Long time ago there was a blog post in the old ArenaNET blog about cutscenes and their evolution. Sadly that, along with countless of other amazing posts is no nowhere to be seen. Including the race weeks and all those wonderful short stories.
Looking at it year after launch that is a kitten shame in my opinion, anyways I digress. I really wanted to talk about the evolution of story cinematics with the living story.
I really like the in-engine and in-world story telling that they are doing now, however, at the same time it is strikingly obvious that the tech hasn’t quite kept up with things. I recently played some early personal story stuff and after comparing that to Queens Jubilee in particular (Scarlets jarring speech) I almost wish that they would use the old conversation tech or some combination of these two approaches for two very big reasons.
One, the high detail models and facial expressions are just so much more pleasant to look at than the closeup of the in-game model. Yes with in-engine shots they can do lot of cinematic panning and lot of auxiliary things to set the scene, but if it looks dreadful in comparison I really would rather have the simpler scenes where the tech is more advanced, until they can come up with something to improve the quality of their in-game style of cutscenes. I don’t usually advocate pre-rendered scenes but in this case even having parts of the scene pre-rendered and recorded in higher detail would be better than what we have now, particularly when it comes to closeups. If that is all they can manage.
The second reason is the fact that the in-engine scenes have the limitation that our player characters can never say anything at all, while things are actually happening… even when it would make sense. This further enhances the feeling that we are just tag alongs with no significance whatsoever.
I am really happy that they started to use the concept art scenes like the ones after character creation or at the start of Ascalon Catacombs more with the more recent updates. The noir scene was really well done like was Farens leap of faith as well. These won’t have the problem of not being able to have our characters talk either and they also use high detail models as well. While they lack full motion I still think these are the best type of cutscenes in GW2 hands down. Too bad they obviously take more to make since each art piece has to be drawn by an artist individually, which is why we haven’t seen that many of them. Things like, explosions would look way better if done through concept art than in engine for example, Scarlet’s bombing of DR didn’t feel grand at all (same can be said about Ellen blowing up the ship).
TL;DR: The story telling has improved as the result of the increase of in-game scenes, but at the same time the graphical fidelity, aesthetic and the general level of awesomeness has significantly decreased and our characters have been gagged. Personally I would rather have higher detail scenes and less in-engine shots if the grand scope of events is watered down by technical limitations. With old style at least I could let my imagination run its course now I can not instead things that should feel impactful don’t because the tech can’t deliver right now.