Face Sword - Face Animations

Description

Half Sword's faces never move. You can take a man apart limb by limb and he looks exactly as bored as he did standing still. That always bothered me, so I fixed it.

WillieFace gives the heads a real set of facial shapes, teeth, a tongue and an actual mouth, and hooks a script into the game's own events so the face reacts to what is happening to it.

Installation

You need two things: UE4SS (the script loader) and this mod. They go into different folders, and that's where most installs go wrong.

1. Close the game.

2. Open your Half Sword folder — in Steam: right-click Half Sword → Manage → Browse local files.

3. Install UE4SS v3. 0. 1 (skip if you already have it). Download it from https://github.com/UE4SS-RE/RE-UE4SS/releases and extract it into: Half Sword\HalfswordUE5\Binaries\Win64\ That's the folder with HalfSwordUE5-Win64-Shipping.exe in it. When it's right you'll see dwmapi.dll and a ue4ss folder sitting next to that .exe.

4. Install this mod. Extract the archive into Half Sword\ — the top folder, the one you landed in at step 2. Don't put it next to the .exe; the archive already contains the full path inside it. If HalfswordUE5\Content\Paks\~mods\ doesn't exist, create it (with the tilde).

5. Play. Don't edit mods.txt — the mod ships an enabled.txt, which is all UE4SS needs.

To turn it off without uninstalling: rename ue4ss\Mods\WillieFace\enabled.txt to enabled.txt.off and restart.

To remove it completely: delete zWillieFace_P.pak and the WillieFace mod folder. Nothing else to undo — the mod never writes to mods.txt.

Main features

Hit someone and they flinch — eyes wide first, the wince a moment later, and harder blows hurt more. Corner a man and he'll beg, then cry, then just sob. Open his throat and he spends his last seconds gasping with a face that never quite settles. When he finally goes, the jaw takes a few seconds to fall open.

The rest is the small stuff that sells it. Brows that furrow the forehead, crow's feet, eyes that dart about and blink unevenly, everyone breathing at his own rhythm, nobody's face quite symmetric. Mouths move while they shout, driven by curves built from the game's own voice recordings.

Requirements

Half Sword, tested on the July 2026 Steam build, and UE4SS v3. 0. 1. Nothing else.

Honest limits

Seven heads are covered: Willie, Frank, Hans, Henrish, Konrad and Matteo. The old Willie_OG is now also in, The mouth moves convincingly while someone shouts but doesn't match the actual words.

No support, sorry. I made this for myself and I'm not going to troubleshoot installs or chase game patches. If it breaks, delete two files and you're back to stock.

Made with full AI assistance, start to finish. Better you hear it from me.

The pak carries Half Sword's own head meshes with the facial shapes added; there's no way to ship it otherwise. They belong to Half Sword Games, I asked on their Discord before releasing this, and it comes down if they want it down.

Shout outs

Half Sword Games. USC ICT for ICT-FaceKit and NVIDIA for Audio2Face-3D, both released openly. The UE4SS and FModel teams. And the Half Sword modding community, who worked all this out long before I turned up.