Ex-BioWare dev explains why everyone in Mass Effect and Dragon Age does that one 'BioWare turn' animation
You might not know the name, but you sure know the animation. You remember how everyone in so many BioWare games—your Mass Effects, your Dragon Ages—seems to have the exact same physical tics? There's 'rubbing forehead worriedly,' there's 'rubbing hands together while glancing nervously side to side,' and—most famously—there's 'ambling directionlessly off to the side of the screen for a bit before returning to the exact spot they started speaking from'.
It's called the "BioWare turn" and it turns out there's a reason for it beyond being charming, familiar, and presumably close to hand in the animators' arsenal. In a recent post on X, "The Everything App," (via GamesRadar) former BioWare dev Violet McVinnie explained just why the animation gets used so often.
"This anim is part of a set called 'Posebreakers' which are intended to move characters around the area if a scene is feeling too static," wrote McVinnie. "We'd combine them with the infamous 'Exit Left/Right' between cuts." That's the classic Commander Shepard 'I should go' followed by wandering off-screen.
In other words, the animations are a videogame equivalent of "business," the theatrical term for, in essence, actors actually doing things with their bodies while they're dialoguing and soliloquising. Think things like the small council mucking about with those weird marbles they have in House of the Dragon, or an actor fiddling with a prop while delivering a speech in Hamlet. Because, of course, having two actors—or two character models—just stand and deliver dialogue at each other would be kind of stultifying to watch, throwing in these dashes of physicality makes the scene more interesting.
In theory, anyway. The thing about the BioWare turn is, of course, that it became so omnipresent in the studio's games that they ended up taking you out of the experience rather than putting you into it. The reason for that is, well, pretty much what you'd expect: "Many animations propagate through lots of BioWare franchises," writes McVinnie, "ME3's Thane/Kai Leng fight cutscene has a lot of Jade Empire combat animations stitched together."
Because unlike actors on a stage, character models can't improvise new movements on the fly, and giving them all-new ones takes time and effort that could probably be better spent elsewhere. Easier and better, then, to chuck a BioWare turn in and call it a day. Don't take it personally, players, it's just business.