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How important are faces to you in video games?

levyjl1988

Banned
Is it enough to tolerate it even if the face is unpleasant, ugly or does not agree with you.
I guess most of you would go for the band-aid fix and put a helmet or paper bag over it, examples Dark Souls and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion having pretty bad character creation, best hide it with a helmet.

But some times the video game industry really has gone dirty with it and release pretty shitty defaults. You all know what I'm talking about.

Mass Effect Andromeda

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Tomb Raider Definitive Edition, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider


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compared to Tomb Raider (2013), this face is clearly superior in this version.

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Marvel's Avengers clearly listened to the feedback. Going from this:

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to this:

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the jowls have shrunk giving her face a more feminine feel, and I'm glad they listened to feedback.

Something similar happened with Marvel vs Capcom Infinite.

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Hell, there was a lot of backlash with Sonic the Hedgehog movie.


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How important is character video game faces to you?
Is it enough to not warrant a purchase because the character is ugly?


Hell, I know I didn't purchase Control and The Last of Us Part 2 games because these characters were ugly as fuck.


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Not important at all usually the camera when im playing is behind the character or is in first person so don't matter to me only time i see the face clearly is in cutscene.
 
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Freeman

Banned
I don't see anything wrong with Abby's face.

Avenger's looks terrible, like they didn't even try. They had an opportunity to give their own take on Avenger and they come up what looks like a bunch of low budget cosplayers.

Lara suffer from the same problem Nathan Drake used to suffer, where they changed his face too much from game to game.

ME lady is a perfect fit Andromeda, just plain stupid.
 
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tommycronin

Member
Important to me. If the character is ugly it really takes me out of the experience. Like Abby in tlou2, I don't care that she's built like a man but did they have to make her so freaking repulsive
Mel was the real offender in lou2.
 
S

SLoWMoTIoN

Unconfirmed Member
Lara changed races with each game lol

Also yes, it matters to me now because the only way you get faces like mine is if you actually try to make em that way.

:)
 

levyjl1988

Banned
I know faces can be subjective. But attraction and faces play similar results in beauty.
There's a documentary for it too.


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I created some pretty good faces in character creation games.
It's much easier in anime titles though or games with simple shapes rather than sophisticated sets.

Sword Art Online Fatal Bullet
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Attack on Titan 2
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Code Vein
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Dragon Age Origins
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Tera
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Sunset Overdrive
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that's just a couple of my created characters...
 

mortal

Gold Member
I thought this would be a general question, but it's really just another 'where are the hot and sexy video characters' thread. There's been dozens of these threads since TLOU Part II released...

Good faces on characters are generally important to me, especially if the game has a realistic or grounded art direction.

It really comes down to good animation as well. Charismatic and exaggerated facial animations for stylized games, nuanced and subtle animations for more realistic games.
Imo most of the faces ITT suck because once you're actually playing the game the illusion is immediately broken and they look like mannequins with bad botox surgeries.
 
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Skifi28

Member
I draw the line at Andromeda, it was the stuff of nigthmares. Ugly or not-attractive characters are fine when well-animated and resembling humans.
 

levyjl1988

Banned
Assassin's Creed Syndicate had a good model for Evie.

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I also liked Alice Madness Returns.

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I tried my best to make a good looking character in Outer Worlds.


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Character creation is the best, at least it gives players control if the normal default model is ugly to some extent.
 

Fawst

Banned
People can call Abby “ugly,” all they want, but her facial animations are some of the best I’ve ever seen in a game. I don’t want to risk spoiling anything, so I’ll just say she has a look of joy, contempt, confusion, and resignation early on that ... damn, I can’t articulate it in words, and it all comes across in maybe a second of animation. It’s truly amazing.
To answer the question, though: no, faces aren’t THAT important. If they fuck it up horribly, then sure. But I’m not out here judging attractiveness the same way I am the quality of the model/animation. G-Man is ugly as sin, but his face blew me away when HL2 came out.
 
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mortal

Gold Member
People can call Abby “ugly,” all they want, but her facial animations are some of the best I’ve ever seen in a game. I don’t want to risk spoiling anything, so I’ll just say she has a look of joy, contempt, confusion, and resignation early on that ... damn, I can’t articulate it in words, and it all comes across in maybe a second of animation. It’s truly amazing.
To answer the question, though: no, faces aren’t THAT important. If they fuck it up horribly, then sure. But I’m not out here judging attractiveness the same way I am the quality of the model/animation. G-Man is ugly as sin, but his face blew me away when HL2 came out.
People really underestimate how much good animation can elevate a character model.
 

Rikoi

Member
For a not-so-realistic character model Alice was very appealing.
I never played outer worlds but I saw the female characters models in game were disgusting.
At least you could create a good looking character, but for example when the game includes a romance and every female option looks like shit, it makes me think something is wrong.
People can call Abby “ugly,” all they want, but her facial animations are some of the best I’ve ever seen in a game. I don’t want to risk spoiling anything, so I’ll just say she has a look of joy, contempt, confusion, and resignation early on that ... damn, I can’t articulate it in words, and it all comes across in maybe a second of animation. It’s truly amazing.
That's because of the huge budget of ND, but it has nothing to do with the character itself.
She could be beautiful and still have the same animations, they just chose to make her look bad.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
Faces are so important to me, I couldn't finish Uncharted 4. Drake's face looks so creepy-realistic that he didn't look at all like himself from the PS3 / Vita games. Also the lack of gyro controls from UC Golden Abyss was a sore spot.
 

anothertech

Member
Skip games entirely because of faces. would have picked up andromeda despite the shit game if she looked half decent tbh.

The bs happening last few AAA releases across the board is borderline insanity.
 

JLMC469

Banned
I don't think her being attractive was really the point of the character. Not a lot of sexy characters in TLOU Part II, given the art direction and tone of the game.

I also don’t think it was their intention to make her look deformed.
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Yoboman

Member
Could care less if the character is good looking or cool as long as it animates and expresses convincingly

It only bugs me when they do something to change the character fundamentally eg DmC Dante or Asian eyes characters in cutscenes in Uncharted 3
 

Rickyiez

Member
Very important . Gameplay is important too , but it's hard to relate if the character is ugly .

This is how you make a pretty character face , and Japanese or Asian developers are the best at it .

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sidenote : I can't wait for next gen in-game characters to looks 100% from the character creation
 
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idrago01

Banned
this is the actual actress for control and yes faces matter, but the more important problem or question, which we already know the answer to, is why these western developers choose to intentionally make females ugly and more masculine

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idrago01

Banned
Very important . Gameplay is important too , but it's hard to relate if the character is ugly .

This is how you make a pretty character face , and Japanese or Asian developers are the best at it .

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sidenote : I can't wait for next gen in-game characters to looks 100% from the character creation
i disagree western graphics artists are perfectly capable of designing an attractive female face they just choose or are told not to
 

Rickyiez

Member
i disagree western graphics artists are perfectly capable of designing an attractive female face they just choose or are told not to

I'm not saying they aren't capable , they just aren't the best at it . CDPR for example makes great looking faces too but it's not consistent enough across all the developers
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idrago01

Banned
I'm not saying they aren't capable , they just aren't the best at it . CDPR for example makes great looking faces too but it's not consistent enough across all the developers
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my point was it’s not a talent issue evie from ac syndicate looks good, lara croft, most of the females in witcher are done well, look at the actual actress models for mass effect and control compared to how they look in game. it’s more of a deliberate ideological choice that’s the problem
 
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levyjl1988

Banned
Attractive character models got me playing franchises that I originally wouldn't.

I got into Diablo 3 because of Leah:

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I got into Gears of War 4 because of Kait, though I did highly enjoy Gears of War 2 and 3.

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I got into Left 4 Dead because of Zoey.

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And I know I'm getting into CyberPunk 2077 because of...

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Attractive female characters sell especially if they are also badass.


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levyjl1988

Banned
I guess I'm obsessed with perfect faces, the symmetry, the correct proportions, the golden ratio.

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The faces themselves are important, but basic structure is always more important than individual features. Look at someone you find attractive, chances are they have a slightly crooked nose, their ears are small, their teeth aren't all straight, etc. Human faces have a vast range, but there are anthropometric human measurements that almost all human faces share regardless of race or age (obviously a baby's face does not line up with an adult's face) that are important to incorporate when building a character's face for any form of art. Put eyes way too close together, or way too far apart, make a nose, mouth or even ears too low or high and it ends up looking wrong to the point that it triggers an unpleasant feeling in the back of your mind. These measurements don't have to be rigid, some people's noses sit lower than others, some people have bigger ears, but when you go well outside the average, and do so with multiple parts of a face things start to look awful really fast. I don't think all characters should look like the "ideal human", but there is a point where things start to look really off.

As much as structure is important, it's the quality of facial animations that really make a game's characters stand out. A perfect face model can look like shit if the animation isn't up to the same standard, pulling the believable face model back into uncanny valley. Fallout 4 is a great example of this. The faces in the game were extremely detailed and considering the range of the character creator they looked better than I ever expected. You could add any number of imperfections to faces, and the faces wrinkled and morphed in a very realistic manner. They were so well done in fact I never replaced the vanilla faces in the game with a modded version despite the massive number of mods I was running. Unfortunately for the game, the sheer number of voiced lines (100,000+ lines) meant motion capture wasn't an option and as a result all that effort was wasted on what looked like puppets being manipulated when characters were talking as the facial animations weren't even retouched.

Another extremely important aspect of a character model is the eyes. When you talk to someone you spend most of the time either looking directly at their eyes, or looking away completely when you become aware of the fact you've been looking directly at their eyes and don't want to seem weird. If a character has dead eyes no matter how good everything else looks, the character look off and again creep into the uncanny valley. Kevin Spacey in Call of Duty is a perfect example of this. The model was about as perfect as it could be, they used motion capture for the scenes, but the eyes were at best unnatural and I couldn't not see the empty dead eyes of the character.

I'm finding that despite the fact games are advancing at a technical level, with more polygons and better shaders, often times the art or facial capture team isn't up to the job and the faces in more modern games fail to look as believable as many older games. Over-exaggerated animations often take what would otherwise look like a perfectly acceptable model and make it look completely unrealistic. Halo Infinite's pilot character is a great recent example of overdone facial animation, where the same character in the 2nd trailer for the game was more reigned-in, but there have been many titles over the last gen that have fallen short as well. Andromeda is a good go-to for critique as it was absolute dogshit. The Original Mass Effect had some pretty ground-breaking facial animations in it's cutscenes, but from there Bioware seemed to have hit a wall. By the time Mass Effect 3 launched the facial animations were actually worse than in the first game as they appeared more wooden, with transitions between expressions being almost mechanical. Andromeda was a clear case of a lack of the proper talent, while the rest of the series decline was a case of a lack of effort that not surprisingly coincided with Bioware's slide into obscurity after the EA acquisition.

Enslaved: Journey to the West has some of the best looking facial animations of it's time. Playing the game years later they've really held up well. It's not like the faces are jammed with modern effects, it's that the facial expressions are animated in a manner that doesn't look overdone at all.

Ninja Theory pulled out all the stops for facial animation in a game and used Andy Serkis for facial capturing and relied on his input, then the team went through the animations and retouched them to better fit the models. Andy is not a mountain of a man like Monkey and his facial structure isn't a perfect match, so things needed to be adjusted for everything to look right. The results were believable character expressions and memorable faces in a game that even for it's time didn't push any graphical boundaries. Despite this, the game's cutscenes never felt like they were stuck in the uncanny valley even considering the fantastical dystopian future setting of the game.

At every step in the game, Trip and Monkey show a wide range of expressions that always look sincere. When trip realizes her entire village has been killed and comes across her father's body, she doesn't grit her teeth like a maniac, open her mouth like she was about to eat a really big sandwich or squint super hard like she was about to shit out yesterday's really big sandwich. She genuinely looked lost. It reminds me of actual people I've seen during terrible moments in their lives, and the emotion the facial expressions added to the game made the game better than the sum of it's parts. The same could be said for Monkey, he spent 90% of the game being really, really angry, but his facial expressions mirrored my own when I've felt the same anger. I don't scowl the entire time I'm pissed off, but my face shows my anger through subtle cues like the brain aneurism veins that pop on my temples and the lines that form on my forehead. Again nothing was exaggerated and the character came across as believably angry.

Trip
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Monkey
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Dargor

Member
Art style in general, not just the faces, is very important to me. Sometimes I cant enjoy a game if I dont like the art style.

An example: street fighter 4, bought that game going against my better judgement, thinking I could get over the art style if I gave it a chance, well, after a couple of hours I dropped it and never looked back. When SFV came about and it was pretty much the same art style, I immediately wrote it off.
 

JonnyMP3

Member
The NPC faces in Horizon:Zero Dawn was off putting. They weren't bad but they had some AI algorithm to try and simulate interactions but most of the time they just looked... Robotic compared to the mocap characters.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Not important for me as I usually mash buttons to skip cut scenes. The games I play are usually sports and shooters anyway.

I enjoyed playing Fallout and ES games a lot despite atrocious Gamebryo head shots.
 

Paracelsus

Member
Not just the face but the design too.

Main reason I really am no huge fan of Persona is because I find school uniforms and onesies dumb for deathly battles.
 

Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
Main reason I really am no huge fan of Persona is because I find school uniforms and onesies dumb for deathly battles.
??? Thats most because their Persona protects them, there is no need for them to wear heavy amours.
 

MrFunSocks

Banned
Don't care at all. Seems like a really weird thing to not play or buy a game over. Then again I don't care about cinematic-ness in games and don't cry over cinematic game stories so I guess I'm not the target audience for this thread.
 

EekTheKat

Member
I think the facial rigging/expressiveness of the character matters more to me than design/modeling. Having a near photo realistic character that animates/moves like a south park character almost immediately takes me out of it. The expressiveness/animation of a character these days helps to sell it more than just having a good looking character.

Also it's bothering me more and more these days that it's more apparent these days that NPC's just stand in one spot waiting for you to interact with them. In the old days a tighter camera zoom on the head and/or smart cuts between dialog did wonders in hiding this problem, but now I see a few games these days actually zoom out to show you two characters just standing there talking to each other while not moving all that much.
 
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