All high quality CGI scenes in Starcraft II combined are just 2 minutes longer than the two Star Wars The Old Republic trailers, and both of them easily match the CGI quality in SC2 while actually eclipsing them significantly in terms of sheer scope.
That is absolutely not true. Even the Blur guys would instantly agree that there's an order of magnitude difference between their work and Blizzards. For a start there's absolutely no mocap in SC2, everything is manually animated. Then there's the detail, the polish, the artistic values, it's worlds apart.
The entire intro movie of putting together Tychus and his armor is something that neither Blur nor we could really to do today, 3 years after it's been published. It's so complex even Blizzard was barely able to do it, and it took a studio like ILM to match it in Iron Man 1.
You must understand the difference between the approach of Blizzard and that of Blur or us.
We need to deliver 2-4 minutes of stuff in 3-5 months, so we spent years on developing tools and workflows to be able to work as fast as we can. We re-use anything we can (Blur in particular must have a huge model and texture library after 15 years and at least 70-80 projects), we cheat whenever we can, we always take the easy road.
Blizzard on the other hand spends time to get every tiny little detail completely perfect (within their aesthetics of course) and can afford to, having practically no budgetary limits. And it's not just the completely insane complexity of that armor which has more details then all the characters from the SW cinematics put together... Just look at the way the toes or the belly of Tychus moves in that movie, the way the gas freezes on top of the armor when the cables are pulled out, or just how his cigar lights up in the darkness. It's something we would love to add but have no time to do and it does make a difference too. I'm sure Blizzard's movies cost at least 10 times as much money to make per minute as the Blur ones.
I'm guessing it didn't take 5 years to make the trailers.
The intro took an entire year, although they weren't 100 people back then. They've replaced their entire animation and rendering pipeline from Max/Brazil to Maya/Renderman since then, hired a lot of movie VFX guys, and still it took them 3 years time to do the remaining 3 movies plus the Lich King movie and the Diablo 3 trailer.
Heck, there was more CGI stuff in Final Fantasy VII - Crisis Core, not to mention FFXIII.
More, but at a far inferior quality. Most of Square's stuff boils down to good mocap, interesting character and prop/environment design, but they don't do too complex things with them. FFXIII versus seems to be a bit different... but then again, we don't know how much money they sink into their CGI. It definitely costs more then Blur's stuff.
So my guess is that Blizzard should absolutely have the resources to produce a couple of movie scenes for 2 games, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
You are wrong, and it's based on more then a simple guess.
