When creating immersive experiences, facial expressions play a huge role in how believable character emotions are. For instance, in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, the three pillars for the emotion the game invokes are its story, music, and facial expressions shown during dialogue:
Faces make characters relatable and help players understand how they feel. They’re an invaluable tool for pulling players into the world portrayed by the game, so it’s unfortunate that faces on Roblox are so lacking:
Anthro is positioned to be a game changer, but right now the facial aspect of anthro isn’t doing immersion any favors. Anthro isn’t final, but iteration is not something that’s going to fix its faces. It’s not a matter of needing more face options – the artistic vision just has no soul: it’s uncanny, and we have more memes than legitimate coverage. They don’t provide brand recognition either. No one is going to see the anthro face and scream “Roblox!” because it’s too generic.
I desperately want to make a game on Roblox where interactions with NPCs feels real. Whenever I play games outside the platform, I want to even more, but I can never make avatars feel personable enough on our platform.
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hmm sounds like vertex deformation could help with this, or we can put that off and inefficiently slap together a ton of blocks to mimic it or change the decal of the player’s face every renderstep but doesnt solve the problem of flat faces
I think something like animated player faces would be great, especially if you could change your “mood” in game.
Perhaps they could find a way to distort images so that they could upload, say, a neutral face and then have certain controls that can change the expression on the face?
It doesn’t really need to be 3d, as long as the expressions are truly apparent.
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I can’t understand what feature you’re trying to propose, exactly. Avatar faces are already personable if you consider that we’re not all stuck with the smiley default face, from what I gather your argument is that faces should not be so lifeless. The closest thing I can imagine that you want to see is a facial emote system and/or animated faces (detailed further on).
It’s a start to say “it’s not a matter of needing more face options.” I agree that the static nature of Roblox faces makes them uncanny and difficult to understand completely express emotions to other players, but Roblox is a unique platform that can only do so much. We’re already aware that it’s not capable of vertex deformation that would allow 3D animation like in games such as Splatoon and Breath of the Wild. I believe R15 animations (and especially animation packs) were designed for the same reasons that you’ve brought up - to make characters more personable. Body language is just as important facial expression, and I would dare to say that we don’t really need both, players express themselves far more through emoticons in chat on a regular basis anyway. People recognize Roblox by its blocky avatars so I’d worry more about the concept of anthro itself rather than its face.
Moving onto a specific feature request, you could be proposing a facial emote system, perhaps something similar in design to the Avatar Context Menu which allows you to do a handy Wave emote. It sounds as though you’d also want animated faces that blink and maybe even change their expression (i.e. smile to a frown) without changing the entire face. @SkeletalReality has actually developed a system for fluid face animations, which I very much admire (example). Numerous games have implemented systems such as these for use between players and NPCs. I don’t know if Roblox would ever consider designing built-in services for these features, but to conclude I have to say that they’re already possible with what we have.
I think this would fall more under client features, but I guess that’s just me being picky.
I like this idea, Roblox faces have always been pretty meh in comparison to other games. There are lots of different ways this idea can be implemented, too.
I’d like it a lot, and I think it should come with anthro when it releases (whenever that will be). However I do think it’d be something to disable for lower-end hardware.
Another concern is that I don’t want to lose Blizzard Beast Mode. It’s my face! I think all existing faces should get upgraded to work with this system, and also retain their core features. So it’d probably be something where you have to separate each facial feature and apply them separately – deformation would look a bit weird on some faces, I think.
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