Holy shit.
I now look forward to Crossfire X. Wow.
Then again, eye porn seems to be the major gaming industry trick today. it diverts attention from shitty gameplay mechanics. I could name a bunch of examples. It sucks really.
GIMME THE RAY TRACING BRO! 
It’s how Platige keep paying those bills…
https://www.platige.com/project/game-cinematics/crossfire-hd/
But my view is more that “This capability of Glacier is being underused.”
I am pretty certain by now… playing HITMAN 3… the engine is capable, it’s just not being made to do it.
As long as they deliver on good gameplay I’ll be happy lol.
And I am. This is more about “Well while we’re ahead on the gameplay, don’t forget the pretty pictures department.”
To wit, if there was a downloadable Cinematics Editor for Glacier, kind of like Cinebox for CryEngine… I’d be curious to play around it and see what can be done.
A lot of this seems to be forgetting it’s a game, not a movie.
That guy also made what was, without a doubt, the most jarring sequence that reminded me I was not only definitely in a video game but definitely in a video game he wanted to be a movie instead.
This gets worse in other parts of his game because MGSV is 90% a game where you observe, plan and then engage on your own terms (then improvise when you fuck things up) but on any level that has Hideo Kojima listed as the level writer, you will have a lot of that overruled to try to force cinematic moments and effects on you.
The reason everyone is showing off Kojima’s movies is because he wants to make movies, and will begrudgingly let the player participate sometimes. Also he might have “limited tech” but he also had literal total creative control over everything including being able to make them re-do parts of the game to fit his movie.
Hitman 3 limits itself to a few very rare (and later by default skipped) instances because it’s trying to avoid being a movie and being more about the player getting involved.
He also spent a frankly obscene amount of money on his cinematic assets. So yes, you should say “budgets” because it costs a lot to build all the assets and do all the custom mocap etc. He also spent a fortune on hi-res actor models, complex rigging and mocap because he wanted to hand out with the actorshe uses them as his big marketing point in his trailers etc. The biggest factor in the quality of cinematics has generally been budgets for the past… ten years or so now.
This is likely a decision made due to the cinematic content being such a tiny part of the game, if put too much variation in camera angles it will both confuse the viewer (like when you get poorly editing shots with cris-crossing action and push them out of the “in a game mode” (see the video I linked).
You may also notice that it’s used actively to signal when things are different or off balance.
In A Necessary Evil the camera shifts from a high angle, dropping in from above to feel as though we were entering another mission and then showing Diana as though she’s the target, then when we have the reveal that she’s definitely turned on 47 the camera shifts to a low angle. It’s unfamiliar, its unsettling, it’s now how we’re used to seeing these kind of dramatic moments with people having guns out. It does that because the high angle is a standard in the game and the cinematics.
You can see it in The Man Behind the Curtain and the mission briefing for End of an Era, the low camera angle gets used to signal when 47 is not in control, when you are not in control. When Diana gets a surprise call from The Constant, it’s a low angel. When 47 plots to destroy the ICA with Olivia, he’s shot from low angles with a few shot-reverse-shot to keep it interesting.
Specifically they wanted to crack the “in-game cinematics that look like an animated horror movie, with a sharp transition straight into first person to put you in the shoes of a survivor” effect. It wasn’t a “quality” issue, it was a particular effect they wanted and they had very particular intentions for it.
Hitman 3’s cinematics are supposed to essentially be a continuation of the game feel, not like it’s setting you up to feel like you’re watching a movie and then in the movie. The story telling takes place through the gameplay, and you observe 47 doing it - mimicking this observation in the cut scenes assists with that.
You need the right tools for the right job, without consideration of that and the relative resources available - any discussion is not “critique” but daydreaming.
That’s what happens when more of the budget is spent in cinematics.
Part of being a good director is working with what you’ve got in terms of assets and budgets, and given that Mike Fisher is normally an editor for movies - it seems likely part of the reason they selected him from the candidates is he was willing to work with whatever he could get - rather than just keep blowing out the budget because “my artistic vision” Kojima style.
So with all that - I think the cinematics are pretty good and about what you’d expect. Most of the issues like Grey’s face etc come from the fact that models had to be rendered to be viewed primarily from the third person and had to be a little cartoony so as to take the edge off some of the violence and the gaps between how the game makes things work and how reality would work.
It could certainly have been better with a bigger budget and more time and resources allocated, but I’m quite impressed with what the director managed based with what he had.
Perhaps it would be better to spend more time examining the cinematics in the game, rather than comparing them to other games?
Here is the job advert for a Lead Cinematic Animator on Project 007…
https://career.ioi.dk/ad/lead-cinematic-animator/scrk51
These are some of the most interesting points it contains:
- Focus on character performance, and cinematics that reflect the personality of the character, and show their motivation, emotions, and fully immerse the player into the game narrative.
- You will make sure that the animations can play well in a level and connect with the rest of the gameplay experience, making the transition between cinematic and gameplay moments feel seamless.
- Plan, prepare, and supervise motion capture shoots using our in-house motion capture studio.
- Create cutscenes and performances, emphasizing weight, timing & silhouette to create visually stunning cinematics for in-game integration.
- Work closely with directors, producers, artists, designers and programmers to set a standard of excellence for animation that will define the future of IOI’s titles.
It’s interesting to see talk of “visually stunning cinematics” with “seamless” transitions. Motion capture is mentioned as well - something which has not been used on Hitman since Hitman 2016. All of this certainly does point towards a new “standard of excellence” for cinematics in IOI games.
To me, it’s a style. It’s like if you said Minecraft looks behind in graphics.
I am not demanding enough to add something here but a general question.
Is it just me or do the scenes have a bad black level? It seems like IO tried to make it obvious there are black bars at the top and bottom by making sure they are more black than the darkest spot in the cutscenes.
That might be also because of the render engine itself as there are some pitch-black areas that are actually pitch-dark-grey.
My feedback is they really need to work on the camera angles to make sure the lighting affects 47’s model properly. I really thought he looked washed out during the Mendoza cutscenes.
Here’s how he looked in the level and how I wish he looked in the cutscenes.
i dunno, in the first screenshot he looks totally fine, because it’s in-game and it’s just how the lighting is. it’s not a pre-rendered cutscene so they cant exactly change the lighting in that scene
but definitely all of the pre-rendered cutscenes like the second screenshot are washed out. like @Urben said, they messed up the black-levels in the cutscenes
They are, in the end, what I expected.
But there is nothing wrong with aspiring for better.
To say this kind of cinematic result is somehow appropriate in some stylistic way is to sell the franchise short.
Also the reason I bring up MGSV is more about Fox Engine than about Kojima. It’s to say: “It was already possible to make this look and move better with lesser technology.” That is not supposed to be an insult. It means Glacier can do this already but it is not being made to do so.
Most if not all of HITMAN 3’s cinematics only involved 4 hero actor models. I think it’s reasonable for IOI to have boosted the rigs and animation for 4 actors don’t you think?
Also…Lucas Grey: “I don’t like executive decision makers.” - Who talks like this?!? 
“Camera too high Most of the Time” is also not really any higher point about player decisions or whatever. It’s a basic point.
The most common camera angles used in HITMAN 3 cinematics look like this:
In films they usually are shot like this:
Yes, the low camera is lazy… but it’s the EASY out. And if you know you have budget limits and all that… Every EASY out is the good way out.
Yes, I also realize now seeing the cinematics again in Mendoza that one of the issues is, in fact, the animation itself.
Mocap/performance capture can make this better, but the truth is good animation and mocap is not usually that different once filtered by the audience experience - You see the character performing as the end result of either.
I knew I had seen mocap in behind the scenes for H2016 and had always assumed those were IOI facilities. Not aware they had since lost them when they left SE.
Re5 cutscenes still look badass
I also think mendoza cutcenes are not that bad.
But The scenes in the woods where Lucas Grey dies,
It’s so dry that it’s really not tense at all right?
Motion capture is discussed in the excellent All Things Hitman interview with the main cast. If I’m not mistaken, at one point they mention that more mo-cap had been planned for H2 but got cancelled during development (i.e. after the split from Square Enix).
The better than expected sales, turning profitable after just one week, perhaps gives an indication that more money can be invested in development going forward. I certainly think this will be the case with Project 007, as the language in that job advert already seems to imply.
Indeed. The full list of 007 hires means IOI are indeed probably making the step to improve this area as well.
It is definitely a great thing when a developer is so good at gameplay that we have to start asking for other things instead. 
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.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001054/awards?ref_=nm_awd
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.
I’m glad you said it, coz I was gonna 
For a more blinding obvious example
This shot from Batman is almost identical framing to the H3 one
I doubt anyone would argue that films cinematography wasn’t ‘cinematic’ enough 
I am not saying these are simple. I am just saying what happened was lacking. If you think this level they are at is all fantastic already. Then ok.
You actually, absolutely are. You’re dismissing the complexity elements and the budget elements and just saying “yeah they could just fix it”. That’s not critique, that’s just asking to talk to the manager.
I think that actual critique involves talking about what is, what isn’t and talking about options and matters involved.
They use a camera angle a lot.
Instead what you’re providing is basically what I call the Tarantino Fallacy, the reasoning of people goes as such:
This ignores that every decision is film making is not a thing that is scored on points of good to bad, but rather one of many brush strokes in overall work. Many directors set themselves deliberate limitations to avoid choice paralysis or style inconsistency.
It depends on styles and what the director cares about.
In Hitman cutscenes, ultimately they’re mostly going to be about two people talking to each other about a thing - though they’ve gone to a lot of work to try to break that up and use opportunities for the briefings to be more creatively engaging.
David Fincher, and film makers like him, have the power in the productions - in this particular game the cinematics were a small, relatively low budget part of the production so interesting points of critique and discussion include (but are not limited to):
Because I can tell you - we all wish IO Interactive had a bigger cinematic budget, an unlimited one - but that wasn’t the case. We cannot change what has already happened.
