While not the sole reason for the lower-than-most's score, one critique at the forefront of my mind right now is that the animations are atrociously janky. I am constantly pulled out of my immersion during dialogues by character animations that are robotic, glitchy, or just downright counter to what I'd expect my character to do.
Eehhh I don't know, some of the facial expressions are the worst. The camera often cuts to my character with a brain dead stare or some over the top weird smirk.
Yeah I get what you mean, IMO there's a mix of well captured body language and sometimes wonky facial animations, they probably acted some dialogues and just used some other standard animations for some other characters
Agree about the player custom character during dialogue. The facial animations are terrible considering the face options are predefined. Other characters though look great IMO. Not TLOU2 level face capture but fantastic for an isometric RPG
My character is a ranger who basically lives in the woods far away from people and is horribly socially awkward, so the slightly wonky facial animations have actually been perfect for her.
Yeah, that's what I'm suggesting. It's almost like review scores are subjective. I think the game is good, but not great. I have a lot of QoL nitpicks, my partner and I have run into many multiplayer bugs, the dialogue choices are often 0 or 100 with no in between, I find that animations during cut scenes very subpar, and the combat is good but not great for me.
But I had an NPC in act 3 whose eyes kept doing weird spinny things. Both eyes would suddenly snap to me, then one would spin off again. And another NPC who kept ... flipping inside out.
I think, even if you deeply love that specific jank, this game is only an 8/10 currently. As more people get farther in the game, they realize that what was amazing at first kind of falls apart in the later acts, with a truly atrocious ending and tons of cut content. Maybe with definitive edition it will hit a 9/10 but the increasing illusion of choice as the game wears kind of prevents it from being a 10/10. Still a great game but it definitely suffers and is a shell of what it could have been late game.