CBU3 and fade-to-black cutscenes

Why are the animators so lazy? Let's not animate people eating, let's just fade to black and play eating sounds. Let's not animate people cutting wood, let's just fade to black and play sawing sounds. Let's not animate people hammering at the forge. Let's just fade to black and play some anvil sounds.

This is expected from a budget AA studio $30 game but FF14 and 16 are full-priced AAA games and this makes it feel like a cheap knockoff.

I don't like it either, especially when characters explain to a new character your entire life story. I would rather know what they were told.

When it fades to black and the Warrior of Light says what happened in an echo vision, it's like the Scions know every insignificant detail and that just isn't realistic. I do my best to imagine the vague way they explained it, and then immediately they start discussing insignificant details that nobody would mention when describing something they experienced.

Since in FFXVI the main character talks, there isn't a good reason for them not to just have some lines that summarise their life story, and particularly mention ones important for driving the plot forward.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by TheDecay

Why are the animators so lazy? Let's not animate people eating, let's just fade to black and play eating sounds. Let's not animate people cutting wood, let's just fade to black and play sawing sounds. Let's not animate people hammering at the forge. Let's just fade to black and play some anvil sounds.

This is expected from a budget AA studio $30 game but FF14 and 16 are full-priced AAA games and this makes it feel like a cheap knockoff.

---

And when we do animate Garha eating a Hamburger everyone complains about how resources are being wasted that could have went towards content.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nav_Fae

And when we do animate Garha eating a Hamburger everyone complains about how resources are being wasted that could have went towards content.

---

https://i.imgur.com/fthfNsb.png

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nav_Fae

And when we do animate Garha eating a Hamburger everyone complains about how resources are being wasted that could have went towards content.

---

Problem is that those high quality sequences are very rare, so it would be much better if we got them in some more story-relevant cutscene. I would much rather have some memorable fight in cutscene than some catboy eating a burger.

With FFXVI it's become obvious that what made CBU3 successful is their ability to really focus their budget on features they deem important. And for those who only care about those parts, they make the best games ever.

The downside is that the low-budget parts look incredibly lazy and 20 years behind the rest of the industry. And they constantly iron out everything that's not deemed necessary, creating really dry gaming experiences.

It seems their entire philosophy is built on averting the high-polygon plants from FFXIV 1.0, and it shows, for better or worse.

I've rarely played a game like this, where the spectacular highs are immediatly followed by abyssmal lows.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nav_Fae

And when we do animate Garha eating a Hamburger everyone complains about how resources are being wasted that could have went towards content.

---

What content? :3

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kazhar

With FFXVI it's become obvious that what made CBU3 successful is their ability to really focus their budget on features they deem important. And for those who only care about those parts, they make the best games ever.

The downside is that the low-budget parts look incredibly lazy and 20 years behind the rest of the industry. And they constantly iron out everything that's not deemed necessary, creating really dry gaming experiences.

It seems their entire philosophy is built on averting the high-polygon plants from FFXIV 1.0, and it shows, for better or worse.

I've rarely played a game like this, where the spectacular highs are immediatly followed by abyssmal lows.

---

You summarised it very well. It's so incredibly stark sometimes: the various opening cutscenes for 1.0 have better animations and cinematography than I've experienced in 99% of ARR to post-ShB. I understand they were in a rush to rerelease the game, and that's forgivable, but why did the bar remain so low after that? An absurd amount of cutscenes can be recreated using /emotes, and that is not a flattering fact.

I mean, 99% of FFXIV 2.0 doesn't even have cinematography, unless "defiant remark, cue dramatic music, spinning camera into action zoom, <begin fight>" counts, but that's a pattern you witness endlessly and it's not even very inspired the first time. :(

They say they want this game to last another decade, hence the upcoming visual rework (overdue given changing resolutions of the past decade), but unless they massively improve the floor for cutscenes it will be a bit of a waste.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by TheDecay

Let's not animate people eating, let's just fade to black and play eating sounds. Let's not animate people cutting wood, let's just fade to black and play sawing sounds. Let's not animate people hammering at the forge. Let's just fade to black and play some anvil sounds.

---

(14 is not just a AAA game, but a recurrent subscription game.)

It will never not be annoying when your character or another hands over invisible "items" -- but it is likely not the animators fault, so much as SE not paying for enough of them to work on these things (they have a history of burning XIV's absurd profits on doomed live services and NFT weirdness).

Sadly, some of the best animation work in the game (e.g. 1.0 Gridania part 1 & part 2) dates back to 1.0 and has somehow survived to the present. I don't know why they put such a massive emphasis on visuals in 1.0 and then neglected them in 2.0 and beyond.

If a dev somehow reads this thread, I hope they can understand people's frustrated remarks as a product of caring in the first place.

besides this troll making another post I think the examples said don't really impact anything...like why spend all that time and resource for stuff that doesn't impact the narrative or the thing at large. I don't need a montage of animations for them making my relic how it is now is fine. Handing over items is forgivable in an MMO because of how many items you'd have to animate for etc so its just the lesser evil. Its not laziness (I'm not broadly painting this) its just picking what really needs to be animated and what doesn't. Now if you say oh the 2 food scenes lately...the graha burger was in a scene that was a much needed respite for our party and for zero it was more about sharing and whatever else they had going for her friendship I suppose so they were applicable to the scene.

I will agree they need to move out of the whole B tier cutscene of shot reverse shot basic animation play and they can do that if they are looking into their animation pool which they mentioned back in Feb 2022. Longer emotes or the freedom to do more with allocation could add to scenes and I hope its something they look at.

Two entities consistently interacting in relatively realistic and not obviously janky ways is, quite literally, one of the hardest problems in game development. Trillions of dollars have been spent on trying to solve this problem across countless games and studios and engines and middlewares. It's even worse if it's two humanoid characters.

Until we're in a reality where packing a fully-functional soft body physics engine in every game is performant and viable, you should always expect this to be the norm for any game that isn't spending $5m+ per hour of gameplay.. and even then, it's gonna be a while.