New ANTHEM Gameplay Takes Us on a Tour of the Main Hub

I don't want to come across as the irritating "downgrade!!!" crowd, but the facial animation from the E3 2017 "alpha" demo looked better. Like you said, it's not hilariously bad like Andromeda, but it still doesn't look particularly great.

That weird first-person facial animations makes me think of the Oblivion zooming in while NPCs speak.

I clearly remember in e3 2017 anthem has really impressive facial animation, like the npc face really close to players to show their impressive animation. Maybe the game is downgraded just like ubisoft watchdog graphics?

I think only playstation that actually upgrade their games graphics compared to their e3 shows.

E3 2017 facial animations weren't great either - the faces themselves may have had more detail and texture but that the actual animation wasn't much better.

A lot of games aren't actually built when they are shown at E3 for the first time, its a visual concept - not even an alpha build but something knocked up to provide a conceptualised idea of what the game is. In a lot of ways, these can be like the 'cartoon' images of Sonic and the team in the handbook whilst the 'sprite' you get in game is more of a splodge that vaguely looks like the characters. By the time they end up building the whole game, expanding everything outwards, etc, some assets etc probably do need to be downgraded just to stream in the vast quantity in time to work properly, not have textures pop-in or low res assets pop-in. They may have to reduce polygon counts a bit too to reduce the GPU load.

Its like that 'Spider-Man' Puddle which may well of been a 'downgrade' in some ways - reducing the amount of reflections in that scene but also if they had to have unique reflection maps for every rooftop as each would have their own set, then that would make the game much larger (file size) and take much longer to make. Its easier to dumb them down, reshape them and use a more generic reflection map that can be used elsewhere.

At the start of development, you have 'big' ambition but as you progress, the limitations of the hardware, time constraints, budgets etc all start to affect the plans. As they move into the final phases, some 'dumbing' down maybe needed to get the performance they want.

Again, I think games shouldn't be revealed until they are in the final phases - that way you get to see a more realistic idea of the visual presentation, a more realistic look at the game and its features (looking at the Division here) and less likely to get delays or vague release windows...

Huh, so it's the opposite of Destiny: third person gameplay and first person hub.

Only problem from the Alpha was that you the only person in it. All your friends go to their own hub.

Not like the tower in Destiny that you see your friends. It is like the post office base in The Division.

What people seem to not understand is that not-so-important NPCs regarding the story might not have facial animations of the same quality as important NPCs.
Also the textures look like low quality on this video compared to many other streams we have seen, which further worsens impression.
There is enough other material (e.g. the Story trailer) which shows that this game has great facial animations in place.
I hope Pushsquare will do a hands-on article for the Demos.