Proper cinematics

[Sated]

I prefer cutscenes to cinematics because my WoL is in them.

[Commander_Justitia]

I prefer cutscenes to cinematics because my WoL is in them.

Why not both? In ARR we had the phoenix t12 cinematic, for 5% of the raiding community. And people barely realized that they exist outside of intro.
Short cinematics like that could be so powerful for raid tiers or story endings etc. while still keep the WoL ones for 99% of it. It would feel rewarding I guess

[Sated]

Short cinematics like that could be so powerful for raid tiers or story endings etc.

I guess I just don't see what it could provide that the cutscenes don't already? The cost of production doesn't seem worth it when a cutscene allows for much better storytelling (and as Iscah said, I agree the cinematic characters just look... off. It's not the same).

Personally I'd rather see them further improve their storyboarding and animations in cutscenes than put more resources into niche cinematics.

[Commander_Justitia]

Personally I'd rather see them further improve their storyboarding and animations in cutscenes than put more resources into niche cinematics.

They already do very long, expensive cutscenes for each addon. But if you look back at almost every final fantasy game in existence, they have more polished/animated cutscenes/cinematics and they were often the most memorable scenes from a game. Let them cut the trailer animation by 30s and add a different one to be unlocked in the game, then they don't waste resources like you think they would. And it wouldn't matter if you don't see yourself for 30s in an awesome cutscene.

Your expectations of an mmorpg are just so low lmao... SE can be happy that everyone is so satisfied with it and that their community adamantly defends it.
Look at Elder Scrolls Online which released half a year after ARR and you had every quest synchronized by voiceactors, dialogue options that actually matter, we got the same cutscene musics since ARR start in sidequests or at bossfights (they prefer to use old boss music even for shadowbringers bosses like why? xD, there are other plenty good ones to use). Devs who create quests just need a better toolkit to be able to be more creative with colorfilters, different sfx/audio background, "more emotes"/skeleton presets - you notice whenever they have to show something they cant really "emote" they just put a blackscreen or cut the scene off? , more transformations and usable items (like duty special items) aka minigames could also be a thing. They are better off selling books with the quests so we can just read them and don't need to fly around the whole map for just talking and nothing else. Some quests really are like that, where you do nothing else than to read long text without fighting/collecting/whatever even.

So yeah, I think they can totally polish their questvariety designs a bit and also try to make somewhat good nonstory sidequest cutscenes, otherwise I would just not make them, they are too similar to just looking at it ingame. Those quest cutscene where nobody moves around or joins/leaves the story, I doubt they are worth it, if its static like that.

[MitsukiKimura]

I prefer cutscenes to cinematics because my WoL is in them.

This^ It makes "You" feel like you're part of the story which you are. Some MMO's don't even show your character in cut scenes and don't allow you to speak in them either. It brings that special feeling of having your character recognized by their friends and everyone around them