People Just Don’t Understand Target Videos!

Now, I don’t know if you read sites like Penny Arcade or 1UP, but there was a big stink about the Next Gen Madden video looking way worse than the original target video. This may come as some surprise to you because IGN reported the following: "But before you dismiss the commercial, the people at Tiburon say that some of the Madden team didn't want these visuals seen, not because they are setting the bar too high, but too low. Seriously, they say that these are the visuals they were shooting for originally, but that the team now feels that they will be easily surpassed.” 1UP said that they might just be using placeholder animations that they will replace by release. They don’t know much about games development because Tiburon has to be just fixing bugs now in order to launch with the 360. Minor animation tweaks is the best we’ll get.
So if all that’s the case, how do you rectify the two sides of the story? EA says they’ll do better than the target video, but the gameplay looks much worse! It’s simple really. The target video shows the quality of the pre-rendered cinematics (FMVs) in the game. Tiburon thinks they can play even better quality video than that on the Xbox 360, and they’re probably right! I’m sure you can do perceptibly lossless video compression on a video like that, even if the video is rendered at 720p resolution! That’s all target videos show. They are to give people an idea of what is to come for cinematics.