[mortenjorck]

Animations are a big part of graphical fidelity. Games with lower-detail character models relied more on your mind to fill in the details as characters spoke or made facial expressions (I still remember an incredible scene in 2001's Anachronox where a character slowly smiles, conveyed with the motion of three vertices), but when you have a near-photorealistic rendering of a human face, the animation has to be up to standard. This is every bit a drain on art budgets as the modeling and textures.

[rbanffy]

Wouldn't then be desirable to avoid showing human faces up close and, instead, explore other ways of telling stories that better match both budget and technical resources?

Insisting on showing a character in great detail when the costs of doing so far outweigh the benefit is unwise.

[alvarosevilla95]

If your game is a third person shooter which is a sequel to third person shooting franchise you can't really do that.