Anthem: 9 Things It Must Learn From Mass Effect Andromeda

2. Facial Animations

The big one, and one that despite Anthem's far more technically impressive higher polygon-count face seen in the E3 demo, is still an issue.

Sadly, we're at a point in the gaming industry's life where graphical quality and general rendering is immaculate, everywhere other than with human faces.

Some developers have figured out how to do it - Naughty Dog are leagues ahead, 343 Industries' Halo 4 and 5 were spot on, and since COD: Advanced Warfare, that series has stepped up considerably - though the majority end up as just slightly better versions of Andromeda.

Needless to say, video games as a medium don't need photorealistic facial animations, though thanks to every other aspect of triple-A presentation setting such a precdent, they stick out more than ever.

From bad lip-sync to just one millisecond of awkward eye contact or a twitch that comes out of nowhere, scientifically it's been proven that the vast majority of communication is non-verbal i.e. we study each others' faces and movements more than what's being said. In the gaming world this means faces are by far one of the hardest things to get right, though when you're now designing a game where NPCs will be talking to the player in first person, getting the tiniest of movements right becomes essential to the experience.

But hey, it can't get much worse than Andromeda... right?