CBU3 and fade-to-black cutscenes

[Catwho]

This is honestly nothing new with the gaming industry, in regard to the manually rendered vs pre-animation rendered animations and lip sync in cutscene heavy games.

Remember the PS2 days? Back in FFX and Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 (as well as other games), they'd swapped models constantly during cutscenes in order to save resources and time. Basically they'd give scenes with higher plot priority and presentation the high poly models where they're lip synced and all and then swap to the lower poly models where the mouths are just textures that flap when they talk along with pre-baked animations.

You also see this all over the place too once you actually start acknowledging this technique; Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, Resident Evil etc.

I think the issue is that during those games, the stylization of the models helped with making the quality somewhat consistent, while in modern era where we have much higher graphical fidelity in animations, the cost-effective method is a lot more jarring to notice because of the bigger dip in quality in the models and animations with cutscenes.

Also we were all dumb kids who didnt give two shits about such things probably so we didnt complain about it as much back then.

Digital Foundry did an in depth review comparing the pre rendered CGI movies of FFIII to the real time, in engine renderings of FFXVI. Turns out XVI does use pre rendered CGI in a handful of places, but it swaps back to the in engine renderings almost seamlessly.

But yeah, it's clear that the B tier face to face character interactions suffered from not having the body motion capture, the same way all the other cutscenes did. That was likely a design decision because it meant they could outsource those bits to a junior team or even another company entirely.

[Naraku_Diabolos]

What other $70 single-player title does this every other cutscene?

I never bought any game that’s $70. I only have a Switch and gaming PC, and the only PC game I play is FFXIV or even on occasion, FFXI. The games you listed are not my types of games and do not interest me.

[BRVV]

Digital Foundry did an in depth review comparing the pre rendered CGI movies of FFIII to the real time, in engine renderings of FFXVI

*FFXIII. You dropped an "X" there.

Didn't read most of this thread but my 2 cents: too many boring, SLOW fades and also watching people walk off... grinds my gears everytime