I’ve found the same thing about most big-budget PC games I’ve played in recent years, from Resident Evil 2 to Far Cry 5. The days of cutscenes wowing us are at an endĪnthem is far from alone in this. It’s incredibly jarring to see crisp 1440p gameplay with pristine effects, and then feel like you’ve been dragged back to watch a Starship Troopers trailer from Apple’s QuickTime website in 2003. But they’re delivered as compressed, low-resolution video files that run at a slower frame rate.

Anthem’s cutscenes are meant to be epic, cinematic moments that depict events beyond the scope of the game’s regular action. I can’t say enough good things about this game’s graphics.īut when there’s a break for a story beat, things look notably worse. The narrative-driven segments in the hub world, meanwhile, feature beautifully drawn characters with excellent acting and facial animation. It might be the most technically advanced game ever to grace my PC’s monitor, with amazing lighting and motion effects that convincingly simulate the experience of piloting an Iron Man suit through the world of Avatar. When I’m actually playing Anthem, it looks incredible. That's the good stuff /KigiBmNlFE- andrew webster February 18, 2019 What I’m saying is that Anthem’s cutscenes look really bad.

Last week, Final Fantasy VIII celebrated its 20th anniversary, while IX was re-released for the Nintendo Switch and Xbox One - I know, VIII got robbed - and the subject happened to be on my mind this week as I played through one of 2019’s newest, highest-budget, most visually stunning games. The canonical example of this is Square Enix’s Final Fantasy games for the original PlayStation. The upshot of this was that big-budget games often didn’t look great while you were playing them, but every now and then, you’d be treated to a lavishly rendered cutscene that would not only blow you away with its detail and artistry, but provide crucial context for what the regular graphics were actually meant to look like. I started playing video games around the time when they were transitioning to 3D and making use of CDs, which meant that the capacity to store beautiful visuals far outstripped the hardware’s ability to render them in real time.

Skip cutscenes borderlands 2