Full interview:
https://www.vg247.com/2017/08/25/shenmue-3-open-world-dead-eyed-characters-shenmue-4/
The bit we've all come for:
The environments look fantastic, but there’s been a lot of chatter about the character models this week. What do you have to say to that? Are improvements coming?
You know, to be honest… the faces, they’ve not been properly deployed yet. [b]This is a behind-the-scenes story, but up until a point 2 months ago the face motion has been removed. The developer changed some structure to the bones of the character model, and this caused a problem. Because of the problem, we decided to stop working on face animation for now.
[Suzuki opens his laptop and brings up an internal, unreleased development video showing facial animation tests for Ryo and Shenhua. The animations look fairly decent, and certainly avoid the dead-eyed stares seen in the recent Shenmue footage or Andromeda-style exaggeration.]
This is still the sample model, the older one, but… this is a test. We’re going to make this even better. We’re incorporating about 11 different types of face motion, and we’re working towards that. That will be improved a lot.