Oh, it's interesting alright. It showed us that their engine wasn't designed to handle dialogue options. The character animations are horrific. Origins had pretty good animations during cutscenes because the game didn't have to adjust the character to fit a different set of animations every time a dialogue was chosen. Everything in Origins was clearly made using real actors, which is something that they've been doing since Assassin's Creed 3. And it worked really well. But it looks like they decided to cut the costs this time and do some bare-bones manual animation work just so they could implement this useless feature in order for their game to resemble The Witcher 3 even more.
For story cutscenes, yes. But they didn't stop there. They also hand-crafted little details to perfection. Most notably facial animations. So even though they used live actors, most animations still received a special dev treatment. And when characters speak, those animations are hand-crafted to fit multiple languages instead of recording all the cutscenes with different actors using different languages. A lot of animations in less important scenes like monster contracts or when you're talking to a merchant were reused and adjusted by hand. Compare the way Geralt moves and talks to how the characters in Odyssey move and talk. Ubisoft looks worse than Bioware now.
This is exactly how I do Assassin's Creed games. I enjoy them, and get plenty of time out of them, but I always wait for a deep sale. I'm working through Origins at the moment; Odyssey can wait.
Which was horribly implemented regardless of the performance impact and no one should have it on. The effect takes the entire screen and you can't see anything for several seconds. It's detrimental to gameplay.
