Well, I’m at least not surprised. They didn’t achieve good face animations through technological advancement, but rather by throwing tons of money at the problem, i.e. hiring actors and motion-capturing them.

When it stops being your unique selling point, you’re not gonna get as much budget anymore, at which point it’s either scrapped or you might use worse equipment, worse actors and give the actors less time to practice and redo scenes.

In general, the problem with realistic graphics is that reality is your upper bound. It’s difficult to inch closer to it and it’s easy to regress when you don’t pay as much attention to some detail…