In the re-re-re-re-re-re-re-make/master era....
When a games cutscenes are nearly unwatchable quality compared to the gameplay, because they didn't bother recreating them.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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A few games I've played recently have the opposite problem. The cutscenes were pre-rendered and look like ass compared to the actual game.
Or like, with Jedi Survivor it looks like ass because it turns all the graphics up during the unplayable segments for the visual quality, but it disables vsync and fast camera movements cause ghosting and screen tearing making the scene an unrecognizable mess.
And then when you've got an ultrawide monitor but the pre-rendered cutscenes are hard-encoded at 16:9 resolution, so you get black bars...
Quite bizarrely, the recent Silent Hill remake has in-engine cutscenes (not prerendered) but STILL has black bars on the sides during them, because the game intentionally adds overlays only during cutscenes! There's an unofficial patch to fix it.
I can only assume they did this because the camera positioning and "cinematography" was done with a 16:9 screen in mind, and when the view is wider you might see more/different things than the creators wanted. Feels so undesirable as a player, though!
I couldn't take that boss seriously. It looked so derpy 😂
That said, a Sonic Adventure remake would be fucking sick at this point!
The Sonic Generations version was pretty good:
I find it far more humorous when you are playing an old game and you are rendering so much better than the cut scene that it looks like a cartoon.
Fuck all that, put some real effort into it and film cutscenes with real actors in costume like Westwood did.
If you're going to interrupt my gameplay with some scripted scene you'd better have done some actual production work, or else give me a skip button.
At least the old game developers had some class when they spoon-fed story elements. Engine-rendered cutscenes are just a lazy escape for developers who couldn't figure out how to make their story elements interactive.
You might wanna take a look at Quantum Leap!