The epidemic of low quality prerendered cutscenes (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, September 24, 2015, 14:38 (3444 days ago)

This bugs the shit out of me. Destiny is a great game, that renders sharply in 1080p on the PS4, and then when we get a prerendered cinematic, it's noticeably less sharp with compression blocks and banding. Why aren't we rendering everything in engine?! Why, if we aren't, are we then encoding our video so it looks like crap? I didn't buy an HDTV to look at a muddy mess.

This is a huge problem with downloadable games, and it's obvious why. File size. You look at a game like FFXIII with gorgeous, sharp prerendered cutscenes, which are playing off the bluray disc and then compare it to a game on PC, or a downloadable game where the file size is crunched. The difference is staggering. If I didn't know any better, I'd also say Destiny is playing videos with bink or some other crappy codec instead of a high profile h.264.

All of this could have been solved by going in engine! You don't have to store videos saving file size, and it looks as good as the console can put out. It also maintains a strong visual cohesion to the entire game. It worked wonderfully in the original release, with only the opening cutscene being prerenedered, and it looking a lot better from what I recall.

This is also the reason we hardly ever see our guardian!