Alright, I'll adress each of your points one by one:
About the costs:
You're right, I'm not a dev. I dont need to be one either to tell you, because the tools are where they are today, you can achieve things today that were more expensive and difficult to achieve before.
Hence my FFVII exemple: Rendering that CGI quality back then required a LOT MORE work, money and compute power than you would need today. In fact, FFVII CGI today would look like a joke that most people would be able to achieve. That's because tools have matured.
I didn't mean that, in general, making cutscenes today is cheaper than it used to be. I meant that, hence my exemple, that doing cutscenes of the fidelity and level of Shenmue II, a game released 20 years ago, is far easier today than it was 20 years ago.
Do I need to be a dev to say that ? Aren't there enough games out there that speaks volume about that and that clearly dont have the budget Shenmue II had ? Is it really that crazy to claim that tools today allows you to do things possible before for cheaper and faster ?
As for Cutscene direction not being only a matter of budget :
Tell me again what's crazy here ? I didn't say "It's not a budget issue if you dont have good cutscenes". I said it's not SOLELY about budget. Other factors come into place. The direction for instance. The choice you make for camera placement and such.
As for your last point about "Who the hell asked me".
Well, unfortunately, the person I replied to decided to take ME as an exemple. Claiming that MY expectations were out of proportions on the matter of cutscenes for instance.
So yeah, hence why I adressed MY expectations since it's a point that user raised.
As for the rest of your accusations, me being arrogant, mean, awful and what not, I'm just adopting the tone of the person I reply to. If someone is civil with me, I'm civil with them. If someone isn't, I try to remain civil as I did before. If someone is talking me down, I talk them down too.
If you felt hurt by my posts or my opinions, I'm sorry, that wasn't the intention here. Debates can get heated but I feel like I did my best to remain civil. I dont think I talked down on someone or insulted anyone. In fact I think I did a fairly good job to not reply with insults to insults adressed to me.
For instance, your very own post here.
Now, if you wish, you can warn me or ban me. I wont stop having my opinions on those matters though. And I feel like it's the interest of discussions. Discussing the core matters. If you disagree with my point about cutscene direction, I'm willing to hear your thoughts on the matter and if possible, that you demonstrate with exemples why and how you think it's great.
Because yeah, so far, the complaints I'm getting is that I tried to back up my claims with exemples.
The fact that creating cutscenes is cheaper now is irrelevant. Obviously, game development in general is cheaper now. Otherwise, we wouldn't even have been able to get the game that we got on $12 million budget with a team of "close to 50 people."
We're talking about direction. No matter how cheap it is to create cutscenes, they do not direct themselves! It takes people with time, resources, and talent. By your own admission, Ys Net was a team of less than 50 people. The team did not even exist when the Kickstarter began. Yu Suzuki had to spend time and money from the Kickstarter just to hire people and build a team. Then, those "close to 50 people" had to create literally everything that's in the game, including the cutscenes.
If you can't understand why it was extremely unlikely that the cutscene direction under these circumstances would probably not be quite as good as it was for a game that basically had unlimited budget and the best people from Sega's prime working on it, then I don't really know what else to say.
Budget isn't the main explanation of everything and having the cutscene direction of II wouldn't make III a AAA game. I didn't ask for the cutscene quality of RDR2 or even any AAA game in the market. Just the one of a 20 years old game.
Okay, I find this really funny. Now you're trying to act like the cutscenes in the old games were nothing special and of a quality that is easy to achieve. "I'm not asking for AAA quality, just that of a lousy 20 year old game!" But in other threads, you were acting like the cutscene direction in Shenmue II was the greatest thing ever.
Aren't there enough games out there that speaks volume about that and that clearly dont have the budget Shenmue II had ?
I don't know, are there? What games today have a $12 million budget and were developed by a team of under 50 people that have cutscenes as epic and expertly done as Shenmue II's? Especially ones that also have as much varied content as Shenmue III does?
Budget may not be "the main explanation of everything," but you seem to think that it doesn't explain anything and that Ys Net should have been able to achieve exactly what Sega did 20 years ago. That's just not how it works. Yes, developing a game like Shenmue is cheaper now than it was then. That's the only reason Shenmue III even came as close to the previous games as it did!
Maybe you should try crowdfunding a game and having it include beautiful open worlds, countless NPCs, a huge script (that gets recorded in two different languages), a combat system built from scratch, many different mini-games, a fully interconnected economy system, and everything else that's in Shenmue III. I'm sure that your team of close to 50 will achieve cutscenes exactly as good as Shenmue II's, because that's sooooooo cheap and easy these days.
I wouldn't say they're bad per se, but I agree that they're a far cry from what we got from the series before from both a storytelling (which mostly falls on the lack of story) as well as a music/editing perspective. The direction of the action oriented cutscenes was pretty good but imo anything involving exposition or dialogue was pretty flat and uninteresting. But, I mean, cutscenes are a pretty important thing to get right in a game like Shenmue and S3 is very uneven (that ending cutscene, yeesh...).
UE4's Sequencer is actually really great and user friendly as long as you have the proper assets, especially animations. And we know the S3 team had several of the animation assets since many of the fighting animations are unchanged since the 2017 teaser trailer.
I can provide insight into how it usually goes (which is basically the same as a movie: storyboard> rough cut> polish) but I can't provide insight into how it worked on S3, like how/when/why the location of fighting Mr. Muscles changed. But no, cutscenes aren't hard to implement, the "hard" part (and the reason most indie games don't use them) is getting the assets; if you have the locations, character models, dialogue, story beats, and animations then you're like 90% of the way there. Just plan out your cameras, timing, and lighting (which is largely derived from the location) and you're good.
For reference:
This is two character models standing pretty still around a tree. All these assets (minus the flashback) exist in S3; it would've been very easy for them to make this cutscene in UE4.
What's hard is making this moment. When I first saw this cutscene in S2 it felt like the biggest thing that ever happened and all it was was the name of a tree. But the combination of the pacing, the story, the characters, and the quality of the cutscene really made the moment stick. S3 lacks moments like this, not necessarily cutscenes, and that's a fair criticism.
Did you know that S3 confirms that there are multiple Shenmue trees? You know how it does it? In a journal entry...
This I can mostly agree with. The best directed cutscenes were the action oriented ones and none of exposition-type cutscenes were as epic as the Shenmue tree one, but I'm not sure there were any moments of exposition in the game that really warranted it. I don't know what your problem with the ending cutscene is though (at least as far as direction and cinematography goes).
