Call of Duty WW2 has made a significant step forward in face rendering

I think they were somewhat beaten to the punch by Ninja Theory's astonishing work on Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They won the real-time award at SIGGRAPH 2016 in triumphant fashion. Not only did they create a tremendous technical achievement, but they produced a game with genuine artistic intent on a fraction of a typical AAA budget.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yh-zFCILR4

https://youtu.be/OMENy0ptoyM?t=48s

I had a similar reaction when I saw a video of snappers rig[0] in Unreal 4 a couple of months ago - I don't really play many AAA games these days so I guess I must have missed where the rigs advanced to the point where modelling wrinkles in the face became feasible. Their tech[1] seems to be used in a few AAA games and looks pretty convincing to me.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo_FALeUc8c

[1]http://snapperstech.com/

I played through COD WW2 a couple of weeks ago. The single player campaign is great.

My dad and I used to play the original Call of Duty together when I was a boy. Technically, we played CoD: United Offensive, which has the best multiplayer in any video game ever, as far as we're concerned. We used to swap war stories over dinner, much to my mother and sister's frustration, I'm sure.

COD: WW2's single player captures some of the original game's feel. And yes, the faces are great. It helps draw you into the story between gameplay.

The multiplayer has sadly evolved into something much less interesting. My dad and I won't be playing it together.

I feel pretty fortunate to have been a gamer during the transition from 2.5D graphics, through the evolution of 3D graphics and the various levels of generational advancement over the years. The characters became better looking and more detailed over time, from sprites to models whose mouths would move in a Kermit the Frog sort of fashion, but they were still hollow and unconvincing puppets. It wasn't until Half-Life 2 that characters in games could properly convey emotion through sophisticated facial animation and sufficient detail. That, for me, was the first time I could emotionally connect with a character in a game, and it was such a fundamental shift in my understanding of what a game could be.

The evolution in rendering here is nothing short of amazing. For the most part I've fallen out of love with gaming, just as a function of getting older or getting burned out on it (or both), but new generations of gamers really are very lucky to be able to have some of their first gaming experiences with characters like this.

An activision Dev/manager gave a talk in my graphics class earlier this year. He said Activision had contracts wth the CIA/etc because Activision's facial motion capture/analysis equipment is better than anything the gov has.

This was something the hit the computer industry hard back in 2007 when Crysis was released for the PC. I can only imagine what the will be available in 2020, seeing as most of the scenes in major action films are 100% computer generated.

With the work being conducted to increase the capability of graphics rendering while reducing power consumption, heat production and overall size VR, AR, and MR applications will probably be very hard to tell the difference between what is real and virtual.

Wow, this is incredible.

It's quite frightening and raises some issues, however, that as first-person shooters evolve, we'll be desensitized to shooting more realistic humans.

It's sad that entertainment by violence and combat are the drivers for things like this.

I wonder what far reaching higher order effects come from this selection bias. Is it just a feedback cycle that could be broken? The makers of high budget world-building projects are self-selected for this kind of content, leading to consumers acclimating and demanding more of this, etc. It's already leaking out of the games world: there's a major shift in Hollywood movies to superhero movies centered around video game-style combat.