The epidemic of low quality prerendered cutscenes (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, September 24, 2015, 16:14 (3587 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Watched the opening cinematic again. It's a bit soft and noisy, but I wasn't noticing much obvious blocking and banding. What would you say are the worst problem spots?

Why aren't we rendering everything in engine?!

1-So that we can have extremely expressive and plausible character animations, extraordinarily high levels of detail, and high-order supersampling.
2-So that cutscenes can play without significant load times and without setting aside memory for "cutscene areas" (which would probably get awkward in Destiny, with its unified approach to handle multi-purpose areas).

#2 would be partially addressed by something I wondered about during year 1, compromise asset quality a bit (and Tower asset quality a lot) to keep the Tower in memory 100% of the time on PS4 and XB1, eliminating Tower load times and allowing brief/instant loading when going from the Tower back to your previous environment. Seemed like it would be a cool feature for eighth-gen's much larger RAM pools. But that has its own issues, especially now that the Tower isn't the only hub (and with the matchmaking who knows how much time it would actually save).