The Problem of "Zombie Eyes" in Games

So you are playing a game and you are supposed to be involved in the story emotionally , then this NPC comes along and while delivering his line his eyes never moves , never blinks he stares ahead fixedly even though in the context of the scene he should be at least looking at you.

This is the biggest problem with game animation at the moment , especially in FPS games. The only game that came close to breaking that barrier is half life 2 , I applaud valve for taking the effort to put in facial animation that reflected the characters mood. And the characters blinked and followed you with their eyes and there were even some instances of eye darts.

Small as it might seem that kind of detail stuff makes the game so much better. And with the technology we have nowadays there is no excuse to not have that stuff in agame.

Most recently I am playing Quake 4 and its a great game , they obviously invested a lot of money in hiring professional actors for voice acting and it shows , yet the npc's all look braindead and suffer from what i mentioned above. how hard can it be to at least have some procedural blink animation on those characters?

The day we will have realistic facial animation in games is the day games will leap ahead in immersiveness. I cant wait for it.