Final Fantasy XVI and the Problem with ‘BioWare Face’ – Extra Punctuation

Thus, dialogue scenes. But the strange thing is, Final Fantasy 16 has multiple levels of dialogue scene. There’ll be the main ones, the fully voice acted cutscenes with all the cinematic camera angles and dramatic animation, usually the cutscenes on the critical path, and then you’ll have less important dialogue scenes that I tend to think of as “in engine cutscenes,” even though they’re all in-engine, strictly speaking: the sort of thing that’s used for basic interactions and sidequests. Where the two characters maintain eye contact, plant their feet and the camera remains at eye level flipping from one to the other as they exchange lines. With no voice acting, just a text display with some kind of generic vocalisation at the start as shorthand for “person is talking now.”

It’s always an awkward lurch when the game switches from one mode to the other, partly because one has voice acting and one doesn’t, partly because the first kind of cutscene, the actually cinematic ones, seem to have recorded motion capture animation at the same time as the speech. If you watch people talking you’ll note they tend to emphasise their words with all kinds of subtle movements and facial cues that they more often than not have no idea that they’re doing, and mocapping all of that gives a cutscene a much more realistic feel. So if you take all of that out and replace it with stock standing still animations, occasionally switching to stock gesture animations that don’t match up with the words, it’s extremely noticeable. It’s like everyone turned into a Captain Scarlet puppet while the game was fading out and fading up.

A lot of games do this. Some have even more levels of dialogue scene. They’ll have fully mocapped fully voiced scenes for the really important bits, and then fully voiced scenes with stock animations, and then scenes with no voice acting or mocapping for the stuff that I assume was really veering upon the end of the development schedule. I think it was one of the Yakuza games that had a fourth mode of dialogue scene even below that. Every now and again it would switch to visual novel style with just the text and still images of the speaker.

Now, I absolutely know the reason for all of this. It’s because, as I say, these games are aiming to be huge epic stories full of side activity and throwaway dialogue, and as such they absolutely cannot afford to fully produce every single minor exchange as a full on cutscene. You need a semi-automated system you can hammer a million random dialogues out of to act as the mortar between all the gameplay bricks. We’ve all been trained to accept this over many years. Just as we accepted back in the PS2 days that most of the cutscenes would be in-engine but a handful of important ones would be pre-rendered FMVs, frequently made by a completely different studio with a distinctly different look.

But then I wondered if this is one of the things that’s worth stepping back from and trying to view from the perspective of a non-smartarse long term gaming insider. Think of a credulous child who only knows video games as magical gateways to worlds of fantasy to wile away the dreary hours of summer. Would they understand why Final Fantasy XVI is dynamically and vocally performed some of the time but then mysteriously switches to the exact same characters standing stiffly around like coconuts at a shy, lips emotionlessly moving like two slow-dancing slugs?

‘Cos I think back to my own credulous childhood growing up in England reading Beano comics, wondering why two different strips had a distinctly similar art style. Too young and immersed in the world of the fiction to be willing to consider possibilities like “the strips were drawn by the same artist,” I decided this was indication that the two strips occupied a shared reality and off screen the characters probably hung out together.

What does that sort of pliable mind think when a game has multiple levels of cutscene quality? Do they think the characters have gotten tired from having to act properly and are taking a breather for a couple of scenes? I feel like we insiders have been unconsciously letting this scoot by thinking “Oh it has to be like that because of the way they’re made” but the fact is this is hurting the experience and it wouldn’t fly in any other medium. If half the scenes of a film were well directed and the rest were massively incompetently lit and framed critics wouldn’t go “Oh well we happen to know the budget ran out and the second unit director was a literal baboon, so we’ll just ignore all that.” No, they’d rake it over the coals. Because noticing the nuts and bolts of the film’s production is the death of immersion.

The difference in quality between mocapped dialogue scenes and the other kind really is night and day. I almost think, if you can’t do every scene fully mocapped, it might be better to do them all in the second style just so you don’t have the comparison constantly taking the audience out of things. Then again, maybe not.

What I’m talking about when I talk about stiff, boring non-mocapped dialogue scenes is what I’ve referred to now and again over the years as Bioware Face. Because I always associate it with your Mass Effects and your Dragon Ages. Although one might also call it Bethesda Face because it’s most glaring in games like Oblivion and Fallout 3. You talk to an NPC and the camera dramatically zooms right into a full on shot of their face and they maintain unbreaking eye contact with you the entire conversation. I hate this for the same reason I don’t get on with dialogue trees – real people just don’t talk like this. I’m seeing the workings and getting pulled out again.

You don’t just stand opposite someone, maintain eye contact and take it in turns to speak. You nurse your drink, you pace around, you look out the window, you talk while walking somewhere together, you nod, you go “uh huh,” you gesture to emphasise what you’re saying. It’s all in the little things. And I know it’s possible to avoid Bioware Face even if you aren’t able to mocap every dialogue. I know because I’ve played The Witcher 3.

The Witcher 3 doesn’t use full mocap for every conversation and isn’t above a bit of the old Bioware Face creeping in now and again, but characters mostly don’t just stare at each other. They walk around, sit around, do a lot of subtle things with their faces, shag each other on unicorns – it does just enough. Just enough that I’m willing to overlook the stiffer moments and remain immersed. I want to be immersed, damn it, I want to meet you halfway and enjoy the story, I can’t do that if I’m spending most of my time with NPCs trying to kill me with their eye beams.

Still, I understand that even doing just enough would have been a lot of work. There’s probably millions of little touches you barely notice that would make it come across stiff and awkward if they weren’t there. But I for one appreciate the result.

Better to spread the extra work across the entire game than save it all up for a cutscene once in a blue moon and leave everything else looking like lollipop stick puppets. That’s like massively overtraining one side of your body so you’ve got one really beefy arm and one noodly one. Just doesn’t look right. And then for the rest of your life you have to keep hearing the same masturbation joke.