This might be the reason Mass Effect: Andromeda has horrible animations


It has been exactly two weeks since the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda. While the game has received polarized reception mainly due to the game’s animation, news regarding BioWare’s latest game is still relevant and does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

Recently, YouTuber, Liam “The video games history guy” Robertson spoke to several anonymous BioWare employees to unravel the mystery regarding Andromeda’s character and facial animations.

According to these employees, it appears that all the animations were outsourced to other EA studios.

image: BioWare

In his recent video, Robertson refers to BioWare’s heavy use of a new “cyber scan technology,” which generates digital scans of people or objects and creates an in-game 3D model. Additionally, Robertson also explained that BioWare used this instead of internally sculpting the character faces.

The biggest issue with this choice of character design was that the face models were completely outsourced to other branches of BioWare’s parent company, Electronic Arts. However, according to Robertson, BioWare’s management team depended way too much on outsourcing, which in turn, had the company sending the entire workload off-site and heavily counting on scanning technology.

Image: CinemaBlend

Robertson also voices that the reason for the choice had nothing to do with cost cutting. However, he explains that the management team did not see any incentive to polish the in-game animations with the in-house team, with one artist who “actively went out of their way to offer their services to additional work on the human character assets and were turned away.”

Currently, the management has not commented on why facial animations were not on the list of “high priorities.” However, it is clear that the team did focus a lot more on polishing the gameplay and in-game vehicles; regardless for 2017, the animations are unacceptable and are on par with the animations features from the original Mass Effect trilogy.

You can check out Robertson’s video down below. Mass Effect: Andromeda is out now for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

YouTube video