But engines don’t work like that, you don’t just put points into an engine and it gets better - you design it for a purpose and it supports that purpose.
The Frostbite engine is an amazing piece of technology but being extremely focused on generic shooting games meant that it wasn’t easy to work with on facial animations, and that led to janky cinematics in Mass Effect: Andromeda. They spent so much time fighting the engine and still not getting all the basics right they didn’t have time to refine and explore.
The Glacier Engine is not designed to create super realistic cutscenes and intense rigging, its designed to facilitate massive maps full of hundreds of AIs with varying scripts that allows for West World-esque narratives like this one:
It’s simply a matter of priorities.
Kojima wanted to be movie director and his games are essentially movies with interactive bits to try to get the player a little more invested. He is also used to having complete creative control, so his games take second place to his cinematics - so he can end up spending 80 million dollars and the game isn’t finished, but there are cinematics for levels that were never put into beta. That makes sense really because his fanbase are more heavily invested in his weird soap opera he made than in the gameplay.
IO Interactive needed to make Hitman have its unique appeal and that relies upon each of the levels being incredibly large, complicated, and showing a sophisticated interweaving of elements and opportunities for the player to interrupt and interfere. They cinematics had to take second place to ever aspect of the game design, so they hired a film maker who’d be flexible and make something that fitted it in.
No.
You keep making these arbitrary statements like “They could have made higher definition models” “they could have done more rigging” and “the camera angle is too high” like you’re some sort of world expert but you don’t really address any of the issues involved.
The cut scenes involve five hero characters (47, Lucas Grey, Diana Burnwood, Olivia Hall and The Constant) - three (47, Diana, The Constant) of these are characters that appear in the gameplay maps. There’d also be Diana’s parents and young Diana. During gameplay, 47 can be in a variety of clothes and they need to be reflected in the mini-cutscenes that take place.
So your options are to either make the mini-cinematics look weirdly different because they’re using the standard models, to have the mini-cinematics always use the default hero models for that map (in which case you get that Kojima shitshow I posted a video of) or you can have the department make a hero model for every outfit that is introduced into the game. That means every costume becomes much more expensive and you lose out on suit unlocks because you can no longer afford them.
It’s not a simple decision, it’s actually a complicated one even before you factor in that one of the mini cinematics is the tango which has dozens of models around it - and you still haven’t addressed the deliberate cartoonishness to provide the comforting distance from the violence and grim subject matter.
Saying these things are simple is a massive disservice both to IO Interactive and to the studios that do more intense cinematics because you’re essentially dismissing the work those studios do as easy. It is not.
This is utter gibberish. Films use a huge variety of angles, motion and techniques because cinematography and editing are artforms in their own rights.
You have to consider, who wins the scene:
Is shot-reverse-shot going to make this powerful?
According to you the Cohen Brothers are “lazy” filmmakers.
Not everything should be Bayhem, in fact handcuffing yourself to these kind of big cinematographic moments creates pacing problems and tonal inconsistency.
So far you’ve managed to say repeatedly that they “should be better” but you’re not actually providing any useful critique for it, you’re just saying “I like this movie better” Congratulations on having a preference?
Saying “I want things to be better and here’s a random unrelated reference of comparison” is not critique and its not interesting discussion, it’s just jerking off.
If you know enough about it to be critiquing it, you should be able to explain the elements and how they would function better on their own - not just refer to a random video and say “more like this” or say “needs more mocap”. (Remember Sean Bean didn’t do any mocap at all for his role in the Elusive Targets, they did all that rigging by observation).
I am quietly confident that MGM will insist they include lots of impressive cinematics in the 007 Project and will be more than happy to write them the check to make it happen, because it’s going to be a game of a property that is best known for its films - there’s going to be an expectation of it having film elements in it.
Nobody considers the Hitman movies to be the best part of the property.