Anthem: 9 MAJOR Revelations From Kotaku's Exposé

3. Why The Cutscenes & Dialogue Felt So "Off"

Another fundamental failing came from scheduling, as following the disastrous, gif-filled reveal of Mass Effect: Andromeda's launch state, Anthem's top brass were determined to avoid a repeat incident.

The decision was made to use costly facial-scanning performance capture, to ensure the game would be "un-memeable". This process is common for anything in the triple-A space, but when Anthem's very fibre was being overhauled and rethought so consistently, to such drastic degrees, there was no room to nail down characters, motivations - even the progression of a given scene with specific characters.

With the cost of performance capture so high, bookings for actors and appointments had to be maintained, resulting in sequences and entire chunks of dialogue literally not making sense in the end. Say a story or mission point was changed, Bioware couldn't afford to revisit the booth for amendments, and to this day there are characters or referenced lore items being mentioned, that were actually cut after the scenes were shot.