Thinking about how absolutely buck wild Death Stranding was. Its not just a good game and fun to play, its an incredibly sophisticated piece of cinematic story telling.
There used to be a vast disconnect between the visuals of a games cutscenes and the visuals of the gameplay. This visual disconnect is most notorious and well known on the playstation, but this is still a detectable quality to this day. Usually, a prerendered cutscene is marked by some loading time. Theres usually some compression artifacts that are apparent in the actual movie as well. I complained about this in ffxiii. The video compression is a serious disservice especially when the models in the prerendered movies are have so much more detail. Although higher detailed models don't occur as frequently in modern games, its another disconnect from the gameplay visuals.
These arent necessarily bad. Part of why the playstation is so notorious is bc developers wanted to take advantage of the superior quality available to them through the disc drive. Devs can highlight specific story beats in their game by giving players a more interesting visual experience. A prerendered cutscene can show details that would otherwise be impossible to render/animate in game.
Now, the visuals for in engine vs prerenders have more or less converged. its become larely unacceptable for AAA games to have prerendered cutscenes. (Or, games are expected to prerender cutscenes that are generated in the same engine as in-game.) Some games include adapting to variables that are controlled by the player to render in cutscenes. All the problems that used to occur in prerendered cutscenes are largely absent. There is no disconnect because everything is visually consistent.
What I think is more interesting is the new set of problems devs must now contend with.
Theres no guarentee a cutscene will render correctly or the same for every player. Sometimes it seems like games are more prone to bugging out during a cutscene than in ordinary play. So some devs will avoid certain animations as a workaround to better ensure their cutscenes render correctly. See enough cutscenes and eventually you can see when and where devs and animators decided to play it safe.
One major tell is if characters touch each other. Or rather, if characters avoid touching each other. Its really easy for characters to not line up properly or for one model to accidentally clip into another model. Animating the feedback of a character grabbing or pushing or holding any object is already difficult enough when its not a soft body material like fabric or flesh. Its so easy to slip into uncanny valley when its not done right. Its just way safer to not have characters interact with physical touch.
All that said, the animation in Death Stranding is incredible. The combined digital scans and mocap of the actors in that game are so polished theres a lot of instances where you may as well be watching a live-action film. Kojima productions are clearly flexing whenever they have characters grab the protagonist, and then make it a point to talk about physical touch. Most/all of the cutscenes are rendered in-engine and it still manages that level of sophistication and thats 
I immediately followed up that experience with ffxv. Which looks pretty in its own right, but frankly the animation looks like dogshit by comparison. And i dont think its unfair to compare these two. Final fantasy is the flagship series of SquareEnix, a juggernaut in the game industry.
Characters in ffxv avoid touching each other to bypass the usual complications. But they also interact with each other physically from time to time, and ffxv fails to render those interactions with some regularity. Its common for character models not to line up properly. I caught characters warping into place only for that to still fail and not line up. It's clear the devs wanted to inlcude this vibe that these characters are comfortable with each other, but it exists in opposition to the limits of the technology.
I don't think its bad that some devs choose to avoid animating more complicated things in their game. I also don't think its bad when these interactions fail to render correctly. I dont expect every game to look like death stranding, nor do i want them to. I just think its fascinating to examine these things and how different games can approach the same problem with different outcomes and varrying levels of success.
