[Video] 7 Minutes of Anthem Gameplay (Alpha Footage) - General

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLsHdqHR0-E

Somehow those facial animations look worse than in Andromeda

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/227365/e418d4bb-ac0f-43ea-94f6-0a37592df029/image.png Jesus fuck why would you make facial animations a primary aspect of your earliest demo...

Less and less dialog options... and they still call it RPG.

oh stop reaching

If it's any consolation I made a similar face while watching the video.

People are really looking for something to complain about, don't they?

Gameplay looks nice, but I don't think I'd ever abandon Warframe or Destiny for it.

Look, the Frostbyte engine is totally capable is displaying good looking facial animations. Battlefield 4 was made 5 years ago for god's sake: https://youtu.be/CrtwqDt0IEk?t=33 I know DICE has much more experience with the engine but then why bother using it if you can't make proper use of the tools at your disposal? I think the criticism is totally valid.

you're comparing a small linear experience with a few scripted cutscenes to a game with potentially thousands of cutscenes. The work required to hand-craft all of that is almost prohibitive so Anthem most likely uses generated facial animations. The Witcher 3 did this as well. Also, Battlefield 4's facial animation pretty much falls apart at the seams when not in a cutscene.

Seems weird to me that they bothered to make a showcase of 3 npc conversations and not much else, the very limited player input makes it seem even less noteworthy

That's comparing generated facial animations to handcrafted animations, which Anthem has in it's cinematic cutscenes, just like BF4.

Alpha footage. I know what they're doing by labelling it is as being in Alpha, despite the fact that it comes out next month, it's to avoid criticism of the game, even though during an Alpha or Beta is when a game is most open to criticism, a fact that so many people seem to think the opposite of. Can they fuck off doing that, it's not an Alpha at all.

the game comes out in 39 days, "Alpha" seems like a stretch

Those weren't in cutscenes in BF4. Moreover, it still doesn't negate the fact that if you're gonna have awful face animations or face models maybe you shouldn't show any faces at all. It's bad use of tech and bad art direction no matter how you look at it. This won't make or break Anthem but I don't know why that aspect should be immune to criticism when they've had several years to remedy the issue.

They don't look amazing, but they look fine? The face models themselves look pretty nice and the animations look decent enough. They're not Andromeda bad.

Anthem's been in the pipe for a very very long time, more than long enough for BW to develop a tool on par with CDPR.

Warframe has better facial animations and most Warframe characters don't even have a face.

Gameplay is so bland. Is the NDA about the alpha still in effect? I spent time with it, I have some shit to say.

They're backed by EA, using their proprietary game engine that's been in use for over a decade. I find that to be a poor excuse.

Yeah, I get it, it's alpha. The team aren't as familiar with the tools as other studios. Those animations are probably generated on-the-fly. Regardless of whatever considerations and concessions there are to be made, doesn't change the end product the player (or rather viewer in this context) is seeing. Maybe "Worse than Andromeda" is a bit strong, but Half-Life 2 still has it beat in how authentic it looks. Overall it's minor but it's the first thing I really noticed. people want Biowares blood I want them to avoid repeating the same mistakes (God-awful writing [plot-wise], dialogue, facial animation, cutscens and of course all the bugs) that resulted in Andromeda getting rightfully shit on. Being that it seems to be more of a loot-em-up than anything else, they've kinda diminished the impact any one of these could have individually by the type of game it is.

*not, by any standard used in the industry. If that was actually the case that means they'd have less than a month to finish development and then beta test the game.

“Alpha” When this doesn’t make a trillion dollars EA is gonna kill bioware for good and then it’s just sports games from here on out.

Who cares about the facial animations, these conversations are the blandest cookie cutter thing ever.

I don't think the facial animations are that bad, really par for the course in most games. Really the reason it looks so bad in certain situations is the lighting, if you bottom-highlight or just have only indirect lighting on a face, it's gonna' look bad pretty much no matter what - and that was the case for a lot of faces in this. What did stick out to me, was how bad the shading was (seriously, everything just looked like blinn-phong with a constant roughness), and how low resolution the textures were, Dead Space had a higher texel density than this.

...why are some of the textures PS2-tier low res?

Alpha my ass

Oh my god I want them to succeed but I can't see it possibly happening at this point. The textures must have been having some sort of issue, or they were put on the lowest setting possible. They looked worse in quality to Mass Effect 1 on PC without a texture fix. The conversations felt like generic side quest turn-ins from Inquisition, and the facial animations are absolutely nowhere NEAR what they showed off in their original E3 demo. The voice acting has taken an absolute nosedive. The player character's voice felt like a developer was talking through his lines nearing the end when he was speaking to the guy who modifies the look of your javelin. Why can't EA just pull an Activision and take Bioware off the leash and give them publishing rights to Dragon Age and Mass Effect. This game doesn't feel like an RPG. I don't know why they're even the ones making it.

I gotta assume this is just a really old build and/or it's being demoed on a base model Xbox One or PS4. The last several trailers I've seen for this game look significantly better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJo19lIZWJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZizDqnz7oY Now granted those two trailers could be cherrypicked footage, but even Andromeda had decent texture work so I'm inclined to think this is legitimately old footage. Guess we'll see when the demo comes out in a week and a half.

The game looks like it's running on a low preset or something, the hands at 3:55, look like a low-poly distant LOD.