'Mass Effect: Andromeda': Animation Won't Be Fixed Today

By Jessica Ferrera, Christian Post Contributor Tuesday, March 21, 2017

As reported before, "Mass Effect: Andromeda" will get a patch on its first official day being out in the market. Unfortunately, it will not resolve the facial animation issues.

Since the early access for "Mass Effect: Andromeda" went live last week, the game made rounds for the wrong reason, unfortunately. Players immediately noticed the awkward facial animations that the characters showed in the gameplay.

A player asked the game's lead designer from BioWare, Ian Frazier, on Twitter whether the first day patch will fix the issue, and this is what Frazier had to say: "At day 1? No, that ship has sailed. We'll have more patches later on, but exactly what goes into them is still in discussion." While the awkward facial animations were identified at an earlier time, more players complained and made fun of the issue in time for the opening of the game's early access release. More people shared their pieces of rants and laughs through graphics interchange format, aka GIF, images posted on several social networking sites.

As reports pointed out, the facial animations are highly visible when characters are on the move. However, the flaw is also very noticeable even when the characters are just speaking their dialogues. One player even said through Twitter, "I don't think I'll ever get tired of trashing the new 'Mass Effect [Andromeda].'"

Disappointingly, some players decided to go overboard and harassed a female employee of the game's publisher, Electronic Arts.

Allie Rose-Marie Leost experienced a lot of uncalled for tweets and messages attacking her for being a woman working in the gaming industry. According to Kotaku, the cruel campaign against Leost was instigated by Ralph Retort, an identified "right-wing, GamerGate-tied website" blogger.

The same report noted that Retort told his followers that Leost worked as the lead facial animator for "Mass Effect: Andromeda."

However, the game's developer, BioWare, quickly addressed the issue, saying Leost was a former EA employee who has been "misidentified as a lead member" of the game's development team. BioWare directly clarified that these claims are false, and while they maintain they respect players' feedbacks, "attacking individuals ... is never acceptable."

"Mass Effect: Andromeda" will be launched on Tuesday, March 21.