Does CGI Sell Games?
I still remember the first time I saw the Final Fantasy VII intro CGI. It was incredible. It conveyed emotions in a very short period of time, and it hooked me on the game. I bought FFVII because of the intro cinematic–I made the decision to buy it before I’d even played or read up on it. Back in those days, this was common for me to do. If I loved the CGI cinematic they showed me, I wanted the game. But that’s not true anymore.
At first I thought I might be getting more discerning in my game purchase choices. But, I buy far more games now than I did when CGI sold me on games, and I play far more crappy games to boot. Am I just jaded? Maybe, but then it wouldn’t just be me, it would be pretty much all current gamers too, so the immediate answer to “does CGI sell games” would be, “no.” I’m really not sure it’s my fault at all.
What I think it might be is an uncanny valley. Not the same one that everyone talks about (and I just linked to)–it has nothing to do with CGI looking so close to reality that it’s weird. What I mean is that now when I see CGI for a game, I expect the game to look like that. It seems like the visual bar set by the CGI is within reach for the actual game. And then it doesn’t quite get there.
It’s the exact opposite effect that CGI cinematics are intended for. They are supposed to help sell the game, the tone, the feel, and the experience players can expect to have. What I think it ends up doing is setting this bar of perfection that the game can almost reach, but can never quite get to, and potential players can be turned off when they actually see gameplay footage.
Back in the day, using CGI was as fine idea. CGI represented the ideal of what the game should look like, but the game never even looked remotely as good. It was acceptable. Now, games DO look remotely as good as the CGI, but I think they sit somewhere in the uncanny valley created by their own CGI cinematics–they look so close to the CGI without actually looking exactly like it that seeing the game after seeing the CGI can cause a minor revulsive emotional response.
Case in point: World of Warcraft. Their intro cinematic was freakin’ awesome. It looked amazing, and I was psyched to play the game after watching it. Then, I logged in. I immediately felt shafted. They set me up! I thought the game was going to be this super heroic, really great looking game, and it was cartoony and not heroic at all.
I even feel that CGI cinematics I consider to be very good and dead-on are actually detrimental to a game in the end. Warhammer Online’s trailer was great. It captured the general look, feel, and tone of the world. It was at once epic and hilarious. But, the in-game visuals didn’t quite get there, and I think despite the trailer leaving me with a positive feeling initially, it netted a negative feeling after I started playing.
What’s the alternative? Use game assets! I don’t believe companies have to use exactly what players are going to see in the game. They can pretty it up a bit with higher polygon models, bigger textures, more fluid animations, even filters. But, when I get into the game, I actually feel like I’m playing what I was shown in the cinematic. For examples of this, look for EverQuest II expansion and adventure pack trailers for Desert of Flames and earlier. I think those trailers did a pretty good job of setting the game up.
The most important thing to take from this as far as my opinion is concerned: Whether CGI trailers sell games or not, I feel that a game benefits more from a great game-engine-rendered cinematic than from CGI. So, even if I’m wrong and it’s not dangerous to use a CGI cinematic (because done wrong, it can reduce player retention and/or acquisition), I still believe that it is better to render your trailers in the game engine instead of using CGI (and don’t get me started on prices… having one of those cinematic houses make a trailer for you is ridiculously expensive).
Does anyone feel like they’ve been sold on a game because of its CGI cinematic in recent years? Have you been turned off by a game because the in-game visuals didn’t match the CGI cinematic’s visuals? Do you think anyone has done a particularly great job with a CGI cinematic recently? Do you think anyone has done a particularly great job with in-game pre-rendered cinematics recently?
Actually I have some really good examples for done right and done wrong. Now of course, I don’t think CGIs have a very high chance of selling a game on someone, but they can, as you said, almost unsell one. Personally, I prefer the highly polished out of game cinematics. It isn’t the graphical drift, great or small, that makes or breaks them for me, it’s the content…
Firstly are they a good cinematic regardless of the game aspect (graphics, story, drama), but possibly more importantly, are they telling me the story of their game. What I mean is, when I sit down and watch the cinematic, are they trying to inform me, and get me excited about, things that are actually in the game, or are they just jerking me around by showing me things that are completely impossible in game but look cool.
Out of Game Engine done right: Dawn of War
Let’s face it, their cinematics are freaking awesome to begin with. More to our purposes though, they made a few very important choices, especially on that first one. Sure there is some face acting you’ll never see in the game, and definitely a lot of drama, the lone sergeant charging up the hill, that you’ll never see in the game. But they used all units that the player will control during the game, and more importantly they work “as advertised”. For instance, when the Space Marine lays into someone with a chain-sword, totally doable, when the dreadnaught lifts an ork and cracks him bloodily in half, totally doable, and when da boy connekts da magma bomb to da umie kan an’ makes it go boom, totally doable. As soon as you get in game, you’re rewarded by seeing most of the particularly awesome parts of the cinematic come to life. (Also you can theoretically replicate the situation in it’s entirety in game… theoretically.)
Out of Game Engine done wrong: Warhammer Online
You already brought it up, but this is an important case, especially since they did so much right but missed on the big parts. They got a bunch of playable classes, and just sort of had them do their thing, but they missed on the reason why. You’re supposed to reward the player with sights of their favorite things from the cinematics. WAR simply couldn’t deliver on the most important part of the cinematic, the huge army assaulting a massive fortress town, and being relieved to the back lines by the intervention of a deamon. You just can’t do it in-game. You can’t get that size of army in a zone with any stability, you can’t siege those kinds of fortresses, and Tchar’zanek, let alone a his pet deamons, never take part in battle. I suppose if you’re a particularly touristy type and would be happy just getting a screenshot with Tchar’zanek it might not be disappointing, but if you expected the cinematic to have any relation to real battles in-game it kind of sucks.
I can’t really give you an in-game done right, nothing really comes to mind that quick. I can give you done wrong though. The Bioshock menu timeout demo. All of the graphics were pretty much exactly what you would see in the game. The characters were all in the game. The weapons, and even the general situation were all very much so in the game. So what went wrong? They came too close to looking like game play with stuff that was completely impossible for the player to do. You couldn’t beckon to the little sisters in game, or try and drag them out of their holes kicking and screaming. If you got hit by a big daddy with a drill in game it meant your screen flashed red and some health was removed, in the cinematic it was a long drawn out battle while you tried to prevent the drill from impaling you.
I suppose the final reality though is false advertising. You never want to give your players the impression that you straight up lied to them. Part of that is not pumping up the players for game play they aren’t ever going to see. Part of that is not pumping them up for visuals that they consider possible, but you aren’t going to give them. Then again though, when has the game industry, especially mmos, been interested in avoiding lies in advertising.
The original EverQuest’s cinematic was so laughably far from anything the game actually did or looked like, it was pretty clear the people making the movie had never seen any part of the game.
I used to watch that intro over and over, though, and even though I knew it wasn’t much to do with the game, it still got me excited to play.
You know. I haven’t really thought about it much. I try to stay away from hype on games before they come out. I like to look at screenies and such because that gives a better feel for the look of the game. I probably watch a game trailer once. They have a job to do. To sell the game. But I tend to watch and forget. But that’s on purpose.
Also, I’m usually in a beta, hoping to beta, or have researched a game well before a trailer comes out that they really don’t influence me. Like you, I’m more interested in the learning about and from the systems in games than I am about the art and animation. Terrible, I know. I appreciate that stuff…but since I have no talent for it, it doesn’t have the same grasp on me.
Well…if only today’s gaming companies could be so innocent as Atari was back in the day – Old School Commercial for Atari
Using in-game assets is not by definition better than a CGI clip, and to understand why one needs to look back at games where CGI first started to pop up. Final Fantasy VII used CGI when the game engine could not do justice to the importance of the event that needed to be shown. While the capabilities of the game engines have improved, movies are still a very distinct visual medium from games, and have more liberty when it comes to pacing, camera angles and other pieces of visual vocabulary. CGI also allows the game developers to conserve detail and use it only where it’s needed. I don’t care whether you have a decent facial muscle animation system or properly translucent skin on your characters if most of the time said characters just a blip in my sniper scope. I do care about those details when you need to show the sweat on the brow of the local Evil Overlord to show that he’s bluffing in a Mexican Standoff, though. If you’re only going to need such detail in a handful of scenes, using a CGI clip instead of in-game assets is completely justified. CGI can also serve as a breather or a reward to the gamer. For example, if the player just defeated a difficult boss, using a CGI clip to show the boss’ death in great detail to smooth out the transition to the next level is ok. But if you’re only going to quickly show something and return to gameplay, feel free to use in-game assets.
Case in point: God of War 2. They kept the same art style in CGi and in-game assets and just rendered the CGI with extra detail, so the difference between cutscenes and gameplay was not that glaring. For example, in the first level CGI is used to re-introduce Kratos and other major characters like Zeus, Athena or Gaia, but in-game assets are used with the Colossus of Rhodes to integrate every appearance seamlessly into gameplay. At the end of the first level, a CGI clip is used to provide exposition and transition to the next level, and the game switches back to in-game assets just in time for the action.
I can think of at least on Pre-Rendered ad campaign that almost always makes me want to play the game, and in fact has come very close to selling me on it. EVE. Those commercials are awesome. I wish the game looked like that. But of course having done a trial of it, I know that the game play delivered is nothing like those cinematics.
JP
There is a cross over that I thought was really interesting in FFVIII. Using the game graphics the scene would set-up and switch to the CGI so you suddenly realized they’d switched. The great thing was that the cinematics were used for the visually stunning things you wouldn’t get in gameplay, and only that. The slow switch combined with restrained usage, as in there were times where it was all game engine graphics, worked to add value to the CGI aspects. Like with the other comments, it seems that the CGI needs to be obviously not possible, or possible. Then it needs to stick with it.
I have to disagree with you. Nothing is uglier than a pre-rendered in-game cinematic. It looks cheap, its usually cheesy, and its almost always an indicator that the writing (and therefore the cinematic) is going to be subpar, or mediocre at best. I have literally turned off a game in disgust thanks to rendered in-game cinematics.
If you want to use in-game assets, render the cinematics realtime. Or, have a CGI house do it for you — but I’m noticing lately that the decadent CGI cinematics are getting worse as well.
One thing I am noticing is that the engine developers need to spend a lot more time making animation and camera movements feel natural. Having the camera pan and then suddenly stop looks and feels terrible — and it tells me that the developer didn’t give enough of a damn to program in motion tweening.
My final issue with prerendered in-game cinematics is this: if you work with the limits of the engine real-time, you get better cinematics. This is simply because art under constraints often seems to turn out better than art where every possible trick in the book was used. Its something that applies to painting, writing, music…. and certainly cinematography.
Once upon a time I loved sitting in anticipation of the next awesomely pre-rendered cut scene in any game I played. Of course, my fondest memories are of the FF games, even when they re-released some of the older ones on the DS or PSP that never initially had cut scenes. I’ll always remember when Nintendo decided to pretty much do away with the concept of CG in their games with the release of the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
I worked for them at the time and I hated the idea. I wasn’t on any design or development team so there wasn’t much I could do, but I do remember hounding them about it, questioning the seriousness of their decision considering the technology to make in-game cinematics look awesome wasn’t even on par with CG.
Nowadays though … I don’t really look for the CG in games when I’m playing them. Most games on the latest gen consoles look awesome in game and can pull off their cinematics using the in-game engine. Final Fantasy 13 is a great example of in game graphics almost being on par with quality CG cinematics.
However, when a company is SUPER talented at doing CG, let’s say for instance: Blizzard … THEIR cinematics can sell a game. I Still watch the original WoW intro and the newly released WotLK into because they’re just THAT awesome. Blizz also snuck a machinima cinematic in the game as well and even THAT is awesome. I look forward to doing that questline on every character I level up JUST to see it happen in the game (watching it out of game is nice, but it feels more epic when you see it at the end of a questline in-game).
I think my PoV is the same as a couple other peoples’ who’ve posted: If done right, CG CAN sell a game, but not to the extent it used to. You expect awesomeness from companies like Square or Blizzard and you wait for awesome CG intros when their games / expansions come out.
When I load up a new RPG or something though, I don’t look for the CG anymore. Hell I used to go through the data files in some games just to take out and watch the CGs
Now I just hope the story matches the shiny new graphics in quality.
On a side note, I looked back at some of Blizz’s older games like Diablo, Diablo 2 and Starcraft just to see how far they’ve come. I remember being so mesmerized and awestruck by the awesome CG intros and cutscenes (which by the way I still think would fit in D3 or SC2 nicely) … and to go back and watch the 640×480 (if you’re lucky) movies in all their “splendor” is amusing.
Re: Pre-rendered In-game assest videos, I only need to mention Valve and their videos for TF2 and L4D. They use high quality models and textures, but all the rendering is in the Source Engine. They give you a good feel for what the game will look and play like.