Max Charnock (technical lead): The main goal was to make it feel like an actual dinosaur which took a long time to achieve. Root motion with movement helped a lot to make its movements feel natural but required a lot of correction to ensure it didn't clip into geometry all the time. For a long time, the Velociraptor didn't feel quite right as it’s very easy to see strange behaviour in an animal as we are evolutionally trained to see it. So it took a lot of watching it play and tweaking it to refine that natural feel.
We use the experimental AI package for the Velociraptors pathing and the Velociraptor itself is relatively simple system with a state machine to handle the player interaction behaviour and the wandering behaviour, working off a queue of actions which the Velociraptor can fill if emptied by querying the environment around it or can be manually filled via events for cutscenes.
The biggest issue we ran into was that we needed to strike a hard enough balance between it functioning and feeling natural, but we struggled with the correct sizing of the Velociraptor.
It had to be a good balance between being intimidating and not being a huge burden on art and programming to make it fit in the environments. The Velociraptor was originally about 25 percent larger but that made the environments feel too open.