It's a real 1990s vs 2000s split isn't it? Between the games in each decade there's not much in it (the 90s look shite, the 2000s look amazing), but between decades it's night and day.

They still do some of the finest cinematics out there ol' Blizzard

*history *art

Adding video to channels (Art, History) - requested by ant.

I kinda remebered that the The Reign of Chaos intro was awesome.

They should have put a Starcraft cinematic in the mix too, since it shows kind of a midpoint in animation quality between Warcraft 2 and 3.

Pretty impressive how the *music has evolved too!

wow. i was so impressed by the warcraft 1 & 2 cinematics back then. now i see them and the only thing that comes to my mind is "WTF? Ugly?". We're all so spoiled.

Without the Starcraft and Diablo cinematics, you have really lost the gradual progression that their cinematics have shown over the years. This should've been about all of Blizzard's cinematics and not just Warcraft.

Agreed. What I was looking for was how much of the progression we've already surpassed in realtime rasterization, but with such a giant leap it's not informative.

We've safely surpassed the Warcraft 1 & 2 rendering, while we're almost at the level of the Warcraft 3 cinematics (which would have been unthinkable at the time).

The rest we're not even close; but we will be one day.

2 to 3 was a huge leap, but less change since then.

Warhammer intros > Warcraft intros

e.g. http://www.videosift.com/video/Warhammer-Mark-of-Chaos-Intro-Cinematic

I think it's important not only to notice the evolution in graphics in the warcraft videos, but the evolution in storytelling as well. The video from Wrath of the Lich King is vastly superior to the earlier Warcraft videos.

http://www.videosift.com/video/World-of-Warcraft-Wrath-of-the-Lich-King-Opening-Cinematic
http://www.videosift.com/video/World-of-Warcraft-Burning-Crusade-Introduction-Cutscene
http://www.videosift.com/video/World-of-Warcraft-Introduction
http://www.videosift.com/video/Warcraft-III-cinematics

I think the warhammer video you linked is sort of a mix of the first WoW video and the Wrath one. I think the warhammer universe is more awesome, but cinematically the Wrath video is superior. It's a close call, though.


>> ^southblvd:
Warhammer intros > Warcraft intros
e.g. http://www.videosift.com/video/Warhammer-Mark-of-Chaos-Intro-Cinematic

It's really hard for me to decide which vidya has the best cinematics in the world: Final Fantasy or Warcraft series. I'd say Final Fantasy since FF13 just came out and the cinematics are mindblowing and a large amount at that, but then again give Blizzard a chance and they will produce something awesome!

Also, to those who say - wow, there is not such a big leap after W3. Well, obviously, because W3 cinematics pretty much achieved perfection. Only minor tweaks from there on, since almost everything looks perfectly.

Pretty much the same thing with Final Fantasy. A huge leap from FF7 to FF8, but then not that big difference starting from FFX-FF13.

Now it's not a matter of computer power, it's just a matter of manpower to produce a perfectly believable movie which would be 100% realistic!

Aye that warhammer intro is really good, as for this comparison video, it really should have had diablo video as well, like when Baal comes to the Barbarian city gates for example - also i wish they put in the part from WC3 that had Archimonde destroying Dalaran.

It doesn't help that this video is far lower quality than the cinematics in those later games, which says something in itself. The difference would be even more impressive without the compression and low resolution.

Should of included all the flagshit blizzard games, starcraft would of plugged in some of the "leaps" of advancement

>> ^garmachi:
Pretty impressive how the music has evolved too!
I can still remember spending 3hrs trying to get my soundblaster's midi output to work properly for WCI/II, the tones were always off by just a little bit. But there was something special about the sound of midisynth that gave a unique sound to games from that era.

I'll never miss having to manually mess around with autoexec.bat and config.sys files to load drivers and set paths, but there's something from that era in the way of music that's missing.

Warcraft games > warhammer games