Summary

• Starfield suffers from the uncanny valley due to its character animation quality, specifically in faces.
• Bethesda's Creation Engine 2 aims to improve its visual quality and does in many ways, but emotional NPC reactions are still lacking.
• Future improvements in animation could involve the use of motion capture technology.

Bethesda is known for making massive universes, like Starfield and Skyrim, filled to the brim with detail and places to explore, but there are two sections where the studio tends to fall short. One is graphical fidelity, and another is animation quality. Starfield suffers from the latter, especially when it comes to the animation quality of characters. When stacked up against something like Baldur's Gate 3 (which came out in the same year), there is something uncanny about the characters' facial animations.

Starfield uses Bethesda's new Creation Engine 2 to make its visuals better than the titles that came before it.

the uncanny valley is something that Starfield's characters suffer from and is further highlighted by the camera zooming in on their faces.

The Detail That Could Explain Starfield's Uncanny Valley Vibes

It's Subtle And Easily Missed

Animating faces is difficult, and it becomes even more difficult when the face is detailed enough to imitate real life. When a certain muscle doesn't move when it should, people immediately notice that something is off because of the brain's ability to recognize other human faces and their movements, but they can't always tell why it looks so creepy. In Starfield's case, one of the muscles that don't move is the orbicularis oculi muscle (the muscle that overlies the orbital rim and eyelids).

Without proper contraction of the eyes, a character cannot have a Duchenne smile, which is often considered to be a genuine smile. This is specifically what Starfield lacks.

The eyes of NPCs don't contract correctly when a character smiles, which triggers the uncanny valley feeling immediately and is further highlighted when the camera zooms in during dialogue. Eye movement seems to be an issue in general with Starfield's characters, and the facial animation issues could perhaps be attributed to the lack of motion capture. Bethesda has stated that it doesn't use motion capture information and has stuck with hand-keying its animations with real-life references.

Bethesda Could Improve Its Animation In The Future

There Are Ways To Improve Facial Animations

Should Bethesda choose to use motion capture in the future, it could help to alleviate the uncanny feeling seen in Starfield. Motion capture isn't the animation fix that many believe, since the motion capture information needs to be tweaked and refined after being received. Small fixes that animators may not notice or not have time to do, like the contracting of the orbicularis oculi when smiling, could be solved with motion capture and help Bethesda avoid the uncanny valley feeling with its future titles.