Before I get into my sort of a rant why this comparison is kinda silly, let me be clear that I do think that SC's animations and character tech is showing its age, and it's not pretty. They will have to update some things down the line to keep up with the times.
@DirectorGunner
Star Citizen does have SSS (sub surface scattering), although it's still in its early stages. Take off your helmet, stand in front of a light and look at the ears. I remember seeing it work to some degree. Also they bring it up every time they talk about character art. It's just not very good. They are taking a head-on approach and trying to do it "properly" like they do it in the movie industry, and that's hard to pull off in real-time rendering. This is another tech achievement that players won't know and fully appreciate, but will drive other game studios to do better.
There is no denying that CoD looks amazing.
Now as for this comparison, is it fair? Is the CoD screenshot from a pre-rendered cutscene (which uses highly refind mocap, proper raytracing, a much higher poly model and textures and about a million layers of other stuff I'm not gonna list here) or is it from live gameplay?
Cos the Star Citizen video is basically live gameplay, with in game models, at their in-game detail levels, only it's been captured with some post effects like dof (which we should be able to use as well with advanced camera/director mode? I never got it to work). It's indeed apples vs oranges.
Also, take into account that CoD is basically nothing but a playable cutscene. What I mean by this is that CoD doesn't need the complexity of procedural animations that SC needs. You can animate all that amazing movement in a month, cos it's sooooo limited and fixed. Spend a few years doing it, and it ends up looking this good. Try placing a CoD character into a situation it wasn't meant to be in, and it won't work. I'd guess that for CoD every single animation is hand-made for that specific model. Thinking about things like sitting down, or taking cover next to a car. Change the car to an SUV, and the CoD guy will clip through it. The SC guy will adapt on the fly, and position himself perfectly as much as possible.
There is soooo much difference between the two games the it just makes no sense to compare them. Do I want to see CoD level of animations in SC? Hell yeah! Ofc I do! Is it possible? No, unless you want to wait another extra 4-5 years until they animate every single possible situation by hand, no there is no way it will happen.
Also also, you can bet your ass that for CoD, a team the size of the Frankfurt office was doing nothing but the animation for the cutscenes for years, unlike with SC, where Jax probably had 2-3 ppl working on it for a week or two at most. Jax seems to be a regular npc they put a unique skin on and they animated a bit. Now if the real stars like Mark Hamills character will have the same kind of "basic" animation, then I will be upset too.
Compare that SC vid to real-time characters in something like the elder scrolls online. That's a more fair comparison.
I do agree though that the skin shader doesn't feel right, but they can swap that out any time they come up with a better one. Still, the good thing about an obviously-CG character like space-Clarkson is that you don't get the uncanny valley feeling. You instantly know it's not a real person, and you don't get this "somethings off" feeling that you get with "lifelike" characters.
