Final Fantasy XVI and the Problem with 'BioWare Face' | Extra Punctuation

This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee explores... BioWare Face.

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[Pro-gressive]

I've always thought I have "resting bioware face", it's a miracle I ever found love.

[Darkthestral]

This issue reminds me of something that you learn when you start painting
The viewers ability to fill in gaps and details is your best asset. It's usually best to do just enough that the person's brain gets what it is and fills in the blanks for you. Their imagination will do a better job than you ever could. A good example is in landscapes. If you really study most paintings of a field the flowers will be little pinpricks or blobs of color. Trying to add more detail would actually take away from the viewing experience
When you do hyperrealistic art such as what these videos games are doing, you're fighting against your audiences brain. Basically you have a much much smaller window of wiggle room because all the "spaces" (aka lack of detail) are being filled in by you instead of the viewer. So not only do you need to do several times the work, but your audience is more likely to pick up on any small flaw. You're not asking your audience to suspend their disbelief, you're telling them this is real, and that is a much harder sell

[Zelkiiro]

Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts were the first time I noticed this phenomenon, where sometimes Tidus/Sora have wonderfully detailed faces and expressions, and other times, it's a .gif texture on a flat surface.

[al-muthannaathamneh]

Best one that did immersion in dialogue is Disco Elysium, no fancy animation was needed, it basically said “just imagine the characters doing this” and it was more immersive than most games.

[cloudkitt]

The setup he describes at 1:47 is exactly what XVI has... In fact the unvoiced dialogue moments are very rare, only on a couple optional dialogue choices.

The overall point stands, but I think the bigger issue with XVI was just the sheer wordiness. So the middle level - fully voiced, but stock poses - scenes go on way longer than they needed to.

[Cptn_Fabulous]

Disco Elysium also communicates its story visual-novel style because it can't afford gorgeously animated cutscenes, but it plays a bunch of clever tricks to steer the player's attention away from the sub-par fidelity of the visuals and onto the dialogue window:
* The window contrasts heavily against the environment and covers up a large portion of the screen
* The top-down perspective zooms the characters out so you don't see their lack of lip-syncing.
* The text heavily features full-on narration as well as just character dialogue, to describe subtle details that would be too expensive to display visually. The narrator delivers these lines in a powerful, commanding voice that immediately captures the player's attention.
These all make it incredibly easy for the player to ignore the visuals, focus entirely on the text, and let their imagination do most of the work.

[DeepDiveDevin]

I was really impressed by Psychonauts 2 bringing unique animations for every minor dialogue scene you could find, though it was still definitely lower-quality than the big important sequences.

[charlottearanea]

When I was younger, I always thought of the cutscene quality disparity as a way to tell what was important and what was fluff. Which I guess is literally true, but I actually found it nice in a way. I don't need to treat every single dialogue interaction as though it might be the most important narrative beat in a game. Sometimes I'm just showing a guy a photo of him looking at his girlfriend so he can gush about what a cute couple they are. If that was presented in the same way as the big fight between the princess and the dragon, I might think this is something I have to worry about on that same level.

[colinhobbs]

I've played through Mass Effect 2 close to 30 times, and while there are many reasons why Tali is my go to romance, the fact that I don't have to see any dead eyed stares from her sure helps.

[shankypanky]

Thank you for giving praise for something Witcher 3(and even Cyberpunk) does far better than its contemporaries. So much of our emotions are expressed by our body language. The way we move, the way we sit around someone, the way we approach someone...
Still 'Bioware face' is far FAR better than Bethesda's "middle of the screen, standing still, dead eyes stare" conversations. And sadly, it appears they are in Starfield as well...

[HonkeyKongLive]

One thing that gets forgotten is that this was never a problem in old games. No one complained that characters didn't emote in Chrono Trigger. No one criticizes Undertale over this. It's only when games try to look "realistic, " as if aping cinema is the height of artistry.

[ultrasparrow]

As a former kid, when you would be playing a game like final fantasy 7 through 10 and a fmv started, you knew shit was about to go down. That was the impression I got growing up; something important was about to happen. I don't think I recognized it as being more valuable

[cattysplat]

As a kid, as I think most kids did back then, we filled in the blanks with our imagination. You had to, so many of the games we played we were lucky to get story or dialog at all. So we appreciated every little bit we got. Even if so much of it was just JRPG Shonen anime reactions or Saturday morning cartoon dialog. Kids in general just don't really critically analyse or question things to piece together why they are, they just believe that's the way it is. Sometimes you even enjoy the simple read along text that is low mental investment for the player to recharge to, not everything has to be amazing all the time, allows you to appreciate the higher quality stuff too.

[melimsah]

The thing is, films and cartoons do it all the time too. You can tell what scenes of a movie has all the budget (like the super long single shot fight sequence in the recent Guardians of the Galaxy). And I had an animation screen design professor who talked about how they'd pick a few episodes of the show he worked on to be the Emmy quality work (they won a few), and then they'd phone out in and half ass it for the rest of the season. Honestly, I know people who didn't even notice the visual changes from Simpsons season 1 to season 4 to now. Like, they literally can't tell the difference, they only care about the funny hahas.

[guyincognito]

Yahtzee compares video games to movies here, but I think a much more appropriate analogy is live theatre. I've been to performances where the set decoration was impeccable, I've been to other performances where the "set" was a table and some chairs without even a backdrop, the audience was expected to suspend disbelief and use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. Set design was certainly an aspect of the experience, but it didn't (and wasn't intended to) steal the show by itself, it was there to support the actors in their performance. I see cutscenes the same way, they're there to sell the "acting" (the gameplay), if they are well made then that's just a bonus.

[ILoveEvadingTax]

Couldn't disagree more about the childhood thing. My first introduction to this was Final Fantasy VII when I was 10 years old and I knew when FMV was going on some seriously important shit was going down and it was time to really pay attention. It didn't break my continuity with what happened at all in fact it was like being elevated to something purely cinematic and then a return to gameplay just to reprocess what is happening. Ultimately I feel immersion is a false concept - we are constantly spotting and processing everything on many levels and the sooner people disabuse themselves of a notion there is a pure immersive state that can and should be maintainer we can move on. Give me Bioware face and let me fill the gaps if you have to; I swear my imagination can fill the gaps for me

[Cronosonic]

Half-Life 2's cutscenes use a lot of pre-canned animations (Valve was known for not using mocap until kinda recently and it's debatable how much), and they made scenes look fairly natural for the time, especially considering you're walking around characters and the developers deliberately eschewed the notion of using cinematic camera angles. The Source Engine's choreography editor might've been an inspiration for the Witcher 3's cutscene editing suite, it was really ahead of its time and honestly you can't find a modern publicly available game engine with all of its features.

[smugsneasel]

While I understand the point about the kids' experience, Yahtzee, I think they're barely care at the end of the day even if it stood out to them. If anything, I find that this happens more with young adults who only played games in their childhood and got back into it now, or never did it to begin with. They're the ones more likely to step back and go "Okay but does it NEED to be like this?"

[pachoarteaga]

I really like how RDR2 does its dialogue: every time you interact with a character they're either polishing their guns or sitting on a log. And when they call Arthur to talk he takes out a piece of meat and cuts it with his knife or he takes out a cigar to smoke. Those little things really add up and help you get immersed in the characters.

Death Stranding does something different in which Sam 'I don't want to interact with no one at all' Bridges will constantly try to do little things while people are talking to him but the other characters will push themselves onto his space, saying "Hey! I'm talking to you and I want your full attention on me" All those things help these characters feel more alive

[ryanwhaley]

I think I actually prefer this. I can read the text way faster than it can be performed and I’d rather be able to skip ahead when it’s a “this could have been an email” conversation. When there’s emotion in the scene though, I don’t want to skip that and I’m glad for the extra effort put into it.

I liken it to the SNES era, where villagers dump info on you in text boxes but important scenes had lovely little emotive pantomimes. Having that is great but if it’s in every conversation for “welcome to peasantville” it gets very old very quickly.