Mass Effect BioWare Montreal's Mass Effect: Andromeda - where element zero meets trisomy 21

[Padzi]

Spoiler

this one at the very least should be kept for posterity

edit: ninja'd

That one should be a codex avatar or a codex smiley.

DarkUnderlord, I submit these for your consideration as smilies.

I was at work and during my break I jumped in on the Codex to check what was going on in this thread and because of you I had an episode of uncontrollable laughter attack. In the room beside mine they were having a meeting so I had to step out to let it pass and laugh it up. Thanks man.

 

[MercenarySnake]

 

[Sykar]

I get a severe headache from the fact that many of the people complaining about Ass Defect : Andrometurd are praising all the games which came before it, including quite often ME 2, ME 3, DA 2 and DA:I.

 

[Santander02]

Let this trainwreck continue! I'm feeling almost as much schadenfreude as during the Kwa election!

 

[Padzi]

The crazy Asari strikes again... :

Spoiler

Writers are seemingly trying to make the crazy as far removed from Asari sterotype as possible, they even gave her an Elcor father to make her more unique. But this is so obvious it doesn't make her interesting it just makes her look like a try-hard character.

 

[Santander02]

I think for most Biodrones (and reviewers) that is really the worst aspect of Andromeda, it's an entire new galaxy and we still have bipedal, humanoid looking aliens (and we can even communicate with them, no big deal)

More retarded than that is how it's an entire new galaxy and we still have bipedal, humanoid looking aliens that we can comunicate with and they just happen to have technology that is roughly on par with what the humans had 600 years in the past when they started out this journey. wat.

 

[Freddie]

It's like Codex is having a beach party while M/S Bioware is sinking offshore

Yeah... and it's fucking awesome.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

Not just shitty animations but also shitty colission detection, what a surprise, Bioderp.

Bugged animation aside, another lovely example of the fucked up body to leg ratio on these models. No wonder they walk funny.

 

[oldmanpaco]

I get a severe headache from the fact that many of the people complaining about Ass Defect : Andrometurd are praising all the games which came before it, including quite often ME 2, ME 3, DA 2 and DA:I.

Some people like gay romance simulators.

 

[MRY]

The name Peebee is remarkable in and of itself.

 

[Freddie]

Bugged animation aside, another lovely example of the fucked up body to leg ratio on these models. No wonder they walk funny.

This is something that actually caught my eye earlier while watching the videos and there was a post about this before thread spilt. Anyway, it isn't just scenes that need a lot of animation are weird but scenes that are quite static feel off, because characters doesn't look like humans. Uncanny valley effect can be actually even disturbing.

What purpose does this choice of design serve?

 

[illuknisaa]

Not just shitty animations but also shitty colission detection, what a surprise, Bioderp.

Bugged animation aside, another lovely example of the fucked up body to leg ratio on these models. No wonder they walk funny.

 

[vortex]

http://www.pcgamer.com/ex-bioware-animator-responds-to-mass-effect-andromedas-animation-woes/

http://www.animstate.com/round-table-mass-effect-andromeda/

Gwen: I thought it was funny that people are piling on animators for these glitches, when in reality the animators are probably blameless. On a AAA project of this scope most of the smaller cut scenes are never seen by the animators. Instead you create a system for designers to use and trust the designers to script everything properly. For instance, you will create a “mood” system so that a character can be happy, sad, or angry. Then you trust the designers to set the mood of the NPC during that scene. You give the designers a stable of placeable background NPC characters that have idles basic behavior, and you trust the designers to place those characters in logical places. As an animator you spend most of your time either on hero scenes (scenes that are entirely animated by hand) or working with animation programmers to make sure that the gameplay systems are air tight. You make sure that when a character is running up a slope they lean forward, and you work on the blending between different locomotion animations – that sort of thing. All the glitches I’ve seen online look like technical bugs and/or implementation bugs. I’m not saying the animators are blameless – everyone is responsible for making the game AAA quality and everyone is responsible for beating the drum when things are not shaping up in game. However, as a technical animator I can’t help but look at these bugs and think they look like ik problems and scripting errors.

https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/844961601732018176

 

[MRY]

Not just shitty animations but also shitty colission detection, what a surprise, Bioderp.

Bugged animation aside, another lovely example of the fucked up body to leg ratio on these models. No wonder they walk funny.

Pretty sure that's a camera angle/clipping issue, but not sure. The ratio looks better a few frames earlier in the animation.

http://www.pcgamer.com/ex-bioware-animator-responds-to-mass-effect-andromedas-animation-woes/

https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/844961601732018176

I read the articles that make this same point and I find it pretty curious.

I think it's lousy that people are personally harassing the animators or whatever. I'm sure they diligently did their jobs, and couldn't overcome the technical challenges in the game. It's absurd to think that some professional animator deliberately or lazily allowed these problems to occur. They were given an overwhelmingly hard task, worked their asses off, but couldn't execute it. Stuff like comparisons to the alpha footage make me more sympathetic to them, not less -- the idea that the art team just decided to turn the quality knob from 8 to 3 is ridiculous. Probably what happened is that various new broad "improvements" kept get adding, and these had cascading effects that required older work to be tweaked -- an animated character in a game represents the work of lots of different people across different disciplines (modeller, texture artist, rigger, animator, but also the people doing the coding for materials, lighting, etc.), and it is obviously super easy for things to get out of sync, and super hard in a big project to keep them all together. That thousands of people poured their hearts and hours into this project only to see people crap on it is really sad, and I feel bad for them.

But from an objective criticism standpoint, I don't really get these arguments. I haven't seen anyone comparing the game's animations unfavorably to Uncharted (maybe I'm not looking). Mostly the criticisms attack the animations without any comparison point, but where they use comparisons, it's typically to either (1) older Bioware titles like ME1 or (2) the Witcher series, both of which are apples-to-apples comparisons of large RPGs. I also saw the article complaining that it's unfair to compare this to animated movies given the relative hours of dialogue, but this is even more nonsensical because this kind of uncanny valley cultivating 3D model is essentially absent from animated movies and only shows up occasionally as a side character (like, say, Gollum or Tarkin or whatever) where there are additional hurdles (compositing it next to real live people, for example, or making the CGI lighting match the natural lighting in the scene into which you're compositing it).

The argument also seems off in that no one is saying that there are little weird defects in the animation -- rather, the basic core building blocks, like the at-rest pose of the main character's face, which would be the most common thing the player sees, are off. While people are poking fun at particular animations and glitches, those criticisms wouldn't get very far if the basics weren't awry. It's not like you have a scene with awesomely conceived characters delivering great dialogue and moving through interesting blocking, only it's getting messed up because the eyes occasionally clip through the lids under certain unpredictable circumstances. Instead, the animation tends to serve as the icing on the cake of silliness that is weird lines ("My face is tired") delivered in a weird way by weird looking characters who don't move naturally. "It's a big game!" doesn't really explain all of that, though of course bigness presents unique challenges.

The final thing that's disappointing about this response ("It's really hard to do very realistic characters in huge, open RPGs") is that it's a little like a high school basketball player trying to play like a Globetrotter and then responding to the fact that he keeps missing shots and losing control of the ball by saying, "Guys, do you know how hard it is to make a half-court shot backwards over your shoulder?" It's not like this kind of visual design is the only way to make an RPG -- there was a choice made to go with this level of detail, and if you make that choice and don't attain it, you can't wave the criticism off by saying you set the difficulty bar too high for yourself.

Incidentally, I think these same points apply to my own work on Torment, which is why I've tried to avoid responding to criticisms of my work by saying things like, "But guys, it's really hard!" It is hard, and I do think it might be useful if people knew how hard these things are -- that's why I think it's really great that the animators are explaining their challenges -- but ultimately that explanation is useful as a way of figuring out how to avoid or overcome those challenges in future titles, not an excuse for them in a current title.

 

[pippin]

The crazy Asari strikes again... :

Spoiler

Writers are seemingly trying to make the crazy as far removed from Asari sterotype as possible, they even gave her an Elcor father to make her more unique. But this is so obvious it doesn't make her interesting it just makes her look like a try-hard character.

Uh, pretty much *the* lore point when it came to asari was that they often found mates in other races, but their children kept their asari appearance. You meet interracial asari couples everywhere, and they even have salarian husbands, this is important because they are said to have no sex drives. In fact, pure asaris are a big deal in the games.
I'd say it's the rare occasion where Bioware actually managed to keep up with their own lore.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

Uh, pretty much *the* lore point when it came to asari was that they often found mates in other races, but their children kept their asari appearance. You meet interracial asari couples everywhere, and they even have salarian husbands, this is important because they are said to have no sex drives. In fact, pure asaris are a big deal in the games.
I'd say it's the rare occasion where Bioware actually managed to keep up with their own lore.

I think the point is that it was an elcor and not a species a bit more... charismatic. Can you imagine what an elcor sounds like in bed? Elcor voice: "Lustily: oh yes, that is good. Pleadingly: slow down, I'm going to... Sadly: oh no."

 

[Projas]

http://www.pcgamer.com/ex-bioware-animator-responds-to-mass-effect-andromedas-animation-woes/

http://www.animstate.com/round-table-mass-effect-andromeda/

Gwen: I thought it was funny that people are piling on animators for these glitches, when in reality the animators are probably blameless. On a AAA project of this scope most of the smaller cut scenes are never seen by the animators. Instead you create a system for designers to use and trust the designers to script everything properly. For instance, you will create a “mood” system so that a character can be happy, sad, or angry. Then you trust the designers to set the mood of the NPC during that scene. You give the designers a stable of placeable background NPC characters that have idles basic behavior, and you trust the designers to place those characters in logical places. As an animator you spend most of your time either on hero scenes (scenes that are entirely animated by hand) or working with animation programmers to make sure that the gameplay systems are air tight. You make sure that when a character is running up a slope they lean forward, and you work on the blending between different locomotion animations – that sort of thing. All the glitches I’ve seen online look like technical bugs and/or implementation bugs. I’m not saying the animators are blameless – everyone is responsible for making the game AAA quality and everyone is responsible for beating the drum when things are not shaping up in game. However, as a technical animator I can’t help but look at these bugs and think they look like ik problems and scripting errors.

https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/844961601732018176

the animators are probably blameless

I’m not saying the animators are blameless

 

[pippin]

Uh, pretty much *the* lore point when it came to asari was that they often found mates in other races, but their children kept their asari appearance. You meet interracial asari couples everywhere, and they even have salarian husbands, this is important because they are said to have no sex drives. In fact, pure asaris are a big deal in the games.
I'd say it's the rare occasion where Bioware actually managed to keep up with their own lore.

I think the point is that it was an elcor and not a species a bit more... charismatic. Can you imagine what an elcor sounds like in bed? Elcor voice: "Lustily: oh yes, that is good. Pleadingly: slow down, I'm going to... Sadly: oh no."

yeah that's funny, but still well within the boundaries of ME's lore. Unlike what they did to Sten's race in DA for instance.

 

[vortex]

It seams they used new tech for animating faces. Lead animators and programmers pass scripts for various expressions to other animators. Scripts have a lot of parameters and bugs occurs for such huge game.
Constants and variables, heh.
They should postpone the game for about 3-4 months to polish it and make heavy editing stuff in writing area.

 

[pippin]

They should postpone the game for about 3-4 months to polish it and make heavy editing stuff in writing area.

No time left for it now though. it's out and everybody can buy it. The thing you might be suggesting is probably closer to pulling an Arkham Knight?

 

[DeepOcean]

Man, If I had some champagne right now, watching Bioware going down on flames is so fun, it probably more entertaining than playing Prospermeda.


Congratulations Bioware, that is some quality fun.

 

[Melcar]

Can't they patch?

 

[vortex]

No time left for it now though. it's out and everybody can buy it. The thing you might be suggesting is probably closer to pulling an Arkham Knight?

Arkham Knight was broken performance-wise. ME:A runs OK. It needs patches and Director Cut.

Man, If I had some champagne right now, watching Bioware going down on flames is so fun, it probably more entertaining than playing Prospermeda.

 

[Dexter]

http://www.gamerevolution.com/featu...er-work-was-featured-in-mass-effect-andromeda

Meet The Lip Artist Who Didn't Know Her Work Was Featured In Mass Effect: Andromeda
Posted on Thursday, March 23 @ 14:20:00 PST by James_Kozanitis

Andrea Reed has always had a passion for art and designs. A few years after graduating high school in 2009, she combined makeup and art to give herself a more challenging canvas: her own lips. Fast forward to 2017, and a pixelated lip design Reed created last year called "Defragmentation" was featured in Mass Effect: Andromeda, one of the year's biggest and most anticipated video games.

But this was news to her. In fact, Reed only found out about her lip art being featured in Andromeda because she was contacted by GameRevolution. Reed said she received no contact whatsoever from EA or Bioware, and, despite a tertiary knowledge of the Mass Effect games, she had know idea that Mass Effect: Andromeda even existed.

"It's been a really popular design," she said, referring to her creation of Defragmentation. "I know my designs are all over Pinterest too, and that's a big place people look for inspiration."

Defragmentation, while not identical, is remarkably similar to the "lipstick style 3.00" option in Andromeda's custom character creation, as you can see below.


Click Image For Full Screen

Not only are they remarkably similar, but Reed's particular design is highly visible online. In addition to her more than 300,000 followers on Instagram, you can simply Google image search the words "pixel lips" and see her Defragmentation design on the first page. More generally, the design will also show up on the front page of Google simply by searching "cool lip designs." Not only that, but you won't find any similar designs from anyone else besides Reed, who designs under the banner "girlgreybeauty."

But would artists at BioWare really resort to Google image searching for inspiration? It's not unheard of. In fact, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan recently revealed that the map Dorado was designed after an image they found by Googling "colorful mexican town."

Reed, who also models and photographs her designs, has yet to monetize her art in any way, although she has been wanting to sell prints of her designs, since her followers often ask for them. Reed has mixed feelings about seeing her designs were used in Andromeda. Despite saying it's an awesome feeling to be the inspiration for such prominent work, it bothers her that she received no credit for it.

"My first response was a little ticked," Reed said. "But really, I know how inspiration works. Sometimes [artists] get inspired without even noting what inspired us.

"That said, companies should work harder on crediting artists. I want to be positive about this, but I don't want to just brush it off, because artists get taken advantage of all the time."

GameRevolution has reached out to BioWare for comment, and we will update this story once we get a response.

 

[MRY]

I saw a funny Tweet insisting that the pink alien was inspired by Abobo from the Double Dragon movie. It's not a bad claim!