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[alloush]

The intro cutscene is probably the most visually impactful. Take note of the Titan rendering especially during close up. When I saw this my mind immediately made me think of Transformers movie. There are also shots in that same sequence that show nanite-like geometry, and the battle scene looked straight up CG with fantastic animation of the soldiers. Someone in another thread said it reminded them of playing MGS4 on PS3. I agree with that analogy. It's not perfect, but it's a spectacle with very high production value.

Maaan, you got me excited for this. Having said that, I think FF16 is hella polarizing especially on this forum. Some are praising it to the moon and some are calling it a PS4 game, lol.

The eikon battle is cool but i didn't liked the close up textures on the titan, they still looked plasticky\fake\low res, like the venom suit in spidey 2.

I should made a big post on how devs still don't get monsters skin\scales\organic material right in any game, a dragon on ps5 look like a dragon on ps4, just compare the textures on gow2018 dragon boss and demons remake blue dragon, they are virtually identical.

Avatar suffer from the same flaw, when they show a close up of that big alien creature the textures are just meh.

I fucking love hyper detailed cretures so i probably notice this more than most.

Yeah I’m like you. First thing I noticed in the Avatar trailer was the low res texture on that big creature thingy when zoomed in. I was like “nope that’s too big of a low res object on screen it cannot be unnoticeable “.

That’s also my beef with regular characters and character/NPC rendering and modeling.

 

[Edder1]

Watching DF Ubisoft review they also confirm that Outlaws is real time likely running on PC and isn't a fake demo given how LODs behave, low framerate hair, framerate drops in the demo and some animations running at half rate. These imperfections would make no sense if this was another infamous fake Ubisoft demo.

 

[rofif]

I'm not saying that you don't have to like it, i just thought that nextgen would also bring less plasticky textures on these type of monsters.

I have a particular fetish for creatures and monsters.

You are talking like if they are doom 3 models.
There is nothing "plastic" about these models...

 

[alloush]

I have a particular fetish for creatures and monsters.

 

[H . R . 2]

It's not low res and it's not hyperdetailed.
Not hyperdetailed =/= bad graphics.

Besides what are you expecting?! Rock titan to have pores and facial hair ?! This is all purely an art stuff

to be fair, GOW2018 had great [rock] textures for its bosses.
it's all about priorities
we can only expect that kind of consistency from the likes of R* or ND
but then again TLOU2, despite looking bonkers, had its fair share of inconsistencies and flaws

so you are both kind of right

 

[GymWolf]

You are talking like if they are doom 3 models.
There is nothing "plastic" about these models...

The fact that you have lower standards doesn't mean that i have to like that potpourri of bad textures in titan form, sorry.

 

[SlimySnake]

Watching DF Ubisoft review they also confirm that Outlaws is real time likely running on PC and isn't a fake demo given how LODs behave, low framerate hair, framerate drops in the demo and some animations running at half rate. These imperfections would make no sense if this was another infamous fake Ubisoft demo.

I think both Outlaws and Avatar look fairly realistic for next gen games. There will always be downgrades, but i dont see anything major being downgraded. Especially not in the case of avatar which is coming out in just six months. If they already have it running on PS5, it will probably end up looking better, not worse. Starfield and FF16 both look better than their trailers from last year.

 

[GymWolf]

I think both Outlaws and Avatar look fairly realistic for next gen games. There will always be downgrades, but i dont see anything major being downgraded. Especially not in the case of avatar which is coming out in just six months. If they already have it running on PS5, it will probably end up looking better, not worse. Starfield and FF16 both look better than their trailers from last year.

I'm gonna be severely underwhelmed if this is the best nextgen devs can provide.

 

[SlimySnake]

LMAO at DF praising the explosions fire effects in Avatar. come on. What kind of experts are these guys.

They did notice the explosions were causing physics reactions. One of the trees lost its leaves and we all dismissed the dude being thrown back in that gif posted yesterday as canned, but there are real physics here. The explosion seems to trigger a shockwave which affects foliage and enemies in a nearby radius.

 

[H . R . 2]

Watching DF Ubisoft review they also confirm that Outlaws is real time likely running on PC and isn't a fake demo given how LODs behave, low framerate hair, framerate drops in the demo and some animations running at half rate. These imperfections would make no sense if this was another infamous fake Ubisoft demo.

that was already obvious. The concern is that they might actually downgrade the visuals BECAUSE of all those imperfections
because Ubisoft has a history of building great tech just to realise they can't handle or iron out those technical creases in time for the release
so they almost always downgrade!

 

[Edder1]

DF seem to be much more impressed by Outlaws than Avatar. Outlaws seems to be doing much more impressive stuff from a technical perspective going by their reaction.

 

[GymWolf]

LMAO at DF praising the explosions fire effects in Avatar. come on. What kind of experts are these guys.

They did notice the explosions were causing physics reactions. One of the trees lost its leaves and we all dismissed the dude being thrown back in that gif posted yesterday as canned, but there are real physics here. The explosion seems to trigger a shockwave which affects foliage and enemies in a nearby radius.

Didn't we had this shit in many games?

ffs zelda on switch has all that stuff...

 

[rofif]

The fact that you have lower standards doesn't mean that i have to like that potpourri of bad textures in titan form, sorry.

My standards are not too low. I am the graphics guy over fps.
Your standards are over the roof. You want some unimaginable graphics now. you kinda remind me that twitter guy complaining about spider man 2 picture of new york looking unrealistic.... and then it was revealed it is a real picture lol.

Anyway. Let's agree to disagree. I understand you are not as impressed and you have every right to be. Lets not waste more posts

 

[Edder1]

that was already obvious. The concern is that they might actually downgrade the visuals BECAUSE of all those imperfections
because Ubisoft has a history of building great tech just to realise they can't handle or iron out those technical creases in time for the release
so they almost always downgrade!

The fact they have it running at almost locked 60 a year and a half from release says otherwise to me. It's not like we are looking at a 30fps footage with drops into 20s.

 

[GymWolf]

My standards are not too low. I am the graphics guy over fps.
Your standards are over the roof. You want some unimaginable graphics now. you kinda remind me that twitter guy complaining about spider man 2 picture of new york looking unrealistic.... and then it was revealed it is a real picture lol.

Anyway. Let's agree to disagree. I understand you are not as impressed and you have every right to be. Lets not waste more posts

Spidey 2 was trolled for its graphic by a lot of people, it was hardly a single person.

 

[TheKremlinBossMan]

Not graphics related, but that music is so so so good. It sold me on the game.

Also not graphics related, That song transitions into a battle theme. Not the standard battle theme but one based off of the level music and it is glorious. Drifts in and out between this and the action piece.

 

[SlimySnake]

I'm gonna be severely underwhelmed if this is the best nextgen devs can provide.

The way I look at these games is that they are year 1 first gen games like KZSF, Infamous and AC Unity. Better looking gen 2 games will arrive around 2025-2026.

This is just the beginning.

 

[SlimySnake]

Didn't we had this shit in many games?

ffs zelda on switch has all that stuff...

Nah, that stuff is canned and none of it applies to foliage.

Zelda is different from pretty much every other game out there. its physics based and yes, it does have far more realistic physics that arent canned. The problem is that it comes at a cost and it looks worse than Uncharted 2.

 

[GymWolf]

I'm gonna be happy when creatures are gonna look like pacific rim monsters, not a moment before. (and PR is already old cg tech), but the dream is something like godzilla vs kong.

(shit pic but you get the gist)

This is how a dragon should look

 

[GymWolf]

Nah, that stuff is canned and none of it applies to foliage.

Zelda is different from pretty much every other game out there. its physics based and yes, it does have far more realistic physics that arent canned. The problem is that it comes at a cost and it looks worse than Uncharted 2.

Dude i'm absolutely sure that i played many games where the foliage move if you throw a granade and enemies and objects\bodies get thrown away dinamically, you are making something big from something small of all the impressive things in that trailer.

I'm pretty sure that if you cast aard on w3 you can see trees and foliage moving.

Mad max had incredible wind tech during thunderstorms and all the objects around the world were moved dinamically by the storm.




And look at the fucking explosions, i swear mad max still has some top notch graphical aspect, it's frankly incredible.

 

[SlimySnake]

Dude i'm absolutely sure that i played many games where the foliage move if you throw a granade and enemies and objects\bodies get thrown away dinamically, you are making something big from something small of all the impressive things in that trailer.

I would give up all of that for 20% more destruction.

No i am just pointing out that its physics based which means the destruction you want will be there organically because the game has system/physics built in. None of the games ive played this gen have you throw a grenade in the room and have it shatter tables, chairs, windows, etc. yes, bodies are thrown off because devs pre-code those animations. What we are seeing here is the physics based destruction they promised in interviews at E3 2021.

"I can give you a specific example of something that you see in the trailer that has to do with the AI systems. For the big creatures, whenever they are calm, they would obviously walk around trees and things like that. But when they are fleeing, or attacking you, or whatever, they will just go straight through the bamboo and other vegetation and just completely destroy it. I think it's really cool to be able to see all of these effects that the NPCs have on the environment, as well as you having an effect on the environment too."

 

[Musilla]

Amigo, estoy absolutamente seguro de que jugué muchos juegos en los que el follaje se mueve si lanzas una granada y los enemigos y objetos/cuerpos se tiran dinámicamente, estás haciendo algo grande de algo pequeño de todas las cosas impresionantes en ese tráiler.

Estoy bastante seguro de que si lanzas aard en w3 puedes ver los árboles y el follaje moviéndose.

Mad Max tenía una tecnología eólica increíble durante las tormentas eléctricas y todos los objetos alrededor del mundo se movían dinámicamente por la tormenta.




Y mira las malditas explosiones, te juro que Mad Max todavía tiene un aspecto gráfico de primer nivel, es francamente increíble.

Sorry for the quality.

The vegetation also reacts to the explosions but I think it is not destroyed

 

[Gudji]

I'm gonna be happy when creatures are gonna look like pacific rim monsters, not a moment before. (and PR is already old cg tech), but the dream is something like godzilla vs kong.

(shit pic but you get the gist)

This is how a dragon should look

That's a monkey and lizard bruv.

 

[ChiefDada]

Maaan, you got me excited for this. Having said that, I think FF16 is hella polarizing especially on this forum. Some are praising it to the moon and some are calling it a PS4 game, lol.

I can definitely understand people comparing some aspects to PS4, namely a lot of the textures and facial animations. But the setpieces are a sight to behold.

 

[GymWolf]

edit

 

[Johnny Concrete]

I think you are not seing it because it's not bombastic like HFW.
It's a subtle and technical look that makes the graphics "invisible" or something like that...
To the point it looks so good, you are kinda not paying attention to it.
I certainly did. My jaw was on the floor 90% of the demo

Anyway. Posting screenshots is ever a bad thing right? I will post of my highlights again and try to explain what makes them look so CGI to me. Do not confuse with realistic.

Benedikta here. Soft light and shadows on her face and neck. The fight is at night, so obviously moon is a very diffused light source. Obviously her smirk too.

When she does a close-up (sorry I had to grab this one of yt because I wasn't fast enough to grab it in-game), so it's sdr and macroblocing. I would need to finish the demo again to grab a good one but I noticed it when playing and then went looking on yt.
The craziest, previously absolutely unseen my be in any game with hints in HFW and Death stranding is the softness around the eyes. I mean that the transition from eye to eyesocket is seamless. There is no face ending and eyeball object beginning. This is absolutely spotless.
it could be pre-rendered but it's a short 3 seconds camera cut during the fight.
Sure, she does not have the MOST realistic looking face. She still kinda looks like an anime person but that's the point.
IMO it is absolutely crazy what we are seeing here. During a boss battle at that.

here is another night scene. Not a single seam or aliasing visible. Everything flows perfectly on her face. It is incredible.
The only parts making me feel it might be real time is the necklace trails (temporal aa) and tiniest bit of aliasing on right side of her hair)
The clothing is not the highest polycount but the shading and face is just mad. Again, the eyes are the highlight

Here, maybe it's AMAZING motion blur doing the work or the direction but the guy straight up looks like a movie lol.
Maybe it's the fact that his face is not overly too sharp to show every single pore. Maybe it's the way hair. Nothing sticks out.
I will be damned if it's not cgi.

This guy is not as good. But still pretty ok

This is the most normal video game looking one but still showcases fantastic dynamic light source

And this one. The most deceiving place in the demo. The swamps.
It is extremely difficult to make a murky swamp look anything but flat and dull. Especially with the diffused sky like they have.
And yet, there is this soft look throught the whole scene. It looks like a tech demo of a game that will get downgrade lol but it's an actual game.
you can still see soft light deforming on their clothes.

better in motion

Yea it is the subtle things they get right, like eyes and the inside of the mouths getting the right amount of ambient occlusion. Something that is often incorrect in game models (glowing teeth for instance, even the Fable trailer has this problem).

Also when talking not just the mouth moves, but also the nostrils and part of the neck are animated, which makes it more convincing that the character is actually talking.

Like I said in another thread: the visuals are not mind blowing, but they are stroking my eyeballs. Very pleasing to look at.

 

[GymWolf]

No i am just pointing out that its physics based which means the destruction you want will be there organically because the game has system/physics built in. None of the games ive played this gen have you throw a grenade in the room and have it shatter tables, chairs, windows, etc. yes, bodies are thrown off because devs pre-code those animations. What we are seeing here is the physics based destruction they promised in interviews at E3 2021.

Play more games dude.

Shattering furniture with granades or moving bodies with granades is ps2 tier tech since we had havok and ragdoll, that bit about being pre.code animations is bullshit because you only have 2 options, bodies that glue on the terrain after death, and bodies that still react for external forces, and when the second thing happen, they always have proper ragdoll and interaction with the scenery, something that you don't see in infamous or tsushima because sucker punch are allergic to ragdoll.


Unironically it is something that i see soo often that i can't even point out a specific game but i'm gonna go with something recent like control for destruction and any game where bodies don't glue on the terrain and react to external forces for corpse interactions, hell i recently discovered that enemies in diablo 4 don't actually glue on the terrain when they die like i thought, and if you use a tornado you can move their bodies and vegetation with that, and it's a fucking isometric game dude.

Have you watched the mad max footage i posted?

 

[Neilg]

No idea why it seems so difficult to create realistic-looking characters and NPCs, man. Yes HFW had amazing character models but even there you felt like they coulda made them look better, at least from my perspective. Avatar, SW, Starfield all those looked amazing but the characters looked a gen or two behind they felt out of place. I honestly would love to hear some people's thoughts on this, those who know a thing or two about this topic.

When you scan a persons face for real time expressions you have to get 30+ poses, to capture what happens when the skin folds and wrinkles during certain expressions, and for use in a video game, create a model which can seamlessly blend between all of these positions and use only certain parts of them, by morphing the low poly mesh and blending 4k+ normal maps which are being masked and brought up into the mix for as low as 2-5 frames to capture the subtle movement and twitches. The systems to build all of this are at breaking point, and the small incremental improvement that you saw going from ps3 gen of simple bones to ps4 where entire texture sets are dynamically swapped was a fucking huge undertaking. the power needed to get these minor details in is unreal. Not even going into the increased complexity of using the tools to actually do the animation work.

Blur studios and other offline CG studios that you see do 'good' characters also do this, but then on top of that they do a soft body simulation of the skin sliding around and adding secondary motion - so if someone changes expression particularly quickly, it has subtle knock on effects elsewhere on their face. that is categorically not happening in real time games.
There are lots of AI tools in development to fill in the gaps here - we'll have AI(neural network) assisted facial animation before we have properly simulated secondary motion in real time.

Die hardmans speech was a critical part of the game - it wasn't dialogue playing over keyframed animation, it was given a huge amount of attention and focus. it still lacks the secondary motion but his expressions were more carefully captured to be used for that speech rather than remixing what happens when your mouth does an O and an E and when you scrunch your eyes etc.

And as for why bethesda games look like everyone is made from the same face.... they literally are, they pointed that out in the starfield direct. it's a feature to them that everyone is generated from the same tool. makes animation significantly easier. solves many problems that you encounter with making a big RPG. if they didnt do that, it wouldn't be cost-effective to make bethesda style games.
the idea that any of this is last gen is dumb as fuck. last gen it could be done with one character and there was a huge mismatch in quality. now the same quality is being hit across 100+, and in star wars's case, alien species' where every single pose and 'scan' that goes into the animation system manually sculpted by artists. The labor overhead on that is fucking nuts. the generational jump is doing those one-off things from last gen at scale.

 

[Crispy Gamer]

I can definitely understand people comparing some aspects to PS4, namely a lot of the textures and facial animations. But the setpieces are a sight to behold.

Yup I wouldn't challenge anyone comparing some aspects to last gen but that's not the whole package, hell I was even ready to come on here and rail on it until I kept playing and finished it my first thought was holy shit that was epic !

 

[SlimySnake]

Play more games dude.

Shattering furniture with granades or moving bodies with granades is ps2 tier tech since we had havok and ragdoll, that bit about being pre.code animations is bullshit because you only have 2 options, bodies that glue on the terrain after death, and bodies that still react for external forces, and when the second thing happen, they always have proper ragdoll and interaction with the scenery, something that you don't see in infamous or tsushima because sucker punch are allergic to ragdoll.


Unironically it is something that i see soo often that i can't even point out a specific game but i'm gonna go with something recent like control for destruction and any game where bodies don't glue on the terrain and react to external forces for corpse interactions, hell i recently discovered that enemies in diablo 4 don't actually glue on the terrain when they die like i thought, and if you use a tornado you can move their bodies and vegetation with that, and it's a fucking isometric game dude.

Have you watched the mad max footage i posted?

I have played Mad Max. I love that game, but lets face it most AAA games dont do storms like that. I have played virtually every AAA game released this year, hogwarts, RE4, star wars, Horizon burning shores, zelda and now FF16's first two hours, and no one seems to want to do anything physics based. Yes control has full destruction where tables and chairs explode into pieces, but its an exception not the norm considering how none of those games released this year have any kind of comprehensive physics based destruction system.

Look at the leaves falling off that plant. Now imagine if the same physics/destruction apply to this area below. Way ahead of anything we have seen this gen in these open world games.

 

[GymWolf]

Sorry for the quality.

The vegetation also reacts to the explosions but I think it is not destroyed

Nice.

I have played Mad Max. I love that game, but lets face it most AAA games dont do storms like that. I have played virtually every AAA game released this year, hogwarts, RE4, star wars, Horizon burning shores, zelda and now FF16's first two hours, and no one seems to want to do anything physics based. Yes control has full destruction where tables and chairs explode into pieces, but its an exception not the norm considering how none of those games released this year have any kind of comprehensive physics based destruction system.

Look at the leaves falling off that plant. Now imagine if the same physics/destruction apply to this area below. Way ahead of anything we have seen this gen in these open world games.

Pretty sure you can blow up large part of plants that float in the air in the original horizon, search on yt for horizon zero dawn physics, it's small video with rock music.

But sure, nextgen games had been lacking physic wise, i think demons remake and tlou remake had some furniture nice destruction.

 

[Grildon Tundy]

I disagree with the whole theory that ND tried its hand at next-gen and failed. people who say that have failed to understand what was achieved with the TLOUp1:
TLOU1 was a pure cash grab ordered by Sony in order to push its misguided multimedia agenda while trying to bring a bit of harmony and congruence between the titles and the TV series.
yes they did have a chance to create something amazing, ...but they haven't failed YET.
If I were a ND dev, I wouldn't want to outdo myself with puny a remake. I would want it to be a new title [ not necessarily a new IP] with entirely new mechanics introduced properly in a huge event.

I believe in ND

I like your take. To me, TLoU Remake reached basic parity with TLoU Part 2 running at 60fps on PS5. Now, those two games fit together graphically really well. I don't think the intent was to blow away what they (Naughty Dog) had done prior

 

[SABRE220]

I have played Mad Max. I love that game, but lets face it most AAA games dont do storms like that. I have played virtually every AAA game released this year, hogwarts, RE4, star wars, Horizon burning shores, zelda and now FF16's first two hours, and no one seems to want to do anything physics based. Yes control has full destruction where tables and chairs explode into pieces, but its an exception not the norm considering how none of those games released this year have any kind of comprehensive physics based destruction system.

Look at the leaves falling off that plant. Now imagine if the same physics/destruction apply to this area below. Way ahead of anything we have seen this gen in these open world games.

We saw this and much more with crysis 1...which says alot about the current state of physics and interactivity in current games.

 

[OCASM]

We saw this and much more with crysis 1...which says alot about the current state of physics and interactivity in current games.

We saw as much in Turok on the N64

 

[SlimySnake]

Lol my twitter feed is blowing up with these ridiculous tweets over starfield being 30 fps and someone actually posted this as proof that HFW can do 60 fps. Im like look at the draw distance and see how they completely cull the detail in the distance with fake fog/haze whatever you want to call it.

We saw this and much more with crysis 1...which says alot about the current state of physics and interactivity in current games.

We saw as much in Turok on the N64

Yep. Go watch the very first Uncharted trailer on PS3. Amazing physics and destruction. I think it was the E3 2006 trailer. E3 2007, game looked way better but lost all its physics and destruction from the first trailer.

Far Cry 2, Crysis 1 and Warhead all had their physics and destruction removed for Far Cry 3 and beyond, and Crysis 2 and beyond. We went backwards. It's good to see Avatar devs bringing it back.

 

[CamHostage]

Look at the leaves falling off that plant. Now imagine if the same physics/destruction apply to this area below.

This is nitpicky, but I don't think the leaves are being knocked off the plant there; looks like it's spawning leaves when a damage trigger hits, and it also shakes violently to sell the effect. I think it's an animation. Look carefully or at the original clip, the amount of leaves on the trees I believe don't change.

Vegetation interaction is pretty minimal in Avatar from what we've seen so far. (Mostly there is not motion when creatures or characters tread through grasses, and when it does like when the antelope-type creatures hop through it, it triggers a wiggle animation but not crush/ directional movement. ) That may be WIP, or may be how they have such high- res and varied models for plants. Smartly, they can flock it to crazy levels because it's first- person and you won't see leaves moving much behind you like you would a third- person view.

(They did say in original statements you quoted that vegetation can be affected, but i think what they have is a swap system where surfaces can change their overgrowth to show either natural life or devastation of warfare. That's what it seemed to be that they were saying where players have impact over Pandora with their actions. I wouldn't assume it's dynamic though, and given that there's little vegetation interactivity shown so far, i would guess it's not happening while gameplay is happening. But dont know for sure yet. )

Some great effects and techniques in this game either way, I was a doubter that they'd achieve the old trailer quality but Massive really got a lot out of Snowdrop.

 

[Represent.]

Still arguably my fav explosion in a game. Yes its a set piece, but my god was it the most impressive thing ever at the time.

Building collapsing all around you. Wood and debris flying everywhere, and then the building just fucking caves in. All while shooting at enemies, taking cover, etc.

This is the game that turned me into a graphics whore. It was after this that my standards just kept getting higher and higher.

Also when ND put their name in the fucking books and said, this is how you make a set piece.

 

[TheKremlinBossMan]

 

[TheKremlinBossMan]

Sorry both of these were supposed to be in the same post. Was just trying to show some FFXVI shots without the main character models.

 

[Fatal Chuck Yeager]

We saw as much in Turok on the N64

Yeah but you couldn't see more than 5feet of that at a time. lol

 

[Turk1993]

I'm gonna be happy when creatures are gonna look like pacific rim monsters, not a moment before. (and PR is already old cg tech), but the dream is something like godzilla vs kong.

(shit pic but you get the gist)

This is how a dragon should look

GOW:R has some good looking monster skin

 

[Lethal01]

I don’t mind debating. It certainly doesn’t have this super high fidelity graphics pop like hfw…. But if you think about what you are looking at and that it’s real time, it blows my mind. It’s just not so evident with this art style.
Ok I won’t beat the dead horse over here. I agree with you to disagree.

I pray that the complaints about NPC's continue for many more entries., I'd hate for the character design to lose it's anime aestehtic in favor of full realism.

 

[Danjin44]

Sorry both of these were supposed to be in the same post. Was just trying to show some FFXVI shots without the main character models.

The normal NPCs in FFXVI MUCH more improved over FFVIIR.

 

[Lethal01]

I'm not saying that you don't have to like it, i just thought that nextgen would also bring less plasticky textures on these type of monsters.

I have a particular fetish for creatures and monsters.

Same

 

[alloush]

When you scan a persons face for real time expressions you have to get 30+ poses, to capture what happens when the skin folds and wrinkles during certain expressions, and for use in a video game, create a model which can seamlessly blend between all of these positions and use only certain parts of them, by morphing the low poly mesh and blending 4k+ normal maps which are being masked and brought up into the mix for as low as 2-5 frames to capture the subtle movement and twitches. The systems to build all of this are at breaking point, and the small incremental improvement that you saw going from ps3 gen of simple bones to ps4 where entire texture sets are dynamically swapped was a fucking huge undertaking. the power needed to get these minor details in is unreal. Not even going into the increased complexity of using the tools to actually do the animation work.

Blur studios and other offline CG studios that you see do 'good' characters also do this, but then on top of that they do a soft body simulation of the skin sliding around and adding secondary motion - so if someone changes expression particularly quickly, it has subtle knock on effects elsewhere on their face. that is categorically not happening in real time games.
There are lots of AI tools in development to fill in the gaps here - we'll have AI(neural network) assisted facial animation before we have properly simulated secondary motion in real time.

Die hardmans speech was a critical part of the game - it wasn't dialogue playing over keyframed animation, it was given a huge amount of attention and focus. it still lacks the secondary motion but his expressions were more carefully captured to be used for that speech rather than remixing what happens when your mouth does an O and an E and when you scrunch your eyes etc.

And as for why bethesda games look like everyone is made from the same face.... they literally are, they pointed that out in the starfield direct. it's a feature to them that everyone is generated from the same tool. makes animation significantly easier. solves many problems that you encounter with making a big RPG. if they didnt do that, it wouldn't be cost-effective to make bethesda style games.
the idea that any of this is last gen is dumb as fuck. last gen it could be done with one character and there was a huge mismatch in quality. now the same quality is being hit across 100+, and in star wars's case, alien species' where every single pose and 'scan' that goes into the animation system manually sculpted by artists. The labor overhead on that is fucking nuts. the generational jump is doing those one-off things from last gen at scale.

WOW. THANK YOU SO FUCKING MUCH FOR THIS POST.

I have learned about facial animations and character rendering from this post alone more than I have in the past 10 years and I am not joking.

So apparently trying to realistically simulate facial expressions in videogames and rendering characters is much tougher than I thought huh? When do you reckon we will achieve that goal in videogames? Also, a lotta games nowadays have good lip syncing where the character's mouth moves exactly how it should be moving reliant on the words being spoken. I think, and correct me if I am wrong, Rockstar started it with Mafia back in 2010 I guess? They debuted this amazing tech at the time which simulated facial expressions correctly when characters were speaking thus correctly emulating the mouth movement depending on your speech.

 

[Neilg]

? They debuted this amazing tech at the time which simulated facial expressions correctly when characters were speaking thus correctly emulating the mouth movement depending on your speech.

Quick reply, but you're thinking of LA noire - and nothing about that was simulated. The power wasn't there to simulate it - every single line of dialogue in that game was recorded as a 3d facial capture, allowing them to play back a recording of the 3d face performing those lines. Then they stuck these 3d playback masks onto the character models.

If that sounds like it's a fucking crazy solution that would come with a whole host of logistical nightmares and result in the game it's being used in to get delayed significantly, then the tech never used again because it's such a pain in the ass... You'd be right.

 

[Feel Like I'm On 42]

I'm really bummed there's no outcry over Starfield 30 fps. Insult to injury was the bs that came out of Todd and Phil's mouths about "artistic vision".

Guys- this is a fucking FPS. It doesn't look THAT good that there can't be a lowered settings option for 60 fps!

This is bunk. Think about this. No 60 fps means even when mid gen refresh and ps6/series 2x come out this will still be 30 fps.

It's bullshit and there will be PC's with lower specs than Series X that will be able to run it at 60 fps.

 

[CamHostage]

So apparently trying to realistically simulate facial expressions in videogames and rendering characters is much tougher than I thought huh? When do you reckon we will achieve that goal in videogames?

I mean, it's still a problem in some Hollywood CGI movies, so...

Human faces are as hard as it gets, because we are conditioned to feel we know faces. Cartoonish faces like Pixar movies work fine because they can exaggerate motion, but a human face needs to look and move exactly like we've known faces to look all our lives. There's literally a brain function for recognizing faces.

https://www.science.org/content/article/identifying-brains-own-facial-recognition-system.

And the more resolution and effects used to make a digital face more closely approximate a human face, the more we go, "Ugh, that doesn't look right..." The lips don't curl or the jaw doesn't flex or the eyes look dead or the phenomes of syllables don't match the tongue or the subsurface scattering of light on skin isn't perfect, whatever.

It's super hard, because we can see what we expect to see just by looking into a mirror.

 

[Crispy Gamer]

I'm really bummed there's no outcry over Starfield 30 fps. Insult to injury was the bs that came out of Todd and Phil's mouths about "artistic vision".

Guys- this is a fucking FPS. It doesn't look THAT good that there can't be a lowered settings option for 60 fps!

This is bunk. Think about this. No 60 fps means even when mid gen refresh and ps6/series 2x come out this will still be 30 fps.

It's bullshit and there will be PC's with lower specs than Series X that will be able to run it at 60 fps.

Yeah I still tend to get kinda sick playing at 30 fps it pisses me off but whatever I'm too old to be going back in forth on forums about it people are way too tribal. If Spider-Man 2 only launch at 30 fps I'm just done until pro models arrive.

 

[SlimySnake]

I'm really bummed there's no outcry over Starfield 30 fps. Insult to injury was the bs that came out of Todd and Phil's mouths about "artistic vision".

Guys- this is a fucking FPS. It doesn't look THAT good that there can't be a lowered settings option for 60 fps!

This is bunk. Think about this. No 60 fps means even when mid gen refresh and ps6/series 2x come out this will still be 30 fps.

It's bullshit and there will be PC's with lower specs than Series X that will be able to run it at 60 fps.

lol Its everywhere on gaf, twitter, reddit, era. You literally have devs chiming in from god of war guys to naughty dog devs.

I dont agree with them saying its a creative decision because anything that runs at 4k 30 fps should be able to run at 1440p 60 fps or 1080p 60 fps if its CPU bound. The fact that Todd said it runs at 60 fps at times tells me that the game has some CPU bottlenecks they werent able to resolve in time. I think had they focused exclusively on the xbox version, they wouldve been able to get there, but then i look at FF16 struggling to run at 45 fps at 1080p and wonder if its just a PS5 and XSX cpu problem.

If I had to guess, it's the shared ram bandwidth. 448 GBps on the PS5 and that dumb split ram architecture on the xsx that no one really knows if it runs at 560 gbps or if the 360 gbps is holding it back. It could also be that their engine is not efficiently multithreaded, but its hard to multithread games apparently since some of the main game tasks have to wait for the other tasks to finish.

Even PC games recently have had this issue. I never had any issues with CPU being the bottleneck until the Matrix demo which just wouldnt hit 60 fps no matter how much i downgraded the resolution. it ran at 4k 45 fps on my 12 gb 3080 and stayed there under lower resolutions maybe 5 fps boost at max at 1080p. Then came the latest games in 2023 with hogwarts and gotham knights refusing to use more than 50% of my GPU because of the CPU bottleneck, and mother fucking star wars just refusing to run at a locked 60 fps no matter what.

I would not be a 100% sure that PCs with lower specs run the game at 60 fps. The Ryzen 3600 which is equivalent to the console CPUs is a huge bottleneck in Spiderman games on PC. A 4090 runs the game at 69 fps which sounds great until you realize that with a top of the line CPU, it jumps to 130 fps! And thats a last gen game with no fancy systems like starfield.

At the end of the day, you just have to be happy that it is an ambitious game that hits the CPU. it tells me that they chose not to compromise on systems just to get 60 fps working on consoles.