I know they improved the character models greatly, but I'm still wondering how the facial expressions turn out. In Oblivion people barely smiled or frowned at all and it just didn't look convincing. I read somewhere on here that NPCs will actually have emotional animations but I wonder how many they have or how serious I can take them.

Here are some examples of facial expressions that would be nice than just a confusing blank face.

A sniveling, two-timing http://media.dandwiki.com/w/images/b/b4/Wormtongue.jpg.

A bloodthirsty http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:Tj2wleY5CpgTCM:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v334/olofmoleman/Image%20Macros/AngryVikingBaby.jpg&t=1, letting out a battle cry.

A crying http://backseatblogger.com/images/crying_woman002.jpg.

A terrified http://www.allfunnyfaces.com/pictures/Scared_Face.jpg.

These are just some examples of facial expressions that would be cool, feel free to add.


Edit: Crap! Wrong board, entered the wrong url, sorry. Can a mod help me out and send me over to the Skyrim board?

I was gonna take your post seriously but after seeing your image examples
i concluded that your kind of a "#$%

If your are one, please burn.

If your not, i agree they need a WAY better emote system,
how good is the implementation of this is a mayor yay or nay
as far as buying the game for me.

I'm eager to see the game in motion, but honest im not so worried about
the combat animation or the jump, walk or crouch animations, those
i have a lot of confidence they will be superb... its the npcs acting
while talking what worries me, if they are on par with bioware's then
I have no complains really, but since theres not a previous game
form beth's that has implemented this correctly im more than a bit
skeptical.

I though the facial expressions were fine in Oblivion. The only thing that occasionally went wrong with it is that they would come up at inappropriate times. But seeing the quality of the faces of the NPCs in Skyrim even with low res pictures, I'm pretty sure their facial expressions will be top-notch as well.

Sorry about that, I was just having a little fun, but I was being serious about the wondering how Bethesda is going to handle the facial expressions of all the characters, I assume that not every npc is going to have a copy/paste face this time around, and I wonder how deep they take the facial animations with each npc. Serious and detailed facial animations expressing feelings of fear, hatred, sorrow, insanity, and joy would really add to the believability of the world and give it a bit of a grimmer atmosphere. Think about it, if a town just got ravaged by a dragon the citizens of that town wouldn't exactly be cheery or bold, talking about how the local wood elf is more incompetent than an over-encumbered pack-rat, they would probably be quiet, afraid, and anxious. If the country is at civil war and dragons have just been thrown into the mix then there should be a sense of desperation and that is hard to pull off if people have the same blank look on their face the whole time.

Seeing how good the NPCs look so far, it'd be a bit silly if their actual facial animations svcked. I think it'll be very credible.

By the way, about the pics, you're such an n'wah! :biggrin:

Expressions are not just about the face. The whole body is involved.

I hope they keep that in mind.

Yeah, you're right. Since it's confirmed they'll move around and keep doing things while talking, I hope there'll be some visible emotion in that as well.