> any open world game with lots of dialogue will pale in comparison to hand animated faces.
Pretty sure this won't age well - or that it's already aged out. There's only so much animators can do. In the film industry algorithms often augment an animator's work. Often they do the bulk of the work, and animators will fine-tune to get the exact effect envisioned.
Also, artistic animations can look great, but they can also be very inconsistent. Even more so when you need multiple people to work on thousands of lines of dialogue. It also requires an enormous budget - not all studios will have Gollum-like funding for every single NPC.