A list of every issue that Frontier's "Binturong" has:
- The eyes are too bright. They look like Anakin or Palpatine's eyes from Revenge of the Sith. A real binturong has much cloudier eyes, to the point it can sometimes be hard to see the pupils during the day.
- The pupils by the way, completely the wrong shape. Frontier made them round like a human's, in reality they are narrow vertical slits like a cat
- The lower canines, from what I've seen so far, appear to be slightly too short
- The muzzle is not as elongated as it should be
- The face of the entire animal is round, probably because they did minimal changes to the red panda model. It should be much more angular. It is a civet, not a red panda.
- The creature Frontier has made is not just fluffy, it is obese. Severely obese. I would judge it's 25-40 lbs overweight. It's fur is shaggy and should hang down the belly, even if it's just 1 or 2 inches
- The ear tufts should be actual strands of hair, not weird tumors growing out if it's head like horns
- This is hard to judge from the picture's we have, but it looks like the tail might not be long enough. It should be nearly as long as the main body. Even if it is the correct length, it suffers from the same issue as the rest of the animal, it is entirely too poofy.
- The paws and fingers/claws are slightly smaller than they should be
- Frontier gave this animal a permanent anthropomorphic smile and it looks absolutely terrible. I don't know why on Earth they would do this since they did with the lion during the base game and it has never been seen in a positive light. It needs to be removed from the model ASAP. Binturongs do have a similar action, like how a dog pants and looks like it is smiling, so I would actually really love an animation that shows this off, perhaps while they are walking. But to have it be permanent is a very poor decision.
- They usually don't show off color variations in the reveals, but I have fair skepticism that the binturong will have no pattern or color variations. In reality, many animals have their own patterning, often some bits of white at the bottom of the coat tapering onto the belly, or on the back. Some also have extra bits of white on the face, which really gives them that "old man" appearance.
When you look at this entire list of errors, and see that some of them are as simply as getting the eyes right, this were I get more frustrated. I was literally the first person on this forum to give them a ton of praise when the dhole was revealed, I defended every aspect of the sun bear rig and model here as well as Reddit. I think the clouded leopard looks photo realistic, as does the leaf insect. I'm happy with what I've seen from the monkey and babirusa so far.
I think there is obviously some sort of disconnect somewhere in the process during this pack's development. Obviously someone thought that there was no difference between a Malayan tapir and a Baird's tapir, and just switched up the color but made no changes to the model. Except they didn't even fully get the colors right, because Frontier's new tapir doesn't have white on the ear tips, something that is very, very obvious in Malayan tapirs and would take a 1 second Google search to find out.
With the compounded errors in the tapir and binturong, I have some extreme doubts that they actually work with zoological institutions as much as they claim to. Or at least, no one was consulted with these two animals, that is for sure. There is just no chance someone knowledgeable in the field would let those things fly. And I understand that these are video game artists, but you'd think they'd at least make an effort, right? The binturong looks like someone looked at the first 3 Google images and then made it, never using reference material after that.
I don't know who it is over there, but someone very clearly dropped the ball this time and it's a shame that it's bringing the fantastic work of the rest of the team down, and it's a shame that
@Chante Goodman has to deal with this fiasco during her last days at the company because others didn't do their work how they should've.
