I know there's voice acting and there's movement and facial expression rendering, but they generally get discussed separately. For me there is a combo of the two that is more than just the sum of the parts, which I find myself referring to as digital acting.
I was just playing Indigo Prophecy and admiring the expressiveness of the characters, something I guess I appreciate even more in older games and previous generation consoles because they couldn't rely on high-gloss graphics for effect. It makes sense that a game that considers itself to be a playable movie would have good digital acting, but that got me thinking about other games as well. Valve has received a lot of praise for its rendering of facial expression, the lifelike eyes of its characters, and its convincing ragdoll effects. HL2 has a lot of appeal for me because its digital acting is so good. Halo, which I also enjoy so no favoritism here, doesn't have much in that regard except for perhaps Cortana.
Though I am BioWare fan, one criticism that I can make is that it is a good thing their writing is good and their voice actors are generally well chosen, because the digital acting in their pre-Mass Effect games is not that great. It's good enough, but not great. And for all the flawless rendering of their cut-scened little faces, I don't find the digital acting in the Final Fantasy games to be particularly great either. It's not just a matter of realism. The main characters in Beyond Good and Evil were well "acted" despite the fact that it was not done in a realistic fashion.
What other games should be nominated in the Best Acting category?
