Epic announced the latest round of in-game Fortnite voting for The Game Awards today, where players can check out the Fortnite islands up 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, as well as a model of him perched high above the proceedings. This year… um.
In a blog, Epic contributor Brian Crecente (who I think used to be Luke’s boss, but whom I have only met once at the Gawker funeral/party) explained that “This year’s digital Keighley is clearly much improved over 2023’s version. Where last year’s hologram look was created using greenscreen video capture, this year’s makes use of MetaHuman to deliver a more realistic depiction.” MetaHuman is a feature in Epic’s Unreal Engine that allows users to create “high fidelity digital humans.”
Crecente writes that Keighley went to Manchester to be scanned for the model, and Keighley himself says in the blog that “The results speak for themselves, I truly feel like I have a digital double!”
This is that double in-game:
As far as I can tell, you only see digital Keighley once the first time you enter the mode, so I doublechecked against streamers that this wasn’t just something weird my graphics card was doing. Maybe I’m getting tripped up by how un-Fortnite the model looks in its reach for realism; something about seeing skin textures in Fortnite is hugely weird, and the proportions of the face don’t feel quite right, looking neither like Keighley nor a real face.
Curiously, I feel like he looks better in the trailer Fortnite released about the mode, which seems to maintain some of the flatness and lack of detail that I expect from Fortnite characters:
While MetaHuman touts that it is creation “made easy,” I’m sure this was not easy to do, so I am not going to play armchair technician and claim I could have made something that looks less uncanny. But I also didn’t think last year’s hologram needed much improving–it looked like Keighley as a hologram, fitting with the mode and with the look of Fortnite in general:
In last year’s mode, there was also a digital version of Keighley in the gameplay area, which stood at the top of a pile of rocks that, try as I might, I couldn’t scale. I could never get close enough to take a picture, but here’s what he looked like in a trailer from 2023:
In 2023, he looks like a version of himself in Fortnite! In 2024, he does not; he looks like an uncomfortably semi-realistic character squeezed in front of an unrealistic game mode where you shoot at floating crystals. I’m glad that, unlike last year, he’s not perched threateningly above me, where I would be unable to escape the mental image of his creepy eyes.
Maybe MetaHuman is a good tool for creators making realistic games in Unreal; I have no idea! But perhaps we didn’t need to see it used here.
