Ex-Bioware Animator Weighs in on Mass Effect: Andromeda Criticisms

Even before it was released, Bioware’s latest entry into the Mass Effect franchise has been met with various criticisms and complaints which started with simply poking fun at the janky animation but has unfortunately escalated into singling out one particular animator and harassing her. That is pretty much internet behaviour in a nutshell. Now that the game came out, more and more people are weighing in on the topic, but it is not just gamers, but people behind the scenes and knowledgeable in the industry as well.

An anonymous post claiming to be a former employee of Bioware Montreal has posted a review on Glassdoor several days ago, citing huge staff turnover and lack of studio communication as the culprit as to why Mass Effect came out the way it did. Former BioWare animator Jonathan Cooper, who now works for Naughty Dog weighed in on the issue via his personal Twitter account to give a much needed (and trustworthy) insider perspective on the hows and the whys of game development animation, especialyl how it relates to Mass Effect:

“First though; going after individual team members is not only despicable, but the culprits and choice of target revealed their true nature. Just as we credit a team, not an individual, for a game’s success, we should never single out one person for a team’s failures.”

He goes on to state that animating RPG is a lot different than animating other games and that the “animation” that people criticize in Mass Effect is not actually directly on an animator’s shoulders as those scenes are generated mostly by algorithms and not manually done as it would take too long. It is actually on designers, not animators who make sequences of pre-created animations together like a DJ would with samples and multiple tracks. There are several presets which they choose from and populate the scene with which is what they did in Mass Effect 1 through 3, having default body ‘talking’ movement, lip-sync and head movement based on dialogue text. Witcher 3 employed something similar, but added randomly selected body gestures generated to make the scene much more alive.

“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.” he adds.  “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.”

Cooper also notes that audience tastes in quality have evolved and are much more aware of inconsistencies with game animation, hence this issue became greater than it needed to be.