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For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you've already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!
Discuss all things Starfield below!
They’ve never been able to get player models and expression right. I can totally forgive it if you get the same level of open world exploration and interaction we got in New Vegas. I personally can trade quality for depth and interesting gameplay (rimworld and dwarf fortress come to mind in the extremes of this). But it does seem like they struggle to achieve standards that were set even 5 years ago.
Bethesda is a funny company. When they are on it and get it right you end up with some of the best games ever made (Skyrim) but when they’re off it just becomes this jumbled mess that got duct taped together and released at full price (fo76).
I’m hoping this is more of the former but we will see. I suspect the modding community is going to take starfield and turn it into something magical. That ship building engine plus copyrighted space ships from pop culture, sign me up.
I think the hardest thing to do is having complex facial expressions overlapping when characters talk. You could do face capture for every dialog option but that would be a massive task.
In alot of engines characters mouths are controlled by a lip sync system that uses, pitch, tone or text fed dialog to 'mimic' words being formed in the mouth. It's far easier to have that and then having facial expressions as a separate animation layer that's blended together and triggered based on a enum that's selected by a script (say a players dialog option says "Your a mean man" and the player selects it, the NPC knows what you selected and in that dialogue option theirs a little enum (it makes more sense if you treat a dialogue option as an object) that contains the facial expression or expressions that are appropriate to use in response).
Full facial animations are used mostly for cutscenes because actors cost money while in game is just the engine trying to move the mouth using code (I know Farcry 5 had this where only the important characters had full facial animations and the rest just flapped their mouths up and down).
Would anyone else be interested in a game that aborts a dedicated “conversation mode” to just have players respond in their normal first person view? Games like Titanfall 2 did that - even though your banter with BT is inconsequential.
It could even lead to some fun “actions not words” moments. Like, a gangster explaining to you “I have the council in my pocket and every gun in the city knows your face. What’re you gonna do about it?” shoots him in the head instead of responding