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SvennoJ on 04 July 2012
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zarx said:
JEMC said:

If I ever skip a cutscene is either because I've seen it before (so I've been killed and I don't have the mood to see it again), or because it's boring. CGI or in-game doesn't bother me.

With that said, I always liked the spectacular intros that were made during the PS1 and PS2 era. Capcom did some stunning intros back then, but when it comes to cut-scenes during the game, I prefer the engine-rendered ones as they load faster and, once finished and back to the real game, don't leave you with a bad taste in your mouth (great graphics => normal graphics can be disappointing).


There are plenty of development related reasons to prefer inengine cutscense as well, big FF style CGI can take months to render so in a fluid enviroment like game development that means once you have the CGI locked in you have to stick to that as part of the story or lose thousands of $$$ worth of work. Also in engine cutscenes allow you to bring in the wepons and clothing that your ingame character is using into the cutscenes and it also allows devs the ability to have more branching games and have player decisions reflected in cutscenes if it's that kind of game. 

There is a lot of room between real-time rendering and months to render a cut scene. A couple of hours to target render a scene in a small server farm doesn't stand in the way of development, certainly not if you can render a preview in real time.
And even if you don't bother with polishing up your cutscenes you still get seamless transitions with no loading pauses like in Uncharted and Killzone.

For the purpose of reflecting people's decisions, weapons, co-op partner etc, why not render the characters in a pre-rendered background. Store a geometry and light map together with the video and it shouldn't be to difficult to place a couple of characters in the action.

Cut scenes are an opportunity to show of the artwork and artistic vision in the best possible way. It's a shame that they are usually limited by the game engine.