Well I remember that there was an interesting discussion over this before so i decided to create a topic where we could discuss the advantages/disadvantages to having High Quality cutscenes

I have also made a little youtube video for the Poll:
Video Link!!

Question:
Do you preferre High Quality Cutscene Videos or low quality cutscene videos?

Choices:
High Quality
low quality

 

When I say I prefer low quality cutscenes, I want them to use in-game graphics rather than look 10 times better than the game ever does; keep the visual style consistent with our main experience, the game. Cutscenes help tell a story, but the time PLAYING the game is the reason I'm a gamer. Otherwise, I'll just watch a movie.

(I'm one of those gamers who almost always skips cutscenes the second play through).

I'm not really going to vote!
I would much prefer High Quality FMV's.

But in reality I think they should be low quality on the xbox360 and high quality on the ps3 since there is a lot more space when using blu-ray technology.

It's kind of like 9.6gig vs. 52gig!
If dual layer blu-ray wasn't so expensive.
So reflections should have about 24gig to play around with on the ps3's single layer blu-ray disk!

They could probably have all the fmv's in 1080p.
On the xbox they'll probably have to stick to 720i.

If anyones interested I can go into more detail about what P (Progressive) and I (Interlaced) stand for.

Neither, in-game quality. We all have seen super quality technical demos since PSX, they aren't that impressive afterall.

Sure Driver cutscenes looked great but storywise it wasn't perfect, Halo was much more impressive. Now consoles have much more power, even Driver3 looked fine, atleast everything static like sky, nightlights and tarmac did. People, buildings and small objects were the biggest problems.

New game could have graphics like Oblivion, think about that. Oblivion is just one big cut-scene.


Every day Driver4 is postponed in game scenes become better and better choice.

quote:

Originally posted by smiler_16:
Well I remember that there was an interesting discussion over this before so i decided to create a topic where we could discuss the advantages/disadvantages to having High Quality cutscenes

I have also made a little youtube video for the Poll:
Video Link!!

Why is it that you referred to me that I was that only one to say that CGI cut scenes (pre-rendered cut scenes, or those high quality cut scenes that you call them) should be left out of the next Driver game? In reality, I'm sure that there are a lot of people that would think one way or the other. It's not as if I'm the only person in the world to have this opinion. That was very ridiculous of you to think so. And I did see the video, which didn't impress me at all since the CGI sequences have barely any good voice-acting and the storyline is just terrible, so it doesn't matter either way.

quote:

Originally posted by kalle90:
Neither, in-game quality. We all have seen super quality technical demos since PSX, they aren't that impressive afterall.

Sure Driver cutscenes looked great but storywise it wasn't perfect, Halo was much more impressive. Now consoles have much more power, even Driver3 looked fine, atleast everything static like sky, nightlights and tarmac did. People, buildings and small objects were the biggest problems.

New game could have graphics like Oblivion, think about that. Oblivion is just one big cut-scene.


Every day Driver4 is postponed in game scenes become better and better choice.

Yes, that's true, kalle90. Ubisoft Reflections can leave it without any cut scenes too. However, it would be a much more difficult task to make it this possible, simply because unlike Oblivion, it's a more linear game, so that would further complicate a lot of things. It's possible, but that can end up with some good things being sacrificed.

I'd say that the game's graphics should be done in one style only because, just as J_Frumpleberg, or someone else pointed out earlier, having cut scenes look different than the in-game graphics is like having two completely different worlds. I would rather see the cut scenes look in-game and not pre-rendered. If a developer wants a game to look pre-rendered, they'd might as well go ahead and make a movie out of the game because they're not letting players feel very immersed in the video game experience when pre-rendered/high quality cut scenes come into play.

Besides, with the graphic capabilities of the PS3 and Xbox 360, graphics can display many realistic textures, such that there isn't any further need to try to make cut scenes look apart from the actual game's graphics and have them be real-life looking, whereas the game's will still be far apart from looking like reality. Even some Xbox games had graphics that really wouldn't have needed pre-rendered/high quality cut scenes at all because the graphics engines on which they were built had more of a realistic look than you could ever possibly imagine. Doom 3 had some very impressive graphics while The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay's graphics (running on the Xbox and the PC), in terms of photorealism, can be considered the best looking in all of the 6th generation--the time of the PS2, Xbox, GC, and GBA.

Take a look at the graphical capabilities of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay right here (running on the StarBreeze Engine):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiqWyzkfrc0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S-3nHpqnZU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVsL1GQhzmU

If you compare its graphics to many Xbox 360 and PS3 titles, they look more impressive than many early made titles or just more impressive than the games that don't aim too high for graphical capabilities.

A remake of this game is coming out sometime this year, or next year, made by Tigon Studios (a studio formed by Vin Diesel), and with the critical praise as well as the fans' praise on how well the first game went, this remake is going to blow the original one out of the waters, especially since it's going to have multiplayer components.

Here's a video of what the remake will be like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFH4rQz6dGk

They should simply build the game on the same graphics engine used to make the 2000s cutscenes in D:PL for BOTH gameplay and cutscene graphics. Those graphics look VERY lifelike! It looks like watching a new high-def movie! And if they were to do it this way, it would look WAY better than GTA IV's graphics in both cutscenes and gameplay.

I think we would have to see the in game graphics before we could decide how the cutscenes look

Shelby-GT-500: If we were going to see the graphics of the next Driver game, through screenshots or through a video, that would confirm that the staff at Ubisoft Reflections has already decided on how the cut scenes should be. It doesn't make sense what you're trying to say.

Lets just receive in-game graphics with awesome textures, possibly powered by the Unreal 3 Engine, and that would make it useless to have any CGI graphics/movie graphics for the cut scenes. Two worlds in the graphics for a game may seperate the experience from the player, making the game feel not as immersive/interactive as we'd hope for, so I don't want to see any CGI sequences at all. Also, this aspect was so depended on in Driv3r that it costed the gameplay any good quality, which is why the game received poor reviews and lots of criticism. Ubisoft Reflections had spent too much money on these high quality graphics that it couldn't make the game's gameplay any good in comparison to the cut scenes. DPL felt that way as well, despite the fact that Ubisoft Reflections spent more work and effort in trying to improve it over D3. This developer relies too much on graphics that are still far away from reality and I don't want us to be fooled into having high hopes of graphics on the PS3 and/or Xbox 360 that look as good as the CGI in movies. As AMD's website made clear (AMD, like NVidia, is a company that makes powerful graphics cards for the PC), we won't see CGI as good as in today's movies until another 5-10 years (at least) or more.

And I'm kind of getting tired from seeing so many titles deciding to focus on photorealism. It was a good switch for the next Prince of Persia game to be cel-shaded since cel-shaded games are more likely to feel appealing in their artistic styles, even after several generations than a photorealistic game, which means that the game Okami will look better for many players than Gears of War in about one generation or two generations. GTA IV may still contain a kind of cartoon style for its graphics, but at least it didn't try too hard on the graphics, which would've made it compromise the rest of the game's quality. And if we ever do see a cel-shaded GTA game, I would think that its graphical quality will look more amazing than a Driver game's photorealistic graphics after a few years.

powering it by the unreal 3 engine is a rediculous Idea

If they want any engine then the Dunia engine is the only one (made by someone else) that would make sence, partly because its made by one of the UBI studios and partly because The graphics it can handle are brilliant

PS,

If you wanna witness the Dunia engines graphical capabillities then look out for some videos of the new FarCry 2!

Wouldn't it just be better to power a graphics engine such as Crytek's CryEngine 2? After all, it is what powers Crysis, and this is simply the best looking engine thus far. Also, Crytek is making it more possible to bring DirectX10 to the consoles, so I do think that the CryEngine 2 will eventually be powered by many console games in the future.

Edit: Another reason as to why, throughout the whole game, we should only see in-game graphics is because graphics engines for video games can be handled very well by artists that a high quality-looking movie could possibly be made out of them. The studio behind Heavenly Sword said that it could use its graphics engine used in its game to create a movie like Beowulf with only 20% of the cost that it took to make the movie. This proves that in-game graphics are far less expensive and that, for now, it wouldn't be a bad idea to just go ahead and use the graphics from a game engine, as opposed to technology from movies. If a developer so desperately wants CGI sequences (movie technology in graphics), then that developer could turn to making a movie. Hey, if you've learned to use the cut scenes so well in a video game, and if a game is very situated around that, then you have a good chance of making a movie. This is how the Final Fantasy movies came to be. And particularly the Devil May Cry franchise should be made into a movie franchise since there are more times containing cut scenes than any gameplay, and the cut scenes tend to impress a lot more.

Firstly
the team at Crytek are extremely poor at coding
I understand that Crysis is a fun game (I still play it) but because of this rubbish dirty coding, it causes the game to demand too much power for consoles to handle

secondly
UBI and Crytek didn't have the greatest experience together before (Hence the reason Crytek went to EA)

Shall I continue??

I suppose Dunia wouldn't be a bad engine to us at all. However, I still think that video game engines rather than CGI graphics (the kind of technology coming from movies) should be used for a video game's own cut scenes. You may be smart on modding and on graphics engines, but if that's the case, then why would a developer use technology from a movie, rather than its game engine, to create the cut scenes for its own game? Wouldn't that make the developer pay not only for the graphics engine being used in-game, but also for the technology behind the CGI sequences/cut scenes in the game? Personally, I feel that people need to look into other engines or artistic styles. For instance, the Scimitar engine (behind Prince of Persia and was developed for Assassin's Creed) looks like it would fit any kind of game aiming for an imaginative direction. Even realistic games can try to look cel-shaded. What is so wrong with that? I've given an opinion in the past that said we should have a Driver game which looks artistically brilliant. With cel-shaded graphics, say for maybe after this title or another title brings the Driver franchise to new heights, it wouldn't hurt to turn to another new direction, that being in terms of the art style.

Well I think we should wait to see this next Driver game before coming to any conclusions

BUT!! if they haven't made much difference then going a whole new way might be the only choice they have!.

This is a very interesting topic to speak about, I've always debated weather or not we should have Pre-rendered Cutscene.

Previously with PS1 the ingame cenimatics would look horrible if they used it, I guess that's why they used pre-rendered.

Driver 2, looked stunning for it's era.

Then the PS2 could handle so much more, you should see "The Getaway" there pre-rendered cutscenes looked amazing.

But with Driver: 3 they were able to use techniques that their engine nor the PS2 could handle thinks such as having millions of objects on the screen at once. A good example would be the intro scene.

In Driver: Parallel Lines, they used a lot more use of shiny anostropic like material and made a little use of raytraced reflectivity. (if I can remember correctly).

Now there are millions of better quality elements we see in the pre-rendered FMV's that we cannot possible seen when rendered in realtime by the console it'self.

1 minute of footage seen in DPL proably would have taken 30 computer 3 days to render.

That's a big difference compared to rendering in realtime just on one system.

A good example; I created a fairly good looking hosue in 3d max, added lots of fancy materials added a water fountain. Added photometric lighting, enabled final gathering (for realistic caculated lighting) and used raytraced (reflecting and refracting) water.

The scene looks pretty good but it takes one computer 2 days to render 100 frames at 30fps which is equilavant to about 3 seconds of video.


At the moment I'm creating a head, in 3d max. I create using lowpoly techniques and smooth it out (like subdividing the gemomertry) and then it looks more lifelike. (good thing it only takes 20seconds to render)

driver_madness. The reason why video games render in-game graphics slower than the CGI found in movies is because the video games industry has still not reached the power of the movies industry, either in the amount of pixels displayed at once, nor in the rate of speed which they are displayed, so this shouldn't seem surprising at all. Although video games' graphics don't work as well for cut scenes, it would save money by just using a video game engine, and, as a result, this would immerse players much better than the switch between in-game graphics and CGI from gameplay to cut scenes. Therefore, I think that in-game graphics should be considered for everything that is a part of the game. If games like MGS4, RE5, COD4, GTA IV, Gears of War, and many others can look very splendid without any CGI cut scenes, then I think that the same will be possible for a Driver game. There is no need to try to make the graphics so realistic that the game's overall quality deteriorates over time.

Pre-rendered cut scenes have particularly well suited the 5th generation (the time of the PS1, N64, Sega Saturn, Gameboy Color, and the 3DO), but starting with the 6th generation (PS2, Xbox, GC, GBA), the graphical capabilities actually began to look impressive, so many games without CGI wouldn't be fine at that point. And as textures are far more beautiful looking in this current generation, the 7th generation, I don't see why all the video game developers wouldn't just be able to use in-game graphics throughout, leaving out any CGI sequences, since many games are already beginning to look very impressive.

Well i'll post this development video link for the people who haven't seen it yet:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bJODOkwSdH4

I have to say, it looks as though they are developing in game footage for the cutscenes

Now if the graphics will look extra special in DrIVer (4) then I would be satisfied with in game/realtime cutscenes, but if it will look worse than GTAIV (or saints row 2) then I would be dissapointed

I really love the cutscenes on the last 2 Driver games (D3 and D:PL) and I dont want them to ruin that experience, where as if they have decent looking ingame graphics then i wouldn't be so bothered!

I just hope that they develop the new Driver to work on PC too!
Primarrilly because if it is going to have in game cutscenes then the features that the PC can handle will benefit the game massively!
Such as Anti Aliasing and antisrophic filtering, ect.

Don't you think that a game's overall quality is much more important than one aspect of a game? It's not fair to call a game bad, just for a lack quality in one aspect of the game. Besides, the previous Driver games had plenty of bug issues, so even with well polished graphics, this couldn't please the fans of the series.

Other than that, I'm sure that the next Driver game will feature graphics that are at least as good as GTA IV's. Ubisoft is a very good developer, and since it has bought this franchise, it must take really good care of it, which I think it will do a fine job on. Other than that, it's good to point out any flaws that were seen in the previous games, and I do think that game developers should try to make the overall game experience enough to immerse the players in their worlds, particularly with the in-game graphics.

Did I say that the whole game revolv es around 1 aspect?... NO!!!

But if you look at the topic name then you may understand why I/We are discussing this!!

Okay, fine. Then this leads me to a question for you: do you look at games and like them if their graphics look like those of closer to reality, or can you enjoy cartoon/anime-styled graphics too?

I can enjoy those types of games, BUT I buy the Driver games because its different

I play GTA, But I like Driver because its a different style of gameplay!!

EDIT**

I dont wanna buy games that are exactly the same as each other!