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Xbox 360 exclusive Alan Wake is yet to hit UK store shelves, but that hasn’t stopped developer Remedy from promising to address the game’s “fugly” facial animations.
Apparently, the facial animations are a bit wonky, particularly during cut scenes.
But they’ll be better in upcoming DLC, though, development director Markus Mäki has promised.
“We have a few different methods of doing facial animation – in-game using FaceFX and motion capture used in cinematics,” he said in a post on Remedy’s forum.
“While I think it’ll always be possible to get “fugly” single frames out of any game we definitely learned a lot doing Alan Wake, and will try to improve the way we do things to get best possible looking facials. In fact, we’re using some of the improvements in the DLC production already.
“It’s not alone a matter of the method how or where the facial capture is done, it’s about the run-time animation techniques available, skeleton setup and so on. It’s a complex problem trying to dodge the Uncanny Valley.”
Tom’s official comment on the facial animations in Alan Wake: “The lip synching in cut scenes is dated. It doesn’t match the voice over.”
“Fugly”, according to James, means “f#*!ing ugly”.
Still, silly faces fail to prevent Alan Wake from being a superb game.
Game’s out next Friday.
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