Pretty much every game from the PS1 Era. Think back to how FF7 cut scenes looked and the mega Chunky game play.
Ugh, I always hated how people praised it for its graphics when they just meant the cut scenes.
Final Fantasy 8
I remember how absolutely jaw dropping FF8’s cutscenes were at the time. I had never heard of Final Fantasy, saw some stills in magazines and thought “God damn, this game looks incredible!” Then I saw my friend actually playing it and as soon as the first cutscene ended it was like “Oh… OK. This is fine I guess.”
Does the Final Fantasy 7 also suffered from the same issue since it also on Playstation and it was released much earlier than 8?
Back4Blood
On a similar vein, Arkham Knight (and in some cases Arkham City) looked worse in cutscenes if you maxed out the graphics settings. Obviously not if you ran it on a potato, but the games are somewhat well optimized these days*.
*At launch, Arkham Knight was an unoptimized, buggy mess. It has since gotten much better.
Wait you mean that the game’s gameplay looks better than the actual cutscenes in the game?
But how? Does the game use FMV for the cutscenes or something?
The cutscenes were rendered using certain graphics settings that you could exceed if you maxed out your own settings. Plus, because it was a pre-rendered video, there must have been some compression or something, as you could just tell when you’re in a cutscene-- it was grainier and there was a smidge of artifacting. Don’t quote me on this, but I believe the cutscenes were rendered at, like, 1080p, and if you were playing at 4K it would be a very noticeable downgrade. (Note that I did not and still do not have a 4K monitor)
Although thinking about it again, I do vividly remember some in-game-engine cutscenes in Arkham Knight. I’ll have to replay that game again sometime to jog my memory.
