BioWare delivered on their promise of releasing patch 1.05 and addressing some of the cinematics, glitches and bugs. They revamped a few of the facial animation sets for the NPCs and added the much-needed shader tweaks to the eyes. How this managed to make it past any of the quality assurance teams during any build passes leading up to going gold is absolutely beyond me, but heads should have been rolling for not having some of these basic tweaks implemented into the core of Mass Effect: Andromeda.
The most obvious changes include additional light sourcing across the eyeballs and pupil areas, along with more refraction on the surface, which helps improve the dead-eye look. You can see the improvements with the video below from Danger Squad.
The animation clicking is still pretty bad, where you can see where some of the animations snap from one set to the next instead of the keyframes being blended together.
Addison at least looks a heck of a lot better in terms of her facial expressions and gesticulation. It sure beats the stilted, mannequin style depiction she had during the initial release of the game.
You can see a side-by-side comparison below courtesy of Gamer BLR.
They appear to also have given her more movement during dialogue. It’s not the best but it’s better than before. Over the next two months they plan on improving more of the animations. They also gave some characters improved lip-synching, and you can see small pieces of it on display in the video above.
It’s now brought Mass Effect: Andromeda almost up to par with Mass Effect 1. The lip-synching is better in Andromeda but the character shaders still need help. Mass Effect 1 still had a hard-contrast in the use of light and shadows to give the characters a dynamic look throughout the game, as you can see below in the video courtesy of CJake3.
BioWare caught a lot of flak initially for the poor showing of Mass Effect: Andromeda. The game released with stilted facial animations, distorted faces, limited character creator, lots of poorly lit entities, plenty of glitches, lots of bugs, and a lot of cringe-worthy dialogue. Fans complained to the high heavens given that the quality was not on par to the previous three Mass Effect titles.
BioWare announced that they would fix the eyes and certain characters during the dialogue sequences, and that they would address more of the animations, lip-synching and character dialogue over the next two months.
Heck, maybe in another six months Mass Effect: Andromeda will finally be better than Mass Effect 1 in the overall visual department. Well, fans can hope.
