Mass Effect: Andromeda has very strange faces. However, it seems that this is not the fault of the developers at BioWare.
Hardly any other topic has caused as much mockery and derision regarding Mass Effect: Andromeda as the botched facial animations of most characters in the game. Although BioWare has repeatedly confirmed that they themselves are not satisfied, it has not yet been confirmed whether the faces will actually be “fixed.” However, it might be possible that the blame does not lie with the staff at BioWare, but with other teams!
The YouTuber Liam Robertson, who regularly uncovers various details about video games on his YouTube channel “Game History Guy,” recently had the opportunity to speak with some developers from BioWare. Although he did not want to discuss the facial animations himself, the topic was brought up by the developers. According to their statements, the core team at BioWare was not responsible for the facial animations of most human characters!
When creating the faces, they relied—according to Robertson’s sources—mainly on a cyberscan technology, where real objects are scanned and then turned into digital images. To make faces appear realistic, however, a lot of manual work from the developers is still required. This work, however, was outsourced and distributed to other teams.
It is even claimed that the management of BioWare rejected the developers’ offers to manually refine the work because they did not consider it important enough.
That tasks are outsourced to other teams within the same publisher is not new; for example, the multiplayer of Mass Effect 3 was developed by a different team than the campaign.
If the story is true, then the fault probably lies with the management of BioWare, which did not find it necessary to have the core team refine the faces again.
In the coming weeks, more details are sure to be revealed.
