The facial rigs and animation in the cut scenes is stiff for NPCs. I noticed it tries to avoid showing too much of the NPC’s faces in the trust up level cut scenes so I assume the team knows it needs work.
I would look into Nvidia’s audio 2 face, it can be transferred to maya rigs, particularly Advanced skeleton, with good results. AS’s facial rig is modular and can be attached to an existing rig if needed.
Or better yet hire a facial animator, Janfon1, a fan animator, does animations that are much better than this. He uses blender, but learning maya primarily for facial and head animation isn’t the hardest thing in the world, and can be done.
It is even more stiff for the player characters. Why does the character not say anything in the cut scenes yet cant shut up in game? It is the perfect place to include character driven writing, its jarring how there are wonderful monologues in character creator, but nothing in the cutscenes!
I can only assume the face rig for the player character is very limited since the player is even stiffer and quieter than the NPCs, but still, there are ways to get around this by using lots of blendshapes, a set of different custom blendshapes for each head model to drive facial stuff that joints cannot due to wildy varying shapes of the head models for example.
Advanced Skeleton has an option that converts the facial rig entirely into a blendshape facial rig.
Rig each head with Advanced Skeleton’s modular face rigger, then convert it to blendshapes, and now any single facial animation file can drive every single face type of the player character no matter how wildly varied it is because each head mesh has a set of same named blendshapes that drive it.
-Signed, me, a rigger/animator disappointed that the cut scenes aren’t of the same incredible quality that the rest of the game is.