Maybe MetaHuman was a mistake

Epic has announced the latest in-game round Fortnite Vote for the Game Awards today where gamers can watch Fortnite Islands competing for an award and play a multiplayer mode in the voting area. Last year, the voting area featured a hologram of Game Awards host Geoff Keighley and a model of him high above the action. This year… um.

In a blog, Epic employee Brian Crecente (who I believe used to be Luke’s boss but whom I only met once at the Gawker funeral/party) explained: “This year’s digital Keighley is distinct from the 2023 version significantly improved.” While last year’s hologram look was created using green screen video footage, this year’s MetaHuman is used to provide a more realistic representation.” MetaHuman is a feature in Epic’s Unreal Engine that Allows users to create “high fidelity digital humans.”

Crecente writes that Keighley traveled to Manchester to be scanned for the model, and Keighley himself says in the blog: “The results speak for themselves, I really feel like I have a digital double!”

This is the double in the game:

As far as I can tell, you only see the digital Keighley when you enter the mode for the first time, so I double-checked with the streamers that this wasn’t just something weird my graphics card was doing. Maybe I’ll stumble upon how un-Fortnite the model strives for realism; something about recognizing skin textures Fortnite is extremely strange and the proportions of the face don’t feel quite right, it doesn’t look like Keighley or a real face.

Oddly enough, I feel like he looks better in the trailer Fortnite released via the mode, which seems to retain some of the flatness and lack of detail I’ve come to expect from it Fortnite Characters:

While MetaHuman touts that creation was “easy to do,” I’m sure it wasn’t easy, so I’m not going to play armchair engineer and claim I could have made something that looked less scary. But I also don’t think last year’s hologram needs much improvement – it looked like Keighley as a hologram, matching the mode and look of Fortnite generally:

In last year’s mode, the gameplay section also featured a digital version of Keighley standing on top of a pile of rocks that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t climb. I could never get close enough to take a photo, but this is what he looked like in a trailer from 2023:

In 2023, he looks like a version of himself Fortnite! This is not the case in 2024; He looks like an awkwardly semi-realistic character squashed in front of an unrealistic game mode where you shoot at floating crystals. I’m glad that, unlike last year, he doesn’t tower over me threateningly, where I can’t escape the image of his scary eyes.

Maybe MetaHuman is a good tool for developers creating realistic games in Unreal; I have no idea! But perhaps it wasn’t necessary for it to be used here.