Former Bioware Animator Explains Mass Effect: Andromeda’s Bad Animation

Mass Effect: Androm­e­da has been heav­i­ly crit­i­cized for many of its ani­ma­tions. Facial ani­ma­tions and select walk­ing ani­ma­tion in par­tic­u­lar have been mak­ing the rounds on the inter­net. Now the lead ani­ma­tor for Mass Effect 2 has tak­en to Twit­ter to offer an expla­na­tion for the poor animation. 

Johnathan Coop­er has worked as an ani­ma­tor on mul­ti­ple AAA titles such as Mass Effect 2, Unchart­ed 4, and Assas­s­in’s Creed 3. He has also pre­vi­ous­ly spo­ken out against the claim that ani­ma­tions for female char­ac­ters in Assas­s­in’s Creed Uni­ty would take too much time. 

The gen­er­al idea being con­veyed is Quan­ti­ty vs. Qual­i­ty, the use of a low­er qual­i­ty algo­rithm, and lim­it­ed time. Giv­en the large amount of ani­ma­tions need­ed Bioware like­ly used a low qual­i­ty algo­rithm to cre­ate ani­ma­tions for much of the game and planned to change each scene by hand. For one rea­son or anoth­er they did not have the time to do this com­plete­ly and were left with what we have now.

Despite the neg­a­tive atten­tion sur­round­ing the game Coop­er found one positive.

“The audi­ence has grown more dis­cern­ing, which makes our job more dif­fi­cult but fur­thers ani­ma­tion qual­i­ty (and ani­ma­tors) as a requirement.”

Coop­er’s full expla­na­tion can be seen in the series of tweets below.

First though; going after indi­vid­ual team mem­bers is not only despi­ca­ble, but the cul­prits and choice of tar­get revealed their true nature.

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017

That said, ani­mat­ing an RPG is a real­ly, real­ly big under­tak­ing — com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from a game like Unchart­ed so com­par­isons are unfair.

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017

Con­verse­ly, RPGs offer a mag­ni­tude more vol­ume of con­tent and impor­tant­ly, player/story choice. It’s sim­ply a quan­ti­ty vs qual­i­ty tradeoff.

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017

As such, design­ers (not ani­ma­tors) sequence pre-cre­at­ed ani­ma­tions togeth­er — like DJs with sam­ples and tracks.

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017

Here’s the cin­e­mat­ic con­ver­sa­tion tool for the Witch­er 3. Both tools make it fast to assem­ble from a pool of ani­ms. https://t.co/JK4CKrtxJU

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017

The low­est qual­i­ty scenes may not even be touched by hand. To cov­er this, an algo­rithm is used to gen­er­ate a base­line qual­i­ty sequence.

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017

The Witch­er 3 added to this with ran­dom­ly select­ed body ges­tures that could be regen­er­at­ed to get bet­ter results. https://t.co/I3ZogoeoUz

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017

This, pre­sum­ably, was because they planned to hit every line by hand. But a 5‑year dev cycle shows they under­es­ti­mat­ed this task.

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017

Were I to design a con­ver­sa­tion sys­tem now, I’d push for a work­flow based on fast and acces­si­ble face & body cap­ture rather than algorithms.

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017

The one pos­i­tive to come out of all this is that AAA sto­ry-heavy games can’t skimp on the ani­ma­tion qual­i­ty with a sys­temic approach alone.

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017

The audi­ence has grown more dis­cern­ing, which makes our job more dif­fi­cult but fur­thers ani­ma­tion qual­i­ty (and ani­ma­tors) as a requirement.

— Jonathan Coop­er (@GameAnim) March 23, 2017