Why do video game cutscenes look better than the actual game?
In: Engineering
Pre-rendered cut scenes are just movies being played back, and have likely been rendered slower than real-time by more powerful systems than what players are playing the game on. So they can use better quality assets/techniques/etc. to do that render that wouldn’t be feasible for real-time performance.
But even if the cut scene is rendered in real-time, there’s often going to be opportunity to use higher quality assets than the gameplay assets, because during the cutscene the developer has full control of the camera and the viewpoint.
Imagine a FPS level where you’re in a warehouse. While the player is controlling the game, they can turn around and look in pretty much any direction whenever they want, they can move around the level in arbitrary ways, and one of the results of this is that the game needs to be ready to render almost every part of the level at a moments notice. Depending on the gameplay, the game might have to be tracking the actions of various NPCs in the level, even if they player can’t see them, and so on. There’s just a bunch of stuff the game is keeping track of in case it needs it quickly due to player actions.
But with a cut scene, the developer knows exactly what the player is going to be seeing, and so can cut out anything extra. If the cutscene takes place near one end of the warehouse and only looks at that end wall, you might be able to cut out 80% of the warehouse that you’d normally have to have loaded because you don’t have to worry about the camera turning around. You don’t have to track enemies/NPCs etc in the background because they’re not relevant to the cut scene. And maybe with this extra memory you’ve now freed up, you can use higher quality models for the player character and some of the props that are important to the cut scene.
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