One of the big complaints about Mass Effect: Andromeda is that the animations need a lot of work. This has popped up due to a lot of video footage and screenshots captured from the 10-hour trial. Well, people have been asking if these issues will be fixed with a day-one patch.
At day 1? No, that ship has sailed. We’ll have more patches later on, exactly what goes into them is still in discussion.
Day-one patches have to be certified by the console manufacturers before being distributed. The process can take a while because they have to meet certain criteria before being approved.
The issue regarding the animations didn’t pop up until after the 10-hour free trial was made available for those with EA Access. People realized that both male and female Ryder had some odd facial animation quirks and that some of the movement and running animations for Sara Ryder were a bit… off.
It wasn’t just the main characters who came under scrutiny in Mass Effect: Andromeda. There was also a lot of criticisms for the NPCs in the game as well, with various characters disappearing into the background during cinematics, or other characters having strange, waddle-like animations for their walking.
Most jarring was the dialogue sequences where the camera would zoom up on a person’s face and they would either lack proper emotion for the dialogue they were speaking, or they would deadpan another character with fish eyes.
The 10-hour trial managed to make a lot of people aware that there were some serious issues with Mass Effect: Andromeda. In result, they asked BioWare if they would be fixing those issues.
While it’s obvious these things won’t be fixed in a day-one patch, there are those holding out hope that they may arrive in a post-launch patch down the line.
The major issue is that reworking entire animation sets is extremely costly. You’ll need to bring back the face riggers, the body riggers, the animators and possibly even the motion capture crew. Of course, the mo-cap crew would be the most expensive, and they likely wouldn’t want to go that route to fix some of the staggering issues in Mass Effect: Andromeda.
Even still, after getting the crew to work on the animations for the game, the process of fixing those issues at the bare minimum would take weeks, if not months, to not only redo the animations but also run them through quality assurance testing, ensure that they work with all the cinematics, and properly test them in a live build. It’s no hop, skip and a jump.
For now, some gamers have stated that they don’t mind the facial animations or the character movement quirks and are willing to settle with what’s offered in Mass Effect: Andromeda. The game is due for release on March 21, in just a few days, for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
Culled from Cinemablend
What do you think?