Unless you’ve been living under a space rock, you’ll have heard about Mass Effect: Andromeda and the controversy surrounding its subpar character modeling and animations. It was one of the many complaints we made in our review. Amidst the number of armchair developers complaining and hurling abuse, Jonathan Cooper (an actual developer for Naughty Dog) took to Twitter to offer his thoughts. In a fantastic display of rebellion against the site’s 140 character limit, Jonathan gave an in-depth explanation of how animation works and what exactly players are seeing with Andromeda.
We’ve compiled all of Jonathan’s tweets below for easy reading.
Folks have been asking so here are my thoughts on Mass Effect Andromeda’s animation. Hopefully people will better understand the process. 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.
That said, animating an RPG is a really, really big undertaking – completely different from a game like Uncharted so comparisons are unfair.
Every encounter in Uncharted is unique & highly controlled because we create highly-authored ‘wide’ linear stories with bespoke animations.
Conversely, RPGs offer a magnitude more volume of content and importantly, player/story cho...