Here's what I don't get. This is a game about a starship stranded millions of light years from Earth, staffed by Marines and cyborgs in armor that wouldn't actually fit a human with realistic human proportions. They're fighting 10-foot-tall armored rhino-gorillas for possession of a giant metal space flower. Those hairy rhino-gorillas have an army of crab-monkeys with gas masks and a smattering of four-jawed crocodile-lizard-ape-things. Oh, yeah, and the humans have mechs.

Nothing I mentioned in that description calls for photorealistic faces. I would even go so far as to say that Halo needs to be stylized. I don't care if it's the product of aging technology, this still looks great:

It's distinctive! It's memorable! It doesn't look bad unless you define bad as "Not the product of cutting edge motion capture technology". Of course they don't look photorealistic. This is animation. These are cartoons. The point isn't be to slavishly imitate life. The point is to tell a story with tools unavailable to live action media. Characters should have their features exaggerated to fit their character.

Look at the original Captain Cutter. See how he looks like a human basset hound? That narrow face and those sunken cheeks and the hollow look in his eyes just scream "I've walked ten thousand miles of bad road and made it through sheer determination." That is half of the characterization Cutter ever received in the first game.

What's this guy's face say?

My guess? "Hello, my name is Alexei Stukov and I don't want to talk about Heart of the Swarm. Or Resurrection for that matter."

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.

If photorealistic faces really did lead to better immersion, then the Command and Conquer series must have the most realistic cutscenes of all. You can't get more photorealistic than live action.