Cyberpunk 2077 Dev Once Again Defends Starfield From Criticism, This Time Animations
A senior quest designer at CD Projekt RED is defending Starfield. It's about the criticized animations during conversations with NPCs.
Starfield is undoubtedly one of the most talked-about launches of this year, but unfortunately for the developers, the publicity is also, at least to some extent, the result of extensive criticism. One of the main reasons is the uninteresting way of conducting conversations with NPCs, in which the character animations look very shallow. This issue was commented on by Patrick K. Mills, a senior quest designer at Projekt RED, who defended the game.
Cyberpunk 2077 creator defends Starfield
The X/Twitter profile of Synth Potato, which deals, among other things, with reviewing games, published a post, in which the author wrote that, although he really likes Starfield, he thinks that Bethesda should abandon the Creation Engine.
In doing so, he compared the latest game of the said studio to Cyberpunk 2077 and juxtaposed two excerpts from dialogue delivery in both games - the first from Judy in Cyberpunk, and the second with an NPC and Sarah in Starfield. The reviewer pointed out that in CD Projekt RED's game you can see "even such details as the nervous tapping of the interlocutor's leg," which adds realism to the conversation, while in Starfield the camera is locked on the character's face and, aside from basic facial animation, you can't see much else.
The post was commented on by the aforementioned senior quest designer at CD Projekt RED, who wrote:
"I really like Starfield, so I'm not engaging in fundamental criticism here, but I will say that the way the developers handled the videos compared to Cyberpunk 2077, doesn't depend so much on the engine as on the tools and design. These issues are related, but they are not the same."
In addition, Mills pointed out that Starfield staged a number of scenes that are a bit more "sophisticated," such as the first meeting of the Constellations, but the developers focused primarily on the game's scope, where conversations can take place in a huge number of diverse locations.
It is also worth recalling that the issue of facial animation has become a high-profile topic when Delaney King, a developer who worked on Dragon Age and God of War pointed out that the reason why smiling characters look as if they are "dead inside" is the failure to implement an animation that mimics the contraction of the ocular muscle, the lack of which causes the so-called "Duchenne smile."
