Mass Effect: Andromeda Animation Problems Explained

The folks at GamesRadar+ delved into the depths of Twitter and found a few quotes from a former BioWare, now Naughty Dog, animator, Jonathan Cooper that can shed some light on the issues Mass Effect: Andromeda is having with its animations. Here’s an excerpt from the editorialized version:

“Animating an RPG is a really, really big undertaking – completely different from a game like Uncharted so comparisons are unfair,” explains Cooper. “Every encounter in Uncharted is unique & highly controlled because we create highly-authored ‘wide’ linear stories with bespoke animations.”

Something like Mass Effect Andromeda however involves far more work. “Conversely, RPGs offer a magnitude more volume of content and importantly, player/story choice. It’s simply a quantity vs quality tradeoff,” says Cooper. “Because time denotes not every scene is equally possible, dialogues are separated into tiered quality levels based on importance/likelihood. The lowest quality scenes may not even be touched by hand. To cover this, an algorithm is used to generate a baseline quality sequence. Mass Effect 1-3 populated default body ‘talking’ movement, lip-sync and head movement based on the dialogue text.”

Basically, much of Andromeda’s animation was initially automated to populate the wealth of content: “as such, designers (not animators) sequence pre-created animations together – like DJs with samples and tracks. Andromeda seems to have lowered the quality of it’s base algorithm, resulting in the ‘My face is tired’ meme featuring nothing but lip-sync. This, presumably, was because they planned to hit every line by hand. But a 5-year dev cycle shows they underestimated this task.”