Fully Rendered 3D Movies

[Catwho]

They did actually with 2.0 - the scene right after you hit level 15 and leave the city for the first time, and the see the Garlean spaceships - the first part of that is fully rendered CG.

Movies take up a LOT of space on the HDD though, so that is the main reason they prefer to use the in-game engine for most cutscenes.

That, and it allows the player character to be involved. (Very critical for scenes like just after The Vault, where the emotional impact relied heavily on the player character being present.)

[Enkidoh]

They did actually with 2.0 - the scene right after you hit level 15 and leave the city for the first time, and the see the Garlean spaceships - the first part of that is fully rendered CG.

Movies take up a LOT of space on the HDD though, so that is the main reason they prefer to use the in-game engine for most cutscenes.

That, and it allows the player character to be involved. (Very critical for scenes like just after The Vault, where the emotional impact relied heavily on the player character being present.)

That scene was actually not specifically made for ARR though - it was actually part of version 1.0's original opening movie that SE just recycled for ARR (the original scene featured 'Derplander' riding on the back of a Juggernaut - the whole scene was actually within the Echo in the original version).

As amazing as fully rendered CG cinematics are, their main problem is they cost a lot in time, money and labour (I don't have the source sadly but as I understand it the End of an Era/A New Beginning trailer cost over $3 million and took Square Enix Visual Works twelve months to produce. Of course this has proven to be a very wise investment but it's not something they can simply do for every scene in the game, especially with a MMORPG like FFXIV where the player creates their own character.

It's worth noting also that as far as Square's first use of FMV in a FF title (FFVII) was actually not just for the 'wow' factor, but also for technical reasons - the FMV was actually used to hide the loading of new areas into the game, which as it used pre-rendered backgrounds this use of FMV fitted the game perfectly (this is why FFVII often had short FMV of mundane scenes or actions, like a lift going up or down, it was effectively a very cleverly masked 'now loading' screen). But I digress.

[KisaiTenshi]

Movies take up a LOT of space on the HDD though, so that is the main reason they prefer to use the in-game engine for most cutscenes.

There's not much point to pre-rendering any cutscene in the game unless it excludes the player and requires choreography that isn't possible.
Take for example the V1.0 OP/Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXDMDvYu0Fc

and then compare to the V1.0 starting movies (which are pre-render composites a la FFX)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-nmgLvTFD0 Ul'dah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU5N24_5VIk Gridania
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7kxELjRJRM Limsa

In V2.0 we actually lost all the composite movies altogether. But hardware has also moved forward 4 years since. It's -entirely- possible to get enough visual fidelity using the 3D renderer itself that composite renders aren't required. But at the same time ... people still have cheap video cards and laptops that are not capable of running the game at maximum settings. So they also get inferior cutscenes.

Remember, the entire reason we had composite cutscenes in the first place was because the PSX and PS2 were not capable rendering "in real time" the visual fidelity necessary to make the ENTIRE game look good. So Square compromised, rendered the backgrounds and cutscenes, and limited the customization of the playable characters so that the characters were always present and voiced in the rendered cutscenes.