: Because they are different – for both casting and technical reasons. The
: first Halo Wars game, for all its glitteringly wondrous CG, contained
: characters that Blur essentially “made up.” They were effectively “hand
: drawn” amalgams of character, rigging and aesthetics. Those characters
: were created in 2008, using 2007 tech and they looked fantastic at the
: time. But since then, the industry has made geometric leaps forward in
: technique and technology and the trend, rightfully, has been towards
: proper facial and performance capture. The end result is much better
: immersion in the story and far more believable “people” because they are
: people – recordings of the performance rather than a simulation or cartoon
: of it.

: This, with all apologies to Grim, is just so much bullshit. Why is it
: "right" that the industry trend is toward cut-and-pasted faces
: in our cutscenes. That doesn't increase immersion. It's a tool that can be
: used competently or otherwise, just like every other storytelling device.
: "Cutter looks completely different because of better graphical
: technology" smacks of that one time when Frankie justified what 343i
: did to the Master Chief's armor by saying that Bungie would have designed
: it differently if they'd had the technology, which was patently false.

Well, you found the part that really rustles my jimmies and said why before I could. It is bullshit. Moreover, it does not look any better to me at all. The thing that really gets me though is: Where is the creativity? If you go this route all the time, creativity has no place in character design other than costuming and slight edits like aging someone up. Everything animated, be it hand-drawn or computer graphics, in a movie or in a game, is freer than live action, because it's not bound by the appearances of actors.
Taking the freedom of CG animation and constraining it to specific real people is missing the point so hard the point might as well be on fucking Mars.