using just flat surfaces but with the textures they were using it looked like one of those cave demos of nanite...was pretty incredible
@@jeremysumpter8939 I thought we already learned this lesson with Windwaker and Twilight Princess, when they both launched WW was criticized because it looked so cartoony and TP was praised because it strived for realism but as time went on the graphics in TP started showing their age more and more meanwhile the graphics in WW didn't age a day. It's hard to pinpoint but when it comes to graphics there seems to be a line where too much realism goes back around to where you start losing details, just compare the graphics of Peter Jackson's King Kong game in their original version and the ported version for Xbox they did a few years later.
And chasing realism is ultimely pointless cause there will come a time in the future when it will start looking dated no matter how many polygons you render, it's specially bad if focusing on high fidelity makes you neglect more important parts of the game like the gameplay and storytelling, in Astrobot for example can you imagine if they focused on putting realistic textures everywhere instead of playing around with game mechanics and physics like they did? Or if the Alien Isolation devs focused on having more expressive human models instead of working on the Alien AI? Come on, thousands of Indie games come out every year and they can't afford all this fancy realism, they survive by working even harder on everything else. I'm a firm believer that graphics are the least important part of a game, if you can do them well and deliver a good game on top of it that's great, but for me at least there's no game that can coast by if that's the only thing they do well.
It should be mentioned too, all of those Assassins's Creed cutscenes from every game were ALL real time non-pre-rendered cutscenes. And they used the SAME exact detailed models as the gameplay. People forget that during this era, most AAA games with cutscenes were either pre-rendering cutscenes OR if it was in-engine, games would use far higher detailed character models and textures specifically for cutscenes. Assassin's Creed games always had lower fidelity character models compared to AAA games' cutscenes at the time, but far better mo-cap, animations and cinematography. And yet, compared to today, the old AC games look leagues better than what we get now.
No, they didn't. You obviously can see it with your eyes.
@@VlReaderr They did, I'm afraid. There are dev documentaries on YT for each entry lol.
@@binhaldon5078, just run the game and have a look. And try to remember the famous "no face" bug in cutscenes. It happened because a slow computer could not load the detailed model in time.
I hate to break it to you, but all games today have cinematic versions of characters. Hello, game dev here with many years of experience.
They're either clever about the transitions to them, or they just fade to black when switching to them. If they were always using the cinematic versions of the characters, it would be a waste of data at runtime.
Most, if not all AAA characters use a combination of bone deformation and/or blendshapes (interchangeable name). The truth is having 150+ bones active at all times would destroy performance.
It's ok if you don't believe me, but take it from a Technical Animator that's worked in AAA.
@@DannysHauntedJourneythat infos all fine and dandy but isn’t the main point here that outlaws is using *cinematic models* and still looks pretty bad comparatively to assassins creed black flag while it use in game renders? Or am I missing a point?
Technological advances mean nothing when the talent utilising it has declined, and this is what we are seeing in western game studios
This is to say nothing for the fact that , again, western studios have become over reliant on "new" advancements vs good utilisation,epic story telling and solid gameplay
Idk why people aren't focusing on that. It's clear as day what the problem is. The talent isn't getting hired based on merit anymore and a lot of people they're hiring are more worried about certain issues than they are with making a good game. But let's just keep acting like we have no clue why it's happening.
Well, they're also offshoring devs. As well as laying off experienced devs once the game is released. Game devs are one of the worst treated dev jobs.
Given that we see massive amounts of studios going for the Unreal engine all of a sudden. My guess is to outsource work going forward instead of having in-house devs, easier when it is an engine people know like Unity or Unreal.
We are gonna see a bigger decrease in in-house talents I imagine.
Ubisoft doesn't get a pass on tech entropy....getting worse with better technology is a hard sell😂
This is a typical example of the Uncanny Valley Effect, she looks human but there is something very wrong. From her expression, voice to the position of her facial features, everything is wrong. This makes her look more like an alien pretending to be human, to be honest, I feel a little scared when looking into the main character's eyes.
There's good uncanny like The Quarry, hyper realistic animations and facial models and then there's bad uncanny, like with Star Wars Outlaws.
the voice acting and line delivery in outlaws has got to be the worst i've seen in a very long time lmao, what a joke.
Han Solo was a good scoundrel,
but it wasn’t necessarily because he was good.
He was just in opposition to the Empire, which is unequivocally worse than being a smuggler…
Having a character who is conflicted or toes the line between good and bad isn’t necessarily poor character design.
A good RPG however, would let us pick how we develop that character as we progress further into the story. (i.e. Fable or Red Dead)
A leaker basically described that Ubisoft had to have a female protagonist that she had to always hit up instead of down aka empire and cartels, and that she can’t attack or rob or hurt civilians because of Disney. Yes a game with title of outlaws you can’t even be much of an outlaw.
@@NaviRyan I mean, I suppose that’s what happens when an IP is sold to a company who makes media primarily for children?
Also, being an “outlaw” doesn’t inherently imply that you go around murdering innocent civilians for fun.
But yea, it would have made for a more interesting game if it had a morality scale as well as the faction favor.
The Star wars outlaws subreddit would tell you this is the best facial animation since sliced bread and this game is GOTY, comparable realism to rdr2
It's certainly a Reddit thing to go for extremes. If you are not 100% on board with the subreddit consensus then you get downvoted and potentially even banned. People have been making opposition subreddits to a topic for a reason.
The last proper facial animation is from Assassin’s Creed Origins
Fr last ac game where the characters felt human, there even multiple side missions with mocap cutscenes, while nowadays they can’t afford to mocap the main story.
Come on Odyssey is fine as well lmao
Care in your craft is usually a personal thing. Is not just the direction, is the care that every part of the production puts on the work.
The lack of care, means the developers, from the ground level to the director dont care. Most likely, the people that is doing the games now, dont give a crap about their work. Which is very how current generation people do things. Plus all the office politics I am sure its going around. The product's quality is a reflection of the people that make it.
"I will look at you and express zero emotions whatsoever." Kay Mess
Polygons, stretched pores and individual hairs aside… the main issue is how “alive,” a model feels. For comparison, take a cutscene from AC Mirage and AC Black Flag. Mirage has the superior polygon count, detail, etc. of course it does and that is its own achievement.
But the cutscenes and dynamics of the models in ACBF were superior. They felt (not looked, but felt) real, and immersive. It is proof that fidelity is worthless without artistic direction, camera movement, immersion, and dynamic cutscenes that are not mostly people standing and speaking to each other in idle poses.
I saw a talk by a Ubisoft developer WAY back in the day right after they used manual facial animation for the last time. They said that the facial animations were taking up too much time under budget constraints and would be moving to AI assisted facial animation along the lines of what Andromeda was using.
And you could see as it transitioned from I thing Unity to Origins where there was a clear shift in how natural facial animation and lip-syncing appeared.
It was purely for cost and man-hours. And every game since then has looked horrible.
assassin's creed unity facial expressions are way beyond fantastic as compare to shadows
I don't know what Luke's taking about, Vader's facial animations in Outlaws are incredible
AC Unity is such a good game...I still go back and play it routinely, because it has the best parkour, and probably the series' most gorgeous world. Unity is a classy, quality game, and I'm so sad that its first-impression with most people was that of....bugs.
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Been an animator in the industry for about 5 years. Your right, facial animation in games now uses text to speech to generate expressions. Devs no longer have the money/time to pay animators to hand animate the face.
Billions dollar industry with games that takes more than 5 years to create. Don't have the money or time to create good animations.
Wut?
@@-Zakhiel- No longer given the time/money by greedy execs is more accurate i think.
@@-Zakhiel- Greed. Fast food companies and clothing companies do the same despite also having billions. They want to do the cheapest product possible but to get all profits. That's why gaming companies try to save finances by not making proper facial animations or lighting.
Why haven't the tools or processes used to create facial animations kept up or been improved enough to make the process just as cost efficient as it was in the past?
Why isn't facial performance capture the standard in the industry now?
It's so jarring going from a game like RDR2 to something with hand animated characters that look so robotic by comparison.
My question is how was ff7 rebirth lip sync was so good. Its felt perfect in either English or Japanese
He does go extremely soft on Ubisoft while absolutely railing on Rocksteady
Which is crazy when you consider SSKTJL, for its faults, looks amazing. You can point to the water and say "Arkham Knights looks better", which is true, but look at the facial animations and compare them to AK. The expressions are wide ranging, characters move casually, you can even see the pours in the skin and the sweat too. AK facial animations look pretty bad by comparison, it's just it did everything else better.
He got major perks to shill for Ubislop and I guess Rocksteady didn't pay up.
Ubisoft was never amazing even at their peak and Rocksteady was the crown jewel of gaming. Rocksteady deserves all the bile coming its way. Ubisoft goes away, nothing is lost of value.
Omg you people are coping little babies
@@johnnyflannigan136 wasn't saying Rocksteady doesn't deserve the blame. Just saying Luke is being extremely forgiving with whatever Ubisoft is putting out.
(Also he's pals with JorRaptor, another youtuber who praises anything Ubisoft puts out)
All in all, Luke makes solid points on a lot of things. Just the Ubisoft parts seem very soft
19:22 I can’t be the only one who picked up on the fact that her voice sounds just like Nadia Maroni from The Penguin HBO show. iykyk
it sounds just like it because it is her
Seems like at around 16:00 it starts being slightly too zoomed in lmao
talk about jarring lol
I honestly believe that there's a significant skill issue among certain dev teams today relevant to a decade ago. Especially at companies like Ubisoft. It's already established fact that some of these companies have drastically altered hiring practices over the past decade in such a way where merit and skill level aren't necessarily going to be prioritized in every situation. That's going to come with some seriously negative impact on quality results in any workplace, but especially something like game development. I just don't see any situation where that wouldn't be the case, at least to some extent. That's not to say there aren't still very talented devs at Ubisoft. There clearly are. But it does add up when there's such strong contrast in comparison to 10yrs ago, and across seemingly every facet of some games.
Most of these problems come from the fact that they are trying to automate most of these animations using programs and AI. It use to be that animators would spend hours polishing facial expressions. Now they just feed it to the computer to save time, barely anyone passes after the AI to polish it up and it’s a big mistake.
I always explained it to myself like this: the Tech to make it look good has been around for many years, but it doesn't scale well and costs too much. So they replaced it with some automated process that achieves 20% of the visual Fidelity, but at a fraction of the cost. As consumers, we don't want that, but as Ubisoft...
The biggest things are A: the eyes having no movement in SQ cutscenes and only looking movement in main cutscenes (meaning no squinting or anything like that, just looking and blinking) and B: Absolutely no eyebrow movement. We get so much information about emotion through eyebrow movement and the fact that even in main cutscenes there is nothing is ridiculous because you have no idea the emotions the characters are feeling.
Very inconsistent for sure. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's giving me ME Andromeda flashbacks.
Having watched so many of your videos these past couple of months, I have to say that you are way too easy on Ubisoft. Meanwhile you absolutely obliterate BGS whenever you have the chance.
You have a very obvious bias. Both of these companies deserve all of the criticism they receive.
Wasn't Luke even saying that Outlaws is surprisingly polished before the public release? Has he ever addressed that?
That's what you get when you hire based on boxes they tick bc you have to have this % of this group and that % of that group. People aren't being hired on merit and it shows, yet people want to act like this isn't a thing, hell even the companies are acting like they aren't doing it, even though it's plastered all over their website that's what they're doing. They're proud of it right up until gamers, aka the customers, started noticing dips in quality and then noticed they were all preaching the same message and started calling them out on it.
8:05 Yeah, Chiseled in kinda like Kay Vess’s chin….🤣🤣🤣
2:00 SW Outlaws also has some features made for Anvil, particularly, grass. If you look at it, grass is the same as Ghost recon breakpoint (which uses anvilEngine)
I think it's more the focus on creating more quests that made them loose the facial animations: More quests in open world = More time to animate = Much more expensive. To use Dynamic Facial Animations means you basically removed all the time needed to animate any facial animations for any quest you wanna make, which means you can just churn out as many quests as you want.
I think the issue is mostly due to Star Wars Outlaws being, well, a Star Wars game. It's not their own IP, it had a bigger budget and a larger scope, therefore the whole production is prone to major changes and revisions that they could not foresee. So it makes sense for them to decide not to use motion capture performance for the facial animation and went with AI assisted animation instead, to save time and effort. Ideally the animators would tweak them further but that probably would have been a costly endeavor. Of course older Assassin's Creed games would have better facial animation, back then you either do it with performance capture or animate them manually. It is a bit ironic that while developers have more options to do things now, those options don't necessarily make better games. It still comes down to how they use it. But hey, I'm sure the facial animation will be a whole lot better in Assassin's Creed Shadows.
The eyes and eyebrows dont move at all. But that is where most of the expressions should be.
Ubisoft has been guilty of having games that have character models that do not look anywhere near as good as their competition. Its like they decided that they will just force out games with character visuals still around from the PS3/360 era. Ubisoft in general at this point has no draw to me.
Tis a poor workman that blames his tools. It's not an excuse.
Story of the last ~decade is that studios sacrifice things we really care about in order to improve things we don't want as much. Undermining the core experience to make the window dressing really nice, while putting ridiculous budgets into said window dressing and trying to pass the cost to us consumers.
A tool is only as good as the person wielding it.
The only Assassins Creed game I'm looking forward to is Hexe. Really hope we get more solid information on that title next year.
The facial animations bave nothing to do with the engine. Snowdrop is a damn good engine. It’s on the animators, riggers, modelers, lighting effects, even the cinematography and rigging of the morion capture crew, etc.
Have you seen any game on Snowdrop with good facial animations? I haven't.
Ever since syndicate its been a down hill spiral.
There was a detail in AC 3 and also in Unity that only Origins brought and that was the great work developers did with the facial expressions and animations. In AC3 I remember even the nose animations moved in a very realistic manner and the light went through the skin. That was jaw dropping for me at the time
Silent hill 3 looks better than a fair amount of modern games
One of the biggest downgrades to assassin creed games is the cinematics, since they moved to their current engine (origins and onwards), all the character look and move like robots, it stops all immersion for me for the stories of these games
I wouldn't say Snowdrop is not "capable" of handling face animations. Division 1 was developed in Snowdrop and the cut scenes and animations look great.
AC Unity was peak Ubisoft
"this game isn't as good as one you made ten years ago"
"You have to understand, it's a completely different team and engine"
"Ok... This team and engine don't make games as good as the team and engine 10 years ago"
How is that an excuse 😂? If anything, that's just admitting it's bad because you actually got worse?!
About the lip syncing: idk about other languages, but in german usually the localisers try to find sentences and words, that better match the mouth movements. This probably happens less in video games than in high budget movies, but it usually is still really good for a high budget game. And even if it is not a high budget, i´d still prefer natural movement than 100% lip sync movement.
Also, now with AI, those lip movements can be adjusted rather easily. We already have that in a few games and even a movie (forgot the name of the movie).
To be fair Starfields facial animations are way better than Fallout 4
When you compare Star War Outlaws MC's in game model to the real life actress, you'll see day and night difference.
Why's it all zoomed in starting around 15:00 ?
Horizon 2 and I guess the first now also, have by far the best dialogues scenes, If a game claims to be a AAA game now this should be the standard they should they to reach
The talent is not there
Yes its worse than 10 years ago because of late stage capitalism. They are spending less and less money on the production so they can rush to sales .
When products get worse over time its because they are cutting costs to make even more profit
Actually, they are are spending more money than ever. But at the same time it often looks like there is no passion behind it. Because probably there isn't. The rank and file devs get told what to do with little to no creative input in large companies. Writing is outsourced to questionable consultation companies.
In such an environment any and all creativity dies. Either a slow death by being rejected within the long chains of approval process or a quick death because the devs just stop caring and do what they are told. One of the more infamous consultation groups said it out loud: "Pay me to shoot down your white male lead game ideas".
For next-gen, I think Cyberpunk is one of the best looking games out there. But there aren't many.
Jedi survivor aswell tbh
The original passionate and competent devs have retired or left these companies so they hire the less competent instead. It isn't rocket science.
Origins had really expressive facial and body animations but with Odyssey they got pretty stiff. When Valhalla came out it tried to bridge the gap between those previous 2 but it was still stiff.
When I worked for EA I remember when they called all of us into a room to happily announce that based on preorders our game was already considered to be a success so it would be going to gold almost immediately. I was baffled by this choice as we had only barely tested half the game and the other half wasn't even finished, we just had still to give you an idea of the concept we were going for on those levels. I never even got to see those levels before it was shipped out
Not just their facial animations, but faces in general. This push to make main characters ugly and “relatable” is incredibly idiotic. It ignores market and psychological data we have had for years.
Someone can be not attractive and still not feel bland. And attractiveness doesn't prevent blandness automatically.
Yet most contested characters nowadays are either bland, if they aren't, obnoxious, or even somehow both at a time.
@@nicolasferreiro4492 I would agree with this. However, generally, with the data we have it shows people gravitate towards characters that are "better" than them in key ways.
Men tend to prefer masculine characters. The Captain Americas, Thor, Joel. Things of that nature.
Female preferences are different. However, the data still suggest they gravitate towards pretty women, especially when influence is considered.
Another thing to remember is that things look good or bad depending on if everything else in the scene is of similar visual quality and artstyle. That one NPC's face looks worse than it otherwise would because Kay's face is of noticeably better quality.
I think the reason why we see worse, well everything, is that devs with more experience has either left or been fired because those in charge wanted to save money. Those devs have then been replaced by less experienced devs that cost less, and if they ever gain enough experience they will also be fired so those in charge can save money.
In my mind at least this would explain a lot when it comes to decline in quality. As for why development now cost so much more, no idea, most likely poor managment from those in charge.
Played through Half-Life 2 again recently and it was amazing to see the faces. The faces just have a life to them despite the simpler graphics. It surpasses so much we see today...still!
Things like models, rigs and animations are made outside the engine anyway, probably with Maya or 3ds Max.
And yes, Ubisoft has a lot of similar series, Far Cry is basically first person Assassin's Creed, they can share a lot of technologies and wisdom. Do you need NPC behaviour trees for the inhabitants of a city, boom, we've done that a lot in the past and improved, I'll send you my description and you can either implement or reverse engineer it. You need a detection script for stealth, we have that literally at home.
With their approach, which should work very well for the developers but I'm shocked that it worked that long for the customers, I've had enough of it after the first AC when I'm honest...
This is why STYLE held up against time. I love playing old games even though it's low poly it has styles that I don't really see in modern game that chasing realism
Kay Ves looks like Divora from Mortal khombat 😂😂😂
Combine a lacking engine, a young and and sensitive talentpool with a scared leadership and you got Massive Entertainment. THATS why you get games like Star wars Outlaws.
Little to no mouth/facial animation in anime style characters is something we have seen before, so its up to some degree expected. Having realistic looking chatacters that definitely don't move/emote/act the way you expect them to.
I think it is the layoffs and the fact that new developers are expected to bring the same level of expertise as people that are 20 years by one company.. this creates pressure and forces crunching which can not make up for the experience lost with people leaving. In addition the layoffs happen across the board so even if you get help it is from a team diluted by so many new developers expected to bring the same level of expertise as... well it just goes on and on..
The problem with a lot of Triple A companies is they are not retaining skilled employees. They all have revolving doors so they constantly have new employees playing a game of keep up, trying to learn the stuff that the people who left already knew. This is why Larian is doing so good, because they try to keep their talent.
“Its been, one week since you looked at me”
8:19 In Germany you would go to jail for making the "S" like this. In particular when they come in pairs.
The high level reason is inflation. It’s insidious. It makes everything harder and more expensive than it once was. You’re witnessing it real time in the video game industry
4:19 its subjective, but I feel the same way about No Man’s Sky. Even though it is impressive on paper, it really doesn’t impact me in a way that makes the tech worth it yet. I strongly believe things like the Nemesis system or something roguelike with continuity involving the player could be added to create a missing link that grounds you in a world with NPCs or persistent worlds..
i remember watching a long video about stealth animation and movement in splinter cell chaos theory, peak stealth gameplay, i loved the ef outa the game, we have truly regressed as a species when we cannot improve upon systems like that.
Even IF the animation was good, NOTHING would save the writing, acting, and just... overall crappiness.
before watching the video my answer is YES
Yeah, people were pointing out this and other things. And people painted everybody like they were bothered it was a female lead, they were sexist, and that they just wanted gooner bait and more.
No doubt that there exist people that were that way. Just disagree with how the whole discussion went into trench warfare.
Can't point out issues like this on certain platforms without being dishonestly painted as the worst person in the world.
The issue isn’t just facial animation. It’s that the characters are stiff and stand around and the camera doesn’t move. Cutscenes in rh roast has characters move around and the cinematography was creative
Ubisoft really had something special going on during the ac bf an far cry 3 time, it was so unique an beautiful, they also did amazing stuff with far cry 4 an 5, even new dawn, they do amazing animations for the weapons & for the animals, how they go around an do thier thing, how they attack the player or other things in the world, sometimes the animals fight eachother, you can tell they put a lot of effort into that stuff an it looked amazing,
That is why i believe they should do the dinosaur far cry, that could be like turok on a beautiful jp like island, that would be epic.
But heck even if we go back to stuff like splinter cell black list & ghost recon future soldiers, those games looked amazing as well, an had super crisp animations, hardly any bugs.
Whoever they had working on those games really needs to come back an work on more of them or something.
WoW didn't know you were greek luke😂 the way you say Malaka! It's just we say it in Greece 🎉🎉 Nice job
The reason why faces animation are baerly existent is because snowdrop engine is used for RPG like the division, is not an engine for story mode high production games, also ubisoft got lazier and takes less money to get the mocap and face animation, look at watch dogs ac odysey and valhalla there all runing in the RPG engine
I mean if they've facial animator layoff frequently to give bonuses to shareholder and executives then hire a new one to fill it up every time they had new project then it doesn't matter if you use Unreal 5, Unity, Anvil or even the holy and eternal BGS Creation Engine (may long it reign) it will always look worse since it's not the engine problem it's the human problem that's causing it
So in other words, it's like a home builder trying to sell a new 3,000sq ft home that builder claims is modern for $500,000, but is only worth $200,000. The builder built a house utilizing cheap materials, but wants someone to pay top dollar.
Ubisoft is releasing games on an outdated, glued together engine and releasing games for $50-$60
Men with experience left, women who kicked them out have no experience. Easy as.
Also I think they used AI to drive the facial animation like Starfield, so they either didn't capture facial animation or they captured a cheaper less accurate setup and relied on Ai.
Experience, but also talent in general
You sound like an asshole. Not for telling the truth, but by talking out of your ass, like an asshole.
I think there's also there's also writing and direction problem that makes older games look way better when they're talking
For me I could forgive bad face animations, bad stealth, and all of that if things like the combat in general had more to it.
Like mad Max came out almost 10 years ago and they couldn't have made the vehicular combat at least equal to that? I get they're using an engine this isn't really designed for, but for how long they've been working on this a lot of things feel quarter baked, not even half baked.
Kay Vess looking like the puppets from Team America. I can literally see her doing the whole throwing up scene 😭😭😭😭
one possibility is its something they decided not to focus on when trying to get the game finished before whatever deadline
Not just animations, all the advanced mechanics like parkour, enemy AI, etc. are basically lost technologies. They required experts, and with the terrible situation at Ubisoft studios, people are leaving without documenting everything they've worked on. Leads at Ubisoft Singapore only hold meetings in French language, and they don't care if their developers don't understand it. That's how bad it is. It's not some kind of experiment with mecanics, they simply don't know how to do it anymore.
Did they even use Motion tracking for Outlaws? sometimes it looks so weird like they've animated that stuff instead of using motion tracking
Its not just the face animations the game is painfully boring.
Honestly I’ve never thought any video game faces have looked great, they all give me a weird uncanny valley feeling lol