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.

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.

JP

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.

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

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.

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.