I haven’t played Alan Wake yet, but if we are to trust the ever trustworthy Jim Sterling then it’s a very good game, despite a few flaws. One of those flaws is some really funky looking facial animations throughout the game. That might not be an issue for the game’s DLC, though.
On Remedy’s forum the developer posted that the disappointing facial animations were being worked on for the upcoming DLC of the game. “We have a few different methods of doing facial animation – in-game using FaceFX and motion capture used in cinematics. 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.”
While it’s pretty clear from the almost universal praise the game is receiving that Alan Wake‘s facial animation flaws don’t really damage the game, it’s good to hear that Remedy is taking such immediate action and reworking a tech that isn’t that easy to redo.
