Uncharted 4 To Show Off More Expressive Faces
With the improvement of graphics and animation comes the ability to make things seem more realistic and beyond. Where once simple walk cycles were clunky, they are now perfectly believable. Where once it was impossible to make people talk with their mouth in games, you now have titles that have them in perfect sync, making you think you’re talking to a real person both in looks and tone.
The desire to improve though is still there, and Naughty Dog is taking that drive with their next title, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, where they stated that the improvements to their facial animation system is not only better than their last franchise installment, it’s better than The Last Of Us.
“We’ve completely revamped our facial animation systems,” Uncharted 4 writer Josh Scherr explained to GamesTM. “The previous Uncharted games, and in The Last Of Us, the characters all had about 90 to 100 ‘bones’ in their faces which we used to move the meshes around.”
He then goes on to explain what that means: “Think about that, about how detailed Joel and Ellie’s pained facial expressions were, how well the game captured the respective actors’ – Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson – seminal roles. All that was achieved on the old tech. Now, the faces have anywhere between 300 and 500 bones.”
That sounds impressive, and I’m really curious to see how this looks. It’s not unlikely that we’ll get a possible taste of what this is like at Sony’s E3 Press Conference next month. Here’s hoping!