Oh come on now. You couldnt provide me with an example. Even then with TW3 it suffers from stiff animations and an overall unpolished look and I absolutely would not consider it to be a game with good cutscenes at all.
The reason why Open World and CaC games have to make compromises is because devs don't have unlimited time or an unlimited budget and there's only so much the machine running the game can handle. That's why there will never be an Open World or CaC game that will have cutscenes with anywhere near the level of polish and splendor and fidelity and etc etc of a game with preset characters (and their looks) and preset stories. In my eyes Final Fantasy XV's presentation was beyond unacceptable for an offline main FF title. FFXIII's cutscenes are better in every way and that's sad, especially considering it was released 7 years prior.
If you really want things like being able to put cat ears on your character then you can't have super polished cutscenes a la Uncharted and FFXII and XIII. And I honestly cannot understand why some gamers want this in every damn game or why you'd want that stuff in a game with a serious story.
The two games with a CaC and/or customizable looks that has good cutscene direction are Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X. The compromise is that the characters are ugly as sin, entire game is in-game, and cutscenes don't have a polished look or feel. For Xenoblade Chronicles 2, however, cutscenes look a lot better and more polished. Characters also have far better animations. How is this the case? Well, for XC2, you have no CaC, and no costumes or accessories to change the look of your preset characters. That's why the cutscenes are much better.
Final Fantasy was known for its stellar, top-of-the line presentation, insane level of polish, and amazing cutscenes. Until XV. And I want XV to be the exception, not the new rule. FF shouldn't be a series that tries to replicate Western trends. They should stick to what made them popular in the first place.
Dude, I think we're using different definitions of CaC. I don't mean any customizable background story. If you read my posts again I've been only talking about purely cosmetic character customization. That creates no compromise in cutscene direction. It's the same story, cutscenes, just with a different-looking character. Please tell me how it would have impacted FFXII's cutscenes if you could change Vaan's hair and skin-color? The directing, the camera movement, everything is the same. As I said, I'm not talking about CGI scenes. Of course those would always have a discrapancy.
I disagree on TW3. The main story cutscenes were well-directed. Don't mix up sidequest cutscenes and dialog shots with the hand-crafted story scenes, that's not fair.
And what do you mean with this? Do you mean those in-engine pre-rendered cutscenes they used in Uncharted 1-3 and FFXIII?
Please provide me with a game that has a CaC with cutscenes that are anywhere near the level of quality of something like FFXII/XIII/Uncharted.
It's not possible. You cannot have a cutscene that had 4849292929393 possibilities in mind compete with a hand-crafted cutscene.
You know that Uncharted 4 already didn't use any of the in-engine pre-rendered cutscenes anymore, right? If you could change Nathan's clothes, hair, skin-color etc. nothing would be compromised direction-wise because it's all real-time in-game cutscenes.
Also about what you said about the Xenoblades:
The two games with a CaC and/or customizable looks that has good cutscene direction are Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles X. The compromise is that the characters are ugly as sin, entire game is in-game, and cutscenes don't have a polished look or feel. For Xenoblade Chronicles 2, however, cutscenes look a lot better and more polished. Characters also have far better animations. How is this the case? Well, for XC2, you have no CaC, and no costumes or accessories to change the look of your preset characters. That's why the cutscenes are much better.
How is XC2 not having CaC the reason for better cutscenes? Maybe it's just... better directed (different directors, more time and experience after making XCX)? Wasn't the CaC in XCX purely cosmetic anyway or did it have customizable stories? Was the character silent compared to XC2? If it was only cosmetic why would there be a compromise in cutscene direction? Besides, the characters in XC2 are even uglier than the already atrocious ones in XCX and I'm sure everybody would be happy if you could give the main character a different outfit, lol.