Originally Posted by BG3NF
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the cinematics within the game. Do you consider them a mere luxury, or do you believe they significantly enhance the overall gaming experience and atmosphere?

Personally I enjoy them a lot as lot of them are really well done and portray properly what they're supposed to portray. However disregarding the cutscenes which look like they were made by a freshly hired intern who just learned how to animate, the one thing that ruins the cutscene experience drastically for me are the cartoony player facial expressions which are so overdone that they end up looking comically bad.

An example where a character is neutral for 99% of the cutscene and then suddenly has evil thoughts;
[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

Sad, confused, angry, evil... there's really no subtlety to facial expressions because Larian is trying so hard to portray raw emotions that instead it ends up ruining the cutscenes because either a character ends up looking like a confused stumbling dumbass or looking like as if they're trying to do a Doctor Evil impression from Austin Powers. "Oh, in this cutscene player gets to exhibit evil thoughts. QUICK! DO THE EVIL FACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I honestly miss the days of Early Access when there were no facial expressions, it looked so much better and made the character look like an adventuring professional who is in control of their emotions.

So if Larian would just make the facial expressions drastically more subtle and improve numerous animation transition & smoothness errors that some cutscenes are displaying, then it'd be perfect. Because I know they can do it, a lot of cutscenes are wonderfully animated to perfection (such as the MIndflayer transformations or Dame Aylin's flight), but the regular dialogue cutscenes where NPC's eyes go crosseyed or they turn/snap awkwardly as if a noob animator made them or display these hideous facial expressions... those need fixing badly.