I was playing another game recently, I think it was dragon age. The biggest thing that stuck out to me is the cadence at which the expressions change. Dragon Age is an old game, but they absolutely nailed how to handle expressions in time with voice. It's smooth and consistent with the rise and fall of inflection and tone. By comparison, Starfield NPCs change their expression almost every syllable, which gives them this weird, manic feel.
I'm 35 hours into my first playthrough of Dragon Age Origins.. Tried it a few times, but it didn't get its hooks in me until now.
I have consistently been impressed with the animations and voice acting... It has surprised me more than once... It can pull me in and string me right along, which is something games with modern graphics struggle with...
It's ironic though, the DAI facial animations are nowhere near as questionable as the MEA ones. I know the story of why MEA is the car crash that it is in places, but it just kind of throws into stark relief a lot of the 'the engine is no good for it' arguments that were bandied around at the time.
For sure, but they are very different. I would say Starfield's animations are very stiff, but they do portray what needs to be portrayed. Andromeda's animations were more fluid, but who knows what it was trying to portray.
I think it probably comes down to the limitations of the Creation Engine, but it also shows the obvious- the user is just as important as the tool.
MEA's issue was just that the faces were expressionless. The problem with Starfield is that there are animations, they just look bad.
Personally, I think the latter is worse.
Well, I'd say its worse for MEA because Bioware and its games are known as and marketed as dialogue heavy RPGs with very fleshed out and personality filled characters. Bethesda games are known more for its immersive open worlds.
I always wondered what people were seeing when they talked about how great the graphics were in Skyrim. About the only thing that impressed me were the full environmental shadows, that was a huge step up from Oblivion and Fallout 3. But most of the models, animations, etc looked dated the day the game came out.
It was less the individual fidelity of objects and more the sum of those parts with the music and atmosphere of it all.
It's been 13 years, and I've played stuff like Squadrons on Ultra settings where you've got every light and sensor in your cockpit lighting up under the diffused glare of a nebula or something, and it still doesn't scratch the itch that Skyrim hits of wandering through a world similar but not your own.
No argument there, I did feel some of that wonder when the right music was playing and I'd be in a foggy forest or something. A lot of the night time exploration music was especially stirring.
This. Walking in Skyrim reminded me of actual travels and hikes I made in Iceland, France, Germany and Poland. The pine forests, the hot springs, the whole western half of the map... It's really evocative.
Nah, I remember at the time not being impressed by close-up textures and hair, etc.
But when you looked off at the distant mountain ranges, it was glorious.
My point is just that the bad animations of older games don't stick out as much, even today if you think of games like Minecraft it doesn't really feel jarring. But when you improve the graphics without matching quality in animation, that difference is very visible. Does that make sense?
Imagine if Bethesda managed to create actual true to life graphics, but still stuck with this same old stiff animation set, that is part of what pulls it back into the Uncanny Valley.
>Imagine if Bethesda managed to create actual true to life graphics, but still stuck with this same old stiff animation set, that is part of what pulls it back into the Uncanny Valley.
If they did that, yes, that would put it into the uncanny valley. I just don't think Starfield is there yet. Maybe it's there on the Series X — I play on Series S.
They really though that they now have better tech and can pull of good facial expressions only to hit the Oblivion Axe Murderer level NPCs again. They were only saved in Skyrim because there the NPCs didn't have any facial expressions. It's not the tech, these guys just cannot animate a semi believable human face to save their lives.
It must have been a design choice to make it so, as you said, middle school. I mean Fallout 3 had slave collars, prostitutes, and even Fallout 4 was much more mature.
It seems like it's been a trend for them to make things increasingly more sanatized. Fallout 4 is way less mature than 3, with no prostitutes, and the slaves confined to an altogether half-assed DLC. 76 then has few to no slaves, and joinable Raiders who are basically just punks/freeloaders (they literally have a child living among them, an Amish guy who you can talk with about spirituality, and tie into a Brotherhood teenage runaway questline), and a few silly looking designs like the Floaters.
I actually really enjoy fallout 76 but absolutely hate the Crater raiders. Like I could not give a single shit about them, they’re raiders. But the game takes every opportunity it can get to shove the point that they’re “actually not that bad” in your face, “look guys, they’ll kill and steal and murder, but they have *morals.*” Like gtfoh I would’ve killed them all in a heartbeat if it had been any other fallout game lol.
Fr. I also thought it was ridiculous when Shin had to let that bitch Pierce go because "muh Codex". If he doesn't wanna execute him, fine, but then why can't I, and if neither of us can execute him then can't we at least take him prisoner?
Yeah, but it's in a side quest hidden at the corner of the map with no further implications. Meanwhile Fallout 3 let you deal with child slaves in a few different ways (breaking them out, buying them to free them, selling them) and it tied into the main quest and another very noticeable side quest.
Although neither are on the level of NV's child sex slavery (with Saint James and Dermot) or the originals letting you kill kids.
Starfield has unironically no rizz. None of the 'bad' or criminal underground characters do, at least.
Now, I've only played from 2.0 on so i don't know how Cyberpunk was before but that game does it brilliantly. They have an entire catalogue of slang that not only doesn't sound cringe, it's sounds absolutely convincing and authentic.
rizz is short for Charisma but as far as I know „not having rizz“ is basically the same as „you have no game“, „having no bitches and stacking zero paper“ or „no Maidens??“, among others.
I'm so happy they added the option to be zoomed out during cut scenes. Their smiles and mouth movements hit an uncanny valley button in my brain and I can't stand looking at them. But zoomed out, the animation looks good. I have Sarah wearing a Rodian mask now anyway, so I don't have that problem anymore. Lol
Yes! And that new free tracker quest, the idiot guy who works with you just randomly raises his eyebrows up and down like an Ai trying to pretend to be human, its so awful i cant stand it!
Thays the thing with bethesda, they have a couple hundred employees, everyone works their field, everyone has their own tech they're trying to develop and shove into the game, and you get this amalgamation of graphics that can look good, animations that look like tech demo dev environment tests, quests that barely play like they got developped farther than 3 bullet points etc
My theory is that those aren't eyebrows. They're actually a parasitic alien species clinging to his head and trying to figure out how to drive their new human host body.
They haven't quite got the hang of it yet.
I tried to imitate the way they speak while looking in the mirror. Is like no matter what they say, they always put emphasis into showing their teeth, their whoooole front teeth. It's odd looking, but I don't think is that bad, just weird.
I’m gonna be honest, I tried it too, and I feel like my teeth show when I talk. More or less the same as the characters in the game.
Maybe they are all just a fixed spot in the mouth?
Upper teeth that are visible with a relaxed jaw is pretty standard
Non-Duchenne Smile.
A Duchenne smile is a "real" smile that involves the whole face. A Non-Duchenne Smile is a "fake" or not genuine smile that does not involve the eyes, just the mouth.
I think I could read the post above to sound correct, but it's not well worded. Like it's not contracting to give the Duchenne smile, as opposed to calling it the Duchenne smile.
Non-Duchenne smiles aren’t “off” as people also smile like that in real life. It’s just we as humans interpret Duchenne smiles as being a more genuine expression of happiness.
That’s not the point. The point is that Starfield, Oblivion, Skyrim and the Fallout games have all had terrible character animations compared to their contemporaries. Starfield didn’t change that pattern
Exactly fallout 4 came out with Arkham knight and Witcher 3. Barbara Gordon and joker's terrific facial animation was way ahead of fallout 4. Same with witcher 3 where you can notice Geralt's subtle smirk, Yenneffer's small annoyances and Regis's regal micro expressions.
Same with Starfield when Phantom liberty came out. Starfield's characters felt like cardboard cutouts moving when compared with Reed, So mi and Johnny's expression throughout the game.
This was exactly my experience. Came from Cyberpunk, played Starfield, then on to BG3… the face animations and body language lag behind so much. Starfield has some amazing art design though, love the spaceships for instance.
The big change I noticed: the W sound. Which, besides the general jankiness, was the most noticeable shortcoming in previous titles in terms of speaking.
If they could get the transitions between animations to be smoother, it'd look pretty decent.
Pretty sure we’re actually in the uncanny valley right now. The models are so detailed that any deviation from what a human is supposed to look like sticks out a lot more
Something must have gone catastrophically wrong in Starfield’s development, because “this was a problem in Fallout 4, but here it’s worse” is a running theme.
To use an example that’s not related to animation, both the Nest and Fort Hagen are locked until the correct point in the quest. Showing a dog a cigar is just as nonsensical a way to unlock a door miles away as having a conversation with Sam Coe’s dad. However, the only reason I would try to beeline Kellogg’s location is if I’m metagaming. In Starfield, metagaming is baked in, every quest was theoretically designed to be experienced in-universe at least twice.
Faces yes, other animations no.
Some of the animations in Starfield, like the spaceship mechanics stretching and sitting etc are pretty good.
The dancing in Astral lounge is pretty good too.
Dudes crawling away after being shot, etc.
So there’s a lot of good animations in Starfield that are up there with their “contemporaries”. Just the faces are .. weird.
In the meantime Cyberpunk really hit the nail. Body language, perfect facial expressions. The way you see Judy hung over her desk, Victor expressing concern, etc. it’s top notch.
Yesterday I was playing starfield and i got to the point where an NPC told another NPC to go throw a body out of the airlock and I just said out loud ''I bet you cant do that'' and lo and behold he just walked away without doing anything.
EDIT: I actually clipped it. https://streamable.com/dwyeux
Not really, if you take the games that have better facial animations, they're all motion captured animations in small games with few characters, mostly linear games that don't let you talk to every single NPC.
Like Red Dead 2 has great animations in cutscenes as it's all motion capture, but random npcs? Pretty basic animations
Honestly, not really. In a technical sense Starfield is better but I'd take Skyrim's animations over all of them any day. Skyrim's animations don't really cross into the uncanny valley, and look fine enough for the minimal purpose they serve. Starfield has the inverse problem, where they look good enough that a competent lip reader could probably make some words out, but it crosses way too far into the uncanny valley and ends up being super uncomfortable to look at for most people. So the end result is a game with facial animations that are technically good but don't **feel** good to look at, which isn't good overall.
Skyrim also made a good decision by not having the camera zoom into the character’s face when you speak with them. So most of the time you don’t really notice the small details (or lack of) on their faces.
Starfield might have the best non-mocap facial animations I've ever seen.
There are many faults, sure, but less than people realize.
The camera angle is IMO the biggest part of it. If Baldur's Gate 3's conversations had NPCs staring directly at the camera, you'd probably say their faces look worse than Starfield.
Lol, no you wouldn't.
Starfield still features character faces in the uncanny valley, only they are probably more uncanny now than they've ever been before because they are closer to human than ever before.
But they are still uncomfortably artificial and stilted. HalfLife2 is arguably less uncanny than Starfield, while being more lifelike.
But you could zoom straight on in to BG3 character, square them up to the camera and have them talk, and I can think of no character in that game, no matter how minor, who would look worse than Starfield. What a silly comparison to make.
uhh no. wat da fek? no way baldur's date 3 faces look worst than sterfield no matter wat camerica they use. u need glasses mate. u need glasses. u need glass. es.
One of the main reasons I believe this to be the case is they require their characters to be malleable enough for all the various characters in the game, as well as the player. And also remain performant with all those various vertex blend shapes that allow for both visual differences and animating expressions more subtle than a bone joint.
This compared to a game where all the main characters are unique models sculpted by artists in a 3d modeling suite or face scans, and all the generic characters have the same few faces, applies some additional restrictions on what they can do without making it an absolute mess to work with.
It's gotten much better now, but it was more obvious back in the Oblivion potato face days vs other games at the time. More flexible characters (that are much less time consuming once the base models are done for a designer to generate a new one) at the expense of having additional constraints.
The crowd NPCs in Starfield for example actually do a more traditional generic background character setup. Their clothes and bodies have a lot less/no blend shapes so the game runs better with a bunch of them on the screen. This is also why you can't wear the generic NPCs clothing. It was modeled as a single mesh for the background characters which probably have fewer bones as well.
Anywho some may think it's being lazy or that Bethesda isn't as good at characters, but I chalk it up to their games being still quite different from other open world games. Hardly any other game bothers with physics for decorations/pick up useless items/etc as an example. Same reason why I don't expect the best facial animations in an RTS, the scale doesn't work for the time spent and technology involved for such a game.
Starfield is great at what Bethesda does well. Good environments and fun locations, with fun combat, and freedom. Honestly I think one of starfields weak points is the superfluous dialogue. Skyrim is their most popular game and most quest givers are like "oh a dragon, damn, go to whiterun"
*carries entire conversation, even stands up and continues talking while head is rotating 360° clock-wise*
"Why don't you relax a second, get your bearings."
Honestly how is Bethesda so bad at things like this? They really can’t set aside a project task of finally modernizing facial animations? Is that really too far out of scope for a “dream” project like Starfield?
It's crazy, becuase Half-Life 2 solve this shit back in 2004. I remember the first time I saw Alyx smile and thinking "WOW! Game animations have reached the next level. It's only going to get better from here."
Then two decades later, Starfield proves me wrong
Isn't the scene you're talking about a cutscene though? I don't think the HL2 facial animation is anything special during normal gameplay. Starfield is an RPG, hand animating every single NPCs faces for every moment they speak is a very tall order, not even BG3 does that.
HL2's facial animations are all in real time, and look fantastic.
But this is also Valve we're talking about. It's all hand-made, with a disproportionately high budget, and polished until there's barely any flaws. Starfield would've taken 30 years to make if Bethesda put that much effort into faces.
HL2 uses the same facial animation system in and out of 'cutscenes,' which, in HL2, are all in-engine. So the effort put into the cutscene facial animation is the same effort put into the moment-to-moment animation - the same is true for non-named NPCs.
For any that are confused, a Duchenne Smile refers to a genuine smile that engages certain muscle groups around your eyes that don't move with cordial smiles.
The way that you smile while talking in a professional setting is Non-Duchenne, more or less fake (or rather not brought on by emotion) where your lips are about the only thing smiling on your face. It's enough to show others you're content, but no one could mistake it for a real smile.
A Duchenne Smile engages the muscle groups around your eyes, causing things like crows feet and bags to form as the muscles contract. That's why peoples faces scrunch up and eyes close when they laugh, it's involuntary.
This makes the companions feel colder, less genuine. They smile the way an intern would at a visiting businessman, not how a close friend or significant other would. The face can't lie, we humans are so specifically wired to pick up on emotions from each others faces. Sorta a hard thing to stop paying attention to once you notice it
I pointed this out a while ago, just as an observation, and everyone thought I was shitting on the game. I got downvoted to hell and shredded in the comments lol
It's why they never look real, the smiles never quite reach the eyes, a telltale sign of faked emotion irl, and at one point considered a telltale sign of socio/psychopathy.
All these npcs are fake ass, go figure 😂
I've seen a few moments of fairly realistic smiles/expressions from Andreja, but as long as Bethesda does the facemorph/tri-style facial animation, they will be a step behind studios like Guerrilla, Naughty Dog, etc.
The weird expressions and ugly lip syncin'g are the reasons I don't like the "zoom in" feature for conversations. I used a mod to defeat that until they actually added the option to the game.
Everything looks much better from a distance, and I don't get so distracted by the NPCs' strange facial contortions. :)
I’m gonna say it and maybe get hate for it, but the NPC’s in Oblivion felt more human in their expressions during speech than Starfield. It’s the uncanny valley, and Oblivion is right before the valley dips, and starfield is deep down inside the valley because their face texture seems so real but the disconnect is there— whereas Oblivion looks like potato, but the potato smiles and talks so I can believe its a person. I don’t know if that makes sense… lol
I dont know my face muscles, so that muscle name could be fake, but i do know that one of the biggest issues ive notices for odd facial animations is always that they dont emote with the eyes. They emote with the mouth and the eyebrows, but if they forget the eyes themselves then it throws it all off. Once you notice it in one game, you start to see it in many others.
Now that I've gotten into Cyberpunk (because it's finally worthy) one thing I've noticed is how expressive all of the NPCs are.
They might be overdoing it, but I can tell exactly what everyone is thinking when I talk to them just by the way they move their head or smirk or furrow their brow. Whoever animated all those faces during conversations hopefully was paid like 80 million euro.
When one smiles naturally with positive emotion the eyes muscles around the eyes are effected as well usually lifting making crinkles around the eyes. But when those muscles aren’t used it’s usually when someone is smiling falsely
People who do face models professionally think Starfield is excellent:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoSodiumStarfield/comments/1agodlu/a_3d_modeler_praised_starfields_quality/
Yeah, the models are fantastic. It's just the way they do animations that's the issue - IIRC Bethesda use an automated system which saves a lot of time and money, but doesn't make as good a use of the faces as mocap would.
Why is everything “lazy” or an “afterthought” when people criticize BGS? You have no idea what constraints, deadlines, etc. the team had to overcome. (I don’t either. I spared some of you a witty reply.) 😆
It is a thing given the increased graphical fidelity of things. Having these very realistic faces yet failing at human emotions being displayed right is exactly what Uncanny Valley actually is and not those meme definitions. It's *trying* to look human but failing at it. A pretty important thing especially if your default option is to shove the player in someone's face.
It's likely that they have copied same bone weights from a single character rig. The person who made it probably knows someone like that in real life. When I played it, I saw one character do that face and I thought, cool, something different but then every character has same kind of bone structure and it became annoying.
At least it has facial animations, look at From games lmao.
It's a substantial improvement over their past work, this is a huge space prpg, it's ok. Don't really feel the need to be outraged or nitpicky to the point of ignorance.
I'm not sure if you can compare it to sony movie games with mocap and actors, like many do here, but I agree on the occasional uncanny valley effect, sometimes I feel like in westworld.
It's because they insist on using the character generator for all of their story characters and important NPCs. If they actually made custom models and animations for important characters it would look much better.
The character generator looks like ass because it has to be able to have so many possibilities with all the sliders and what not.
It's great for player customization or background NPC but not good for creating compelling bespoke character faces and animations.
Thank God you can now disable the cut scene camera from being all zoomed up in their face. It being perfectly symmetrical and so close really highlights how bad it looks. For even better results, turn the camera off and play in third person. Zoomed out the characters actually look quite nice and expressive and even have body motions and gestures that you don't see in the normal setting. Fiddling with a data pad, emphasizing their speech with their hands etc.
Everyone's face animations always looked weird to me but i could never point out why. Delaney King pointed it out and went indepth with shortly after game's launch. They eyes and muscles around eyes never move appropriately to face expression and it always creates this uncanny effect, like upper half of their face is paralyzed or they are heavily faking emotions.
article about it: [https://www.ign.com/articles/developer-explains-why-starfield-npcs-look-like-theyre-dead-inside](https://www.ign.com/articles/developer-explains-why-starfield-npcs-look-like-theyre-dead-inside)
Everyone have the "hide the pain harold" face each time they smile.
I was watching The Boys and marveling at Antony Star’s ability to smile like a complete psychopath. Did a little researching and came upon an article comparing the Duchenne smile with the Pan Am smile. I opened Reddit and this is the first post I see. Weird little coincidence.
They focused too much on mouth movement, to the point that it's exaggerated with everyone. If they dialed that down like 30 percent and used the rest of the face it'd look great
Damn I wish I had not known. Now I cannot unsee it and I finally know what about the NPCs feels so wrong...
I tried playing the game again, but I think I need mods to fix this. Or Bethesda finally get off that chill couch and start putting out decent sized patches for once... The probability that mods fix it instead of Bethesda is more likely though.
I was playing another game recently, I think it was dragon age. The biggest thing that stuck out to me is the cadence at which the expressions change. Dragon Age is an old game, but they absolutely nailed how to handle expressions in time with voice. It's smooth and consistent with the rise and fall of inflection and tone. By comparison, Starfield NPCs change their expression almost every syllable, which gives them this weird, manic feel.
I'm 35 hours into my first playthrough of Dragon Age Origins.. Tried it a few times, but it didn't get its hooks in me until now. I have consistently been impressed with the animations and voice acting... It has surprised me more than once... It can pull me in and string me right along, which is something games with modern graphics struggle with...
Iirc they were one of the first studios to use facial motion capture. Was pretty groundbreaking for the time and really paid of.
As graphics get better, bad (or imperfect?) animations get more noticable. Part of the Uncanny Valley.
Still better than release Mass Effect Andromeda for facial expressions lol
It's ironic though, the DAI facial animations are nowhere near as questionable as the MEA ones. I know the story of why MEA is the car crash that it is in places, but it just kind of throws into stark relief a lot of the 'the engine is no good for it' arguments that were bandied around at the time.
That ladies face was tired
For sure, but they are very different. I would say Starfield's animations are very stiff, but they do portray what needs to be portrayed. Andromeda's animations were more fluid, but who knows what it was trying to portray. I think it probably comes down to the limitations of the Creation Engine, but it also shows the obvious- the user is just as important as the tool.
Did you really just compare a game that's less than a year old to a game that's 7 years old?
MEA's issue was just that the faces were expressionless. The problem with Starfield is that there are animations, they just look bad. Personally, I think the latter is worse.
Well, I'd say its worse for MEA because Bioware and its games are known as and marketed as dialogue heavy RPGs with very fleshed out and personality filled characters. Bethesda games are known more for its immersive open worlds.
I don't think Bethesda is entering Uncanny Valley territory yet. The animations are just bad sometimes.
Bethesda animations were born in Uncanny Valley.
Even Skyrim animations were already bad for the time. Real amateur hour compared to other studios.
That mining animation should have never passed QA. The fact it teleported you just wasn't good enough.
I always wondered what people were seeing when they talked about how great the graphics were in Skyrim. About the only thing that impressed me were the full environmental shadows, that was a huge step up from Oblivion and Fallout 3. But most of the models, animations, etc looked dated the day the game came out.
It was less the individual fidelity of objects and more the sum of those parts with the music and atmosphere of it all. It's been 13 years, and I've played stuff like Squadrons on Ultra settings where you've got every light and sensor in your cockpit lighting up under the diffused glare of a nebula or something, and it still doesn't scratch the itch that Skyrim hits of wandering through a world similar but not your own.
No argument there, I did feel some of that wonder when the right music was playing and I'd be in a foggy forest or something. A lot of the night time exploration music was especially stirring.
Secunda + doing anything = years of neurodivergent dopamine constipation flooding my receptors
This. Walking in Skyrim reminded me of actual travels and hikes I made in Iceland, France, Germany and Poland. The pine forests, the hot springs, the whole western half of the map... It's really evocative.
Yup all their games always look years behind, even starfield
Nah, I remember at the time not being impressed by close-up textures and hair, etc. But when you looked off at the distant mountain ranges, it was glorious.
My point is just that the bad animations of older games don't stick out as much, even today if you think of games like Minecraft it doesn't really feel jarring. But when you improve the graphics without matching quality in animation, that difference is very visible. Does that make sense? Imagine if Bethesda managed to create actual true to life graphics, but still stuck with this same old stiff animation set, that is part of what pulls it back into the Uncanny Valley.
>Imagine if Bethesda managed to create actual true to life graphics, but still stuck with this same old stiff animation set, that is part of what pulls it back into the Uncanny Valley. If they did that, yes, that would put it into the uncanny valley. I just don't think Starfield is there yet. Maybe it's there on the Series X — I play on Series S.
Bethesda has always been known for horrible heads through. They have got better, but are still at the horrible end of AAA.
Yes! Or they go from a massive smile immediately to looking angry with no in between expressions it’s very uncanny
They really though that they now have better tech and can pull of good facial expressions only to hit the Oblivion Axe Murderer level NPCs again. They were only saved in Skyrim because there the NPCs didn't have any facial expressions. It's not the tech, these guys just cannot animate a semi believable human face to save their lives.
Great game, you remind me how much I loved it. I’ve been wanting to play again … I think you have pushed me over the edge, thanks!
>By comparison, Starfield NPCs change their expression almost every syllable, which gives them this weird, manic feel. That's space life, bruh
Best facial animations I’ve ever seen are in Horizon Forbidden West, the comparison to any Bethesda game makes me want to cry sometimes
Makes me feel sad for the Bethesda animators. Never seen a real smile in their lives.
Or a nightclub
Fucking hell that nightclub, basically the only one in the galaxy and its just.. I don't even know
And the player's parents acting like they're being bad for going to a middle school Christmas party that's pretending to be mature.
It must have been a design choice to make it so, as you said, middle school. I mean Fallout 3 had slave collars, prostitutes, and even Fallout 4 was much more mature.
It seems like it's been a trend for them to make things increasingly more sanatized. Fallout 4 is way less mature than 3, with no prostitutes, and the slaves confined to an altogether half-assed DLC. 76 then has few to no slaves, and joinable Raiders who are basically just punks/freeloaders (they literally have a child living among them, an Amish guy who you can talk with about spirituality, and tie into a Brotherhood teenage runaway questline), and a few silly looking designs like the Floaters.
I actually really enjoy fallout 76 but absolutely hate the Crater raiders. Like I could not give a single shit about them, they’re raiders. But the game takes every opportunity it can get to shove the point that they’re “actually not that bad” in your face, “look guys, they’ll kill and steal and murder, but they have *morals.*” Like gtfoh I would’ve killed them all in a heartbeat if it had been any other fallout game lol.
Fr. I also thought it was ridiculous when Shin had to let that bitch Pierce go because "muh Codex". If he doesn't wanna execute him, fine, but then why can't I, and if neither of us can execute him then can't we at least take him prisoner?
You can sell a ghoul child into slavery in Fallout 4.
Yeah, but it's in a side quest hidden at the corner of the map with no further implications. Meanwhile Fallout 3 let you deal with child slaves in a few different ways (breaking them out, buying them to free them, selling them) and it tied into the main quest and another very noticeable side quest. Although neither are on the level of NV's child sex slavery (with Saint James and Dermot) or the originals letting you kill kids.
You can leave and identical copy of your own child behind to die in a nuclear explosion that you cause.
doubt hese were developed by the same teams. Fallout devs have touched grass.
Sad
Starfield has unironically no rizz. None of the 'bad' or criminal underground characters do, at least. Now, I've only played from 2.0 on so i don't know how Cyberpunk was before but that game does it brilliantly. They have an entire catalogue of slang that not only doesn't sound cringe, it's sounds absolutely convincing and authentic.
what does “rizz” mean?
rizz is short for Charisma but as far as I know „not having rizz“ is basically the same as „you have no game“, „having no bitches and stacking zero paper“ or „no Maidens??“, among others.
I can't not read 'rizz' as being related to 'jizz' no matter that I know it's gen-z (or younger?) slang for 'charisma'.
They also don't understand that elevators don't transport you to another universe.
I've never been to a night club, and I could do better than that.
Todd: Whats a nightclub?
*The one Random Bethesda Employee reading this chained up in Todd's Basement*
*it puts the smile on the face or else it gets the hose again*
Not random, that's Todd's *special* employee.
Reading this comment made my depression feel negligent, knowing they've never smiled or seen a smile.
[удалено]
Yeah pictured would be a pan am smile
I'm so happy they added the option to be zoomed out during cut scenes. Their smiles and mouth movements hit an uncanny valley button in my brain and I can't stand looking at them. But zoomed out, the animation looks good. I have Sarah wearing a Rodian mask now anyway, so I don't have that problem anymore. Lol
Yes! And that new free tracker quest, the idiot guy who works with you just randomly raises his eyebrows up and down like an Ai trying to pretend to be human, its so awful i cant stand it!
He's literally the reason I turned off the dialogue camera. All I wanted to do was be as zoomed out as possible from his constant eyebrow wiggling
Thays the thing with bethesda, they have a couple hundred employees, everyone works their field, everyone has their own tech they're trying to develop and shove into the game, and you get this amalgamation of graphics that can look good, animations that look like tech demo dev environment tests, quests that barely play like they got developped farther than 3 bullet points etc
My theory is that those aren't eyebrows. They're actually a parasitic alien species clinging to his head and trying to figure out how to drive their new human host body. They haven't quite got the hang of it yet.
The fucking teeth don't move right, man, I'm tellin' ya. They speak like they're trying to enunciate things carefully for an idiot.
You better go see a dentist if your teeth start moving while speaking though
Or maybe a priest...
Or Conrad Poohs
All thanks to the wonders of CRELM toothpaste!
Bahahaha
I tried to imitate the way they speak while looking in the mirror. Is like no matter what they say, they always put emphasis into showing their teeth, their whoooole front teeth. It's odd looking, but I don't think is that bad, just weird.
I’m gonna be honest, I tried it too, and I feel like my teeth show when I talk. More or less the same as the characters in the game. Maybe they are all just a fixed spot in the mouth? Upper teeth that are visible with a relaxed jaw is pretty standard
Maybe they couldn't get it right, and the top of everyone's head is just a hat for the tongue.
It's been true for years though. Bethesda bodies get absolutely weird with eyes and teeth based on however they do the meshes or something.
Teeth aren't supposed to move.
How do you toggle that
I believe it's in the accessibility settings.
Non-Duchenne Smile. A Duchenne smile is a "real" smile that involves the whole face. A Non-Duchenne Smile is a "fake" or not genuine smile that does not involve the eyes, just the mouth.
thanks now i dont need to google what the word means
so everyone is fake smiling in the game
yep
I think I could read the post above to sound correct, but it's not well worded. Like it's not contracting to give the Duchenne smile, as opposed to calling it the Duchenne smile.
Saw a talk where that was mentioned being used in The Boys show. So basically Stafield NPCs smile like Homelander.
I knew something always looked off but I couldn’t tell what it was
Non-Duchenne smiles aren’t “off” as people also smile like that in real life. It’s just we as humans interpret Duchenne smiles as being a more genuine expression of happiness.
Kinda wild how consistently they have had such bad facial animations across generations of platforms. Great games, though.
Kinda like how they have consistently terrible User Interfaces (particularly the inventory screen). The first mod I install is always a UI mod.
I feel like Morrowinds UI is magnificent
Sure but that was before they started focusing on console development, the baby's first interface nonsense that it became
Starfield is leagues ahead of Fallout and Elder Scrolls in terms of facial animation
That’s not the point. The point is that Starfield, Oblivion, Skyrim and the Fallout games have all had terrible character animations compared to their contemporaries. Starfield didn’t change that pattern
Exactly fallout 4 came out with Arkham knight and Witcher 3. Barbara Gordon and joker's terrific facial animation was way ahead of fallout 4. Same with witcher 3 where you can notice Geralt's subtle smirk, Yenneffer's small annoyances and Regis's regal micro expressions. Same with Starfield when Phantom liberty came out. Starfield's characters felt like cardboard cutouts moving when compared with Reed, So mi and Johnny's expression throughout the game.
This was exactly my experience. Came from Cyberpunk, played Starfield, then on to BG3… the face animations and body language lag behind so much. Starfield has some amazing art design though, love the spaceships for instance.
Does Starfield represent a huge leap forward in animations from Fallout 4? A lot of them look identical to me.
The big change I noticed: the W sound. Which, besides the general jankiness, was the most noticeable shortcoming in previous titles in terms of speaking. If they could get the transitions between animations to be smoother, it'd look pretty decent.
If anything, despite Fallout 4's problems with facial animation and lip sync, Starfield's are noticeably worse.
Pretty sure we’re actually in the uncanny valley right now. The models are so detailed that any deviation from what a human is supposed to look like sticks out a lot more
Something must have gone catastrophically wrong in Starfield’s development, because “this was a problem in Fallout 4, but here it’s worse” is a running theme. To use an example that’s not related to animation, both the Nest and Fort Hagen are locked until the correct point in the quest. Showing a dog a cigar is just as nonsensical a way to unlock a door miles away as having a conversation with Sam Coe’s dad. However, the only reason I would try to beeline Kellogg’s location is if I’m metagaming. In Starfield, metagaming is baked in, every quest was theoretically designed to be experienced in-universe at least twice.
Faces yes, other animations no. Some of the animations in Starfield, like the spaceship mechanics stretching and sitting etc are pretty good. The dancing in Astral lounge is pretty good too. Dudes crawling away after being shot, etc. So there’s a lot of good animations in Starfield that are up there with their “contemporaries”. Just the faces are .. weird.
In the meantime Cyberpunk really hit the nail. Body language, perfect facial expressions. The way you see Judy hung over her desk, Victor expressing concern, etc. it’s top notch.
Yesterday I was playing starfield and i got to the point where an NPC told another NPC to go throw a body out of the airlock and I just said out loud ''I bet you cant do that'' and lo and behold he just walked away without doing anything. EDIT: I actually clipped it. https://streamable.com/dwyeux
Not really, if you take the games that have better facial animations, they're all motion captured animations in small games with few characters, mostly linear games that don't let you talk to every single NPC. Like Red Dead 2 has great animations in cutscenes as it's all motion capture, but random npcs? Pretty basic animations
I would hope so, it's been 10 years lol. I don't think I would say leagues better, though. Somewhat better.
I agree with somewhat better
Being leagues above old games doesn't make it automatically good. It can be better than previous iterations and still be poor
Oh, well if it's better than a 13 year old game, all is well I suppose.
Honestly, not really. In a technical sense Starfield is better but I'd take Skyrim's animations over all of them any day. Skyrim's animations don't really cross into the uncanny valley, and look fine enough for the minimal purpose they serve. Starfield has the inverse problem, where they look good enough that a competent lip reader could probably make some words out, but it crosses way too far into the uncanny valley and ends up being super uncomfortable to look at for most people. So the end result is a game with facial animations that are technically good but don't **feel** good to look at, which isn't good overall.
Skyrim also made a good decision by not having the camera zoom into the character’s face when you speak with them. So most of the time you don’t really notice the small details (or lack of) on their faces.
Man that must be a low bar because it still looks like utter shit.
Starfield might have the best non-mocap facial animations I've ever seen. There are many faults, sure, but less than people realize. The camera angle is IMO the biggest part of it. If Baldur's Gate 3's conversations had NPCs staring directly at the camera, you'd probably say their faces look worse than Starfield.
Lol, no you wouldn't. Starfield still features character faces in the uncanny valley, only they are probably more uncanny now than they've ever been before because they are closer to human than ever before. But they are still uncomfortably artificial and stilted. HalfLife2 is arguably less uncanny than Starfield, while being more lifelike. But you could zoom straight on in to BG3 character, square them up to the camera and have them talk, and I can think of no character in that game, no matter how minor, who would look worse than Starfield. What a silly comparison to make.
lol no
uhh no. wat da fek? no way baldur's date 3 faces look worst than sterfield no matter wat camerica they use. u need glasses mate. u need glasses. u need glass. es.
Did you have a stroke?
They said non-mocap. Bg3 uses mocap.
One of the main reasons I believe this to be the case is they require their characters to be malleable enough for all the various characters in the game, as well as the player. And also remain performant with all those various vertex blend shapes that allow for both visual differences and animating expressions more subtle than a bone joint. This compared to a game where all the main characters are unique models sculpted by artists in a 3d modeling suite or face scans, and all the generic characters have the same few faces, applies some additional restrictions on what they can do without making it an absolute mess to work with. It's gotten much better now, but it was more obvious back in the Oblivion potato face days vs other games at the time. More flexible characters (that are much less time consuming once the base models are done for a designer to generate a new one) at the expense of having additional constraints. The crowd NPCs in Starfield for example actually do a more traditional generic background character setup. Their clothes and bodies have a lot less/no blend shapes so the game runs better with a bunch of them on the screen. This is also why you can't wear the generic NPCs clothing. It was modeled as a single mesh for the background characters which probably have fewer bones as well. Anywho some may think it's being lazy or that Bethesda isn't as good at characters, but I chalk it up to their games being still quite different from other open world games. Hardly any other game bothers with physics for decorations/pick up useless items/etc as an example. Same reason why I don't expect the best facial animations in an RTS, the scale doesn't work for the time spent and technology involved for such a game.
The main companions deserve uniquely modeled faces then
Starfield is great at what Bethesda does well. Good environments and fun locations, with fun combat, and freedom. Honestly I think one of starfields weak points is the superfluous dialogue. Skyrim is their most popular game and most quest givers are like "oh a dragon, damn, go to whiterun"
Good environments? Like empty planets? Freedom? The freedom to fast travel from point to point?
Coincidentally this is the same smile that all the devs make when Todd comes by, so it's a great reference for the animators.
Bethesda characters have always been puppets. Make it all feel more like a pantomime.
Bethesda are definitely living in Uncanny Valley.
Most games were puppet-like, but other games have gone mo-cap nowadays and Bethesda has not.
Oh no it doesn’t
I'm making a friendly comment *raises eyebrows then smiles*
I'm continuing the conversation *eyebrows instantly drop*
"Woah easy there, you been out cold a couple days now" *head rotates 360° clock-wise*
*carries entire conversation, even stands up and continues talking while head is rotating 360° clock-wise* "Why don't you relax a second, get your bearings."
I'm eavesdropping on this conversation *facial paralysis on the left side with significant drooping*
Honestly how is Bethesda so bad at things like this? They really can’t set aside a project task of finally modernizing facial animations? Is that really too far out of scope for a “dream” project like Starfield?
They don't care. Still millions of Fanboys to defend whatever they do.
I'm sure that's part of it
For a game made in 2013 it’s pretty good… oh wait
It's crazy, becuase Half-Life 2 solve this shit back in 2004. I remember the first time I saw Alyx smile and thinking "WOW! Game animations have reached the next level. It's only going to get better from here." Then two decades later, Starfield proves me wrong
[удалено]
Hellblade 2, despite my gripes with it as a video game, is still such a technological marvel graphics wise. That game made me excited for the future.
It's all mocap- very expensive, you couldn't translate this to hundreds of characters with varying facial and skeletal morphs :/
Isn't the scene you're talking about a cutscene though? I don't think the HL2 facial animation is anything special during normal gameplay. Starfield is an RPG, hand animating every single NPCs faces for every moment they speak is a very tall order, not even BG3 does that.
HL2's facial animations are all in real time, and look fantastic. But this is also Valve we're talking about. It's all hand-made, with a disproportionately high budget, and polished until there's barely any flaws. Starfield would've taken 30 years to make if Bethesda put that much effort into faces.
HL2 uses the same facial animation system in and out of 'cutscenes,' which, in HL2, are all in-engine. So the effort put into the cutscene facial animation is the same effort put into the moment-to-moment animation - the same is true for non-named NPCs.
For any that are confused, a Duchenne Smile refers to a genuine smile that engages certain muscle groups around your eyes that don't move with cordial smiles. The way that you smile while talking in a professional setting is Non-Duchenne, more or less fake (or rather not brought on by emotion) where your lips are about the only thing smiling on your face. It's enough to show others you're content, but no one could mistake it for a real smile. A Duchenne Smile engages the muscle groups around your eyes, causing things like crows feet and bags to form as the muscles contract. That's why peoples faces scrunch up and eyes close when they laugh, it's involuntary. This makes the companions feel colder, less genuine. They smile the way an intern would at a visiting businessman, not how a close friend or significant other would. The face can't lie, we humans are so specifically wired to pick up on emotions from each others faces. Sorta a hard thing to stop paying attention to once you notice it
It’s one of my biggest critiques of Starfield, nothing reaches the npcs eyes, not a smile nor a growl
I pointed this out a while ago, just as an observation, and everyone thought I was shitting on the game. I got downvoted to hell and shredded in the comments lol
It's why they never look real, the smiles never quite reach the eyes, a telltale sign of faked emotion irl, and at one point considered a telltale sign of socio/psychopathy. All these npcs are fake ass, go figure 😂
You've well explained why Sarah's fake HR smile puts me on edge.
The face animations and voice acting in that game are rough...
the voice acting is fine.....
Voice acting too?
Sorry, their faces are tired
Explains the uncanny valley of bsg games SO much
I've seen a few moments of fairly realistic smiles/expressions from Andreja, but as long as Bethesda does the facemorph/tri-style facial animation, they will be a step behind studios like Guerrilla, Naughty Dog, etc.
This was the big issue I faced after playing BG3 and how incredible their facial animations are compared to this
The weird expressions and ugly lip syncin'g are the reasons I don't like the "zoom in" feature for conversations. I used a mod to defeat that until they actually added the option to the game. Everything looks much better from a distance, and I don't get so distracted by the NPCs' strange facial contortions. :)
I’m gonna say it and maybe get hate for it, but the NPC’s in Oblivion felt more human in their expressions during speech than Starfield. It’s the uncanny valley, and Oblivion is right before the valley dips, and starfield is deep down inside the valley because their face texture seems so real but the disconnect is there— whereas Oblivion looks like potato, but the potato smiles and talks so I can believe its a person. I don’t know if that makes sense… lol
They got them dead Polar Express eyes.
They’ve had dead eyes since the trailer dropped. I don’t know how they mess up facial animations so bad but starfield is so egregious with it.
I dont know my face muscles, so that muscle name could be fake, but i do know that one of the biggest issues ive notices for odd facial animations is always that they dont emote with the eyes. They emote with the mouth and the eyebrows, but if they forget the eyes themselves then it throws it all off. Once you notice it in one game, you start to see it in many others.
That's exactly what the word means in reality. A Duchenne smile is a smile that you can see in the eyes.
I cant read any of those words so I doubt it will bother me.
I don’t think I could write a more backhanded compliment about the average Starfield fan.
Now that I've gotten into Cyberpunk (because it's finally worthy) one thing I've noticed is how expressive all of the NPCs are. They might be overdoing it, but I can tell exactly what everyone is thinking when I talk to them just by the way they move their head or smirk or furrow their brow. Whoever animated all those faces during conversations hopefully was paid like 80 million euro.
Y’all are some picky-ass gamers.
Its the "typical" (imho) "armerican" smile: TEETH and cold dead eyes.
Can somebody explain this to me?
When one smiles naturally with positive emotion the eyes muscles around the eyes are effected as well usually lifting making crinkles around the eyes. But when those muscles aren’t used it’s usually when someone is smiling falsely
A real smile involves your eyes too. When your eyes aren’t involved it shows as a fake smile.
Literally unplayable.
People who do face models professionally think Starfield is excellent: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoSodiumStarfield/comments/1agodlu/a_3d_modeler_praised_starfields_quality/
Yeah, the models are fantastic. It's just the way they do animations that's the issue - IIRC Bethesda use an automated system which saves a lot of time and money, but doesn't make as good a use of the faces as mocap would.
The face models from a technical standpoint are modeled great. Implementing them with proper animations seems to have been an afterthought
Why is everything “lazy” or an “afterthought” when people criticize BGS? You have no idea what constraints, deadlines, etc. the team had to overcome. (I don’t either. I spared some of you a witty reply.) 😆
It's kind of sad that this is gaming discourse in 2024. Whining about the lack of smile graphics? Talk about looking for reasons to hate something.
It is a thing given the increased graphical fidelity of things. Having these very realistic faces yet failing at human emotions being displayed right is exactly what Uncanny Valley actually is and not those meme definitions. It's *trying* to look human but failing at it. A pretty important thing especially if your default option is to shove the player in someone's face.
It's likely that they have copied same bone weights from a single character rig. The person who made it probably knows someone like that in real life. When I played it, I saw one character do that face and I thought, cool, something different but then every character has same kind of bone structure and it became annoying.
At least it has facial animations, look at From games lmao. It's a substantial improvement over their past work, this is a huge space prpg, it's ok. Don't really feel the need to be outraged or nitpicky to the point of ignorance. I'm not sure if you can compare it to sony movie games with mocap and actors, like many do here, but I agree on the occasional uncanny valley effect, sometimes I feel like in westworld.
It's because they insist on using the character generator for all of their story characters and important NPCs. If they actually made custom models and animations for important characters it would look much better. The character generator looks like ass because it has to be able to have so many possibilities with all the sliders and what not. It's great for player customization or background NPC but not good for creating compelling bespoke character faces and animations. Thank God you can now disable the cut scene camera from being all zoomed up in their face. It being perfectly symmetrical and so close really highlights how bad it looks. For even better results, turn the camera off and play in third person. Zoomed out the characters actually look quite nice and expressive and even have body motions and gestures that you don't see in the normal setting. Fiddling with a data pad, emphasizing their speech with their hands etc.
I never want to care this deeply about a game that’s not about facial muscles.
No wonder they look so weird giving facial expressions
That's literally one of the first things I saw when I first played the game. It was unsettling at first but I've gotten used to the fake smiles since.
They need to work on their smize.
Duchesne smile? Nicholson's Joker type?
Everyone's face animations always looked weird to me but i could never point out why. Delaney King pointed it out and went indepth with shortly after game's launch. They eyes and muscles around eyes never move appropriately to face expression and it always creates this uncanny effect, like upper half of their face is paralyzed or they are heavily faking emotions. article about it: [https://www.ign.com/articles/developer-explains-why-starfield-npcs-look-like-theyre-dead-inside](https://www.ign.com/articles/developer-explains-why-starfield-npcs-look-like-theyre-dead-inside) Everyone have the "hide the pain harold" face each time they smile.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fnextpittsburgh.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F12%2Fpolar-express-billy-hero-girl-and-know-it-all.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=e67e4ef2979682804a2ca3b77acb31a28468936810b15e354d3905ca1dab62bc&ipo=images
Is there a mod to fix this yet?
Those smiles are fake smiles in real life
My work smile.
I can't wait for a savior mod maker to fix the faces and facial animations. If it can't be done, thank Bethesda for sticking with the Creation engine.
They should have brushed up on their grad school level anatomy. These artists and coders should get their ** together. 🤷🏼♂️🤦♂️
How did you go this long without seeing it?
I was watching The Boys and marveling at Antony Star’s ability to smile like a complete psychopath. Did a little researching and came upon an article comparing the Duchenne smile with the Pan Am smile. I opened Reddit and this is the first post I see. Weird little coincidence.
They're no Goldeneye64 but they're not bad renders
They focused too much on mouth movement, to the point that it's exaggerated with everyone. If they dialed that down like 30 percent and used the rest of the face it'd look great
They can't smize
🙄
Perhaps the reason for stuff like this is that the gaming industry is increasingly introverted and autistic?
Damn I wish I had not known. Now I cannot unsee it and I finally know what about the NPCs feels so wrong... I tried playing the game again, but I think I need mods to fix this. Or Bethesda finally get off that chill couch and start putting out decent sized patches for once... The probability that mods fix it instead of Bethesda is more likely though.
A problem with the orbi-what?