Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
Is it any different from any other post expansion msq, or even vanilla msq segments?

They have shown they can do bigger production value on cutscenes for example as witnessed in the 5.3 end cutscenes (scions in Mor Dhona and Fandy in the Throne Room, probably a lot of mocap involved). It's not gonna address the lack of interactive gameplay, but at least it makes the "movie" side of msquesting a lot more immersive and gripping imo. Too bad they only did it once or twice, it's kinda night and day when compared against most of the rest.
the Big Production Values I've found tend to happen near the end of patch cycles too. Think about as well the ebb and flow between back and forth unvoiced cutscenes and Big Moments in expansions as well. It wouldn't surprise me if they end up having to meticulously plan which scenes get The Money and which scenes get the stock stuff. That said, there were otherwise normal scenes that had some bespoke things in them (estinien's face right before all the alchemists dogpile him, anything post ShB that had food physics in it, Estinien getting ready to jump off your balcony) that imply that someone out there found little workarounds for that, even if they turned out to be expensive.

This might be something the graphics update is intended to help with. If cutscenes are difficult to make because their internal tooling is a pain, that's how you get the constant back and forth talk cutscenes (they probably have a template even), with only bigger moments getting the better stuff because they have to devote nearly all their time to it. If they're redoing how animations and rendering works, it wouldn't surprise me if they're also having to completely change their kit to go with it, given that older systems have a tendency to just scream any time you make even the slightest change.