Sounds to me [...] that's exactly the implication that half of this thread is making [...]: close-up dialogues and voice acting are "a waste of money, a bad use of resources, bad for actual roleplay, etc, etc, yadda yadda" and so they should be removed entirely to nail that good, heart-warming old school low budget vibe.
I've been very clear and direct about what I'm saying. I'm always very direct and clear about what I have to say... it's part of my irresistible charm ^.^
What you accuse me of, in order to then mock, has never been a part of it. I don't appreciate being directly and personally painted into a false position and mocked for it.
I've spoken against the mini cutscenes for atmosphere dialogue with various npcs; I've given my reasons clearly. That has nothing to do with any idea about canning close in cutscenes or voice acting entirely. I've been clear that I believe that those mini-scenes, in their current implementation are taking away from the game more value than they are adding - that they exist supposedly for atmosphere ad world immersion, and that they are actively damaging those very things by their current existence. I have spoken clearly about how and why I feel they are doing so.
Aside for the fact that I'm mostly confident it WILL be improved (we are most likely NOT going going to see random shit placing itself between the characters and the camera, companions idling few centimeters behind who's talking and/or overlapping with each other and other weird glitches, for instance)
Are you truly? You are more charitable than I, in that case, because I'm not. That's why I'm commenting here, in this forum and this thread about the issue: to voice during the EA period a concern about something that definitely needs to not be like it currently is, that I am not at all confident will actually get fixed or improved significantly without further voices being raised about the issue. If I was confident that all of this would actually be fixed and resolved in a pleasing and appealing way by release, then
I Wouldn't Be Posting Here. So if you ARE confident about this... why ARE you here? If you're DO want it improved, and ARE confident it will be, then those who are complaining about it are wasting their energy, sure, but they also aren't doing any harm - so what's your goal here?
I am kind of curious how someone can say the cinematic animations are wooden, or unrealistic, when they were literally motion, and face capture...
Because they often ARE woody, unrealistic, puppet-like and generally janky. They literally ARE. Look at them, and actually look at them - some of these scenes were fully motion-captured in a realistic way, yes. MOST were not... or if they were they have not been mapped well. Most cutscenes, whether mini cutscenes, dialogue scenes or full cutscenes, involve and excessive amount of arbitrary and unnatural movement that, among other things, illustrates that the models being used have no actual weight; that ever part of every body is just as weightless as every other part and that they all move at the same speed, relatively speaking. Scenes almost always contain an excess of floaty, twitchy movement that doesn't belong there (both in the body, and indeed in the face), that seems to be present just for something to do - because things 'have to be moving in some way, right?', which then ends up over-exaggerated and/or forced. A lot of the movements in many scenes - most scenes even, are stiff and jerky, and not natural at all. Pretty much all of the combat animations look machine animated, not captured (even if captures were used for reference). Many of the camp scenes are the shining exception to this, and have clearly had a lot of love and work put into smoothing them, but they ARE the exception, and even they use a handful of various scene tricks to disguise the places where they are weakest. Further more, even those scenes suffer from Terrible choreography, terrible cinematography and basically having every element of the scene that is NOT the VA, the graphical quality or the smoothed captures (when they are good), being TERRIBLE. In those scenes, the excellent quality of those three things makes the rest look even worse. Go look at Minthara's intimacy scenes and tell me that ANY aspect of that is good AT ALL - it's an abomination.
Even if we look at just the motion capturing itself - anything that involves any kind of active movement or motion of the whole body is just a disaster from start to finish. High quality motion capture for dynamic events requires a full studio, and Larian have been doing these captures with people operating rigs set up in their living rooms, and I'm sorry, but it SHOWS. Maybe we can assume these are stand-ins, put in place while conditions were not good, which are fully intended to be replaced with the 'real' ones - but I'm far too jaded to actually rely on that being the case and trust it. I don't.
The camera angles used in the cutscenes are pretty standard, if you watch the behind the scenes the mocap is spot on.. The direction is fine as well.
This is simply untrue, I'm sorry. The camera angles are not good, in a large percentage of cases. The scene direction, choreography and cinematography are all very lacking, very uninspired and poorly handled. They often look like the work of people with no professional training in those fields who think they can just get it done with some basic ideas and using popular media as their mentor... which is puzzling since their cinematic director (Jason Latino) has worked on several other games previously, which, to my immediate recollection, I did not find myself having cinematic complaints about... yet here, there are so many times where I was left with a sense of "what the hell is this camera angle?" and "Er, what am I meant to be seeing here?" and "Egh, that looked really bad" and "That was so tacky" and "I think they're trying to convey X, I guess", and other such thought paths.
There are other threads (Such as
Here and
Here) which discuss this in a lot of detail, and I'd really recommend anyone taking a look at them both and thinking about them, even if you come to disagree with them, before trying to say that the scene direction, choreography and general cinematography for the sequences in this game are 'good'.
