Pre-rendered cutscenes should all be 1080p by now

[Deleted member 284126]

This is always irked me, especially since we're in 2011 now.

But I've noticed that the pre-rendered cutscenes in almost all PC games are under 1080p.

Since it's now a standard that movie trailers are 1080p, the video game industry should follow.

It would be too bad if Deus Ex HR and the new Tomb Raider (both of which have excellent CGI) didn't have high bit-rate 1080p.

 

[motsm]

DVD drives and game downloads stop it. If everything was Blu-Ray I'm sure it would have been done years ago.

 

[ImpulsE69]

You forgot consolization. Consoles aren't really doing 1080, so neither are the PC ports.

 

[The Keeper]

- Xbox 360 only has normal DVD drive. HD-DVD was available as an option but it has been discontinued AFAIK, but it never was standard equipment.
- Wii has some kind of proprietary optical media drive, you can't play DVD movies let alone blu-ray movies in the drive.
- PS3 does have blu-ray drive though.
- Sales of blu-ray drives on PCs have been rather small due to their price. Even today blu-ray drives cost 3 times as much as DVD-drives. Can't even mention HD-DVD because it has for all intents and purposes lost the format war.
- 1080p video on normal DVD-discs would take a lot of space that would normally be used for game data. Whereas we currently have games sold on 1-2 DVD-discs, 1080p cutscenes would likely double that. Same applies to download services such as Steam, you'd have to download games twice as big.

Bottom line is, before you can expect 1080p cutscenes and such there are two things that must happen:
- New generation of consoles sporting higher capacity optical media.
- Blu-ray drives becoming the standard on PCs AND achieving at least 50% share in currently used home computers.

While the first will happen likely next year and bring 1080p movies with them, same does not apply to PC. Even next year vast majority of computers at home will still have DVD-drives. Maybe you remember how long it took for PC games to move to DVD from CD?

Or alternatively. You can have your 1080p cutscenes but compressed to hell and back. I'd rather watch high quality 720p or 480p rather than bad quality 1080p.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

Id rather they give the crappy quality to the consoles and let the PC enjoy pre-rendered 1080p cutscenes at a flawless 60fps. No reason other than laziness on their part. How hard is it to render in 1080p and compress it for consoles? Not hard at all of course.

 

[BoberFett]

I'd like to see cutscenes eliminated completely. If it can't be done in the game engine, it doesn't need to be done. It's fluff. Extraneous junk. Put those 3D modellers to work on creating more in-game models to increase variety. Use more of the budget on features and gameplay. Cutscenes are relics that we no longer need.

 

[motsm]

Id rather they give the crappy quality to the consoles and let the PC enjoy pre-rendered 1080p cutscenes at a flawless 60fps. No reason other than laziness on their part. How hard is it to render in 1080p and compress it for consoles? Not hard at all of course.

If you read the first few posts, you'd see plenty of logical, non lazy reasons why it doesn't happen.

 

[Soccerman06]

Id prefer they be rendered at 1600p but that will never happen, no reason they cant have different copies for consoles and PCs (they already do) and just scale down resolution/bitrate to match format.

 

[Cheesetogo]

- Wii has some kind of proprietary optical media drive, you can't play DVD movies let alone blu-ray movies in the drive.

Actually, the Wii uses a regular DVD drive.


Personally, I'd be glad to see pre-rendered cut scenes done away with entirely. To me, they usually only serve to break the immersion.

 

[gorcorps]

I'd like to see cutscenes eliminated completely. If it can't be done in the game engine, it doesn't need to be done. It's fluff. Extraneous junk. Put those 3D modellers to work on creating more in-game models to increase variety. Use more of the budget on features and gameplay. Cutscenes are relics that we no longer need.

Agree with this. We're to the point where the game engines look great, and real time "cutscenes" are just as good if not better than some pre-rendered scene that takes you out of the game to ruin immersion. Even console games are capable of such things. God of War 3 had everything done in engine and it was excellent.

 

[Barfo]

Cut scenes should be rendered in real time.

 

[-Slacker-]

Cut scenes should not exist at all in this day and age. And don't even get me started on quick time events.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

I agree that cutscenes should be rendered by the game engine in real time; even in games that look crappy, using the game engine for cutscenes at least helps keep a sense of continuity in the story. Think of how ridiculous GTA: San Andreas would have looked if it kept switching between HD cutscenes and the regular pixelated muddy textures of the game; by using the engine to render cutscenes, they didn't look good, but they worked well and kept one in the flow of things.

The only situation I can think of with really awesome CGI cutscenes that might not work on with ingame rendering are the Tekken intros/endings of old. I haven't played Tekken since PS2, but Tekken 3 had some pretty wicked intro and outro movies. Soul Calibur also. Those would be hard to replicate with real-time rendering.

Still, even though I have a computer monitor capable of displaying 1080P, I'm in the minority, even amongst my gamer friends, let alone the general public. I also don't have a blu-ray drive on my PC, so I'd need to have several additional installation DVDs just for cutscenes if they were all high-def. And, quite frankly, I don't want all that stuff cluttering up my hard drive. 720P is a high enough standard to set for the few situations that warrant rendered CGI scenes in a game; I still prefer realtime rendering on the game engine though.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I prefer the in-engine cutscenes as long as they don't pull a Gears of War. The cutscenes looked considerably worse than the actual game did because they were using it to load parts of the game. While I think that's good, when Gears came out on the 360 it was just awful. Pretty much every rendering problem would crop up. Plus the audio would get drowned out by the DVD drive spinning up like a jet. What's the point of a cutscene if you ruin it?

 

[lamedude]

The problem is developers aren't willing to license a decent codec so they just use the crappy Bink codec. Its what Square used for FF13 and the 1080P FMVs took up 32GBs.
If I translated the AVC license fees correctly its 2cents a game. They have no problem using MP3 when the free and better Vorbis exist though but thats only $2,500 instead of $20,000 per million sold.