You have this level that takes place on a mountain, and the devs wanted to have a spot where you could see the gloomy landscape below with more mountains silhouetted in the distance… except this was the PS2 so it’s just two jpegs, one for the sky so you can get some parallax and a curved panoramic one for the landscape. It still looks decent enough 
This era was interesting since you could have pretty detailed character models and environments but still had to use fake backdrops and other tricks for larger environments. Makes you feel like you’re on an old movie set
Lol I saw a stage in richard burns rally someone made where they used a very funny old-school method of doing reflections.
They made the “puddle” transparent and just literally mirrored the entire map on the underside of the one you drive on. So when you look at the puddle and see reflections, they aren’t reflections, just exact copies of the stuff around you upside down through the map. It looks quite good!
The opening tanker level in MGS2 famously did the same thing. I had the Substance bonus disc where you could view all the 3D models and levels in the game and IIRC you could take the camera under the floor and see the mirrored geometry just hanging around there
This was done quite a bit in older games and I love it. Pretty sure Max Payne 1 and 2 used it extensively.
That’s literally all of the PS1 Final Fantasies (and X, now that I think about it). Rendering is expensive.
This is different from games with entirely pre-rendered backgrounds where the entire game is just 3D models displayed on top of 2D images. Here you have a fully 3D game where they put up a fancy wallpaper a couple of meters away from the player and pretended it was an expansive vista
i remember my mind being blown when i was messing around in the Empire Earth map tool and noticed that the grain fields were just 2d models. blew my 11 year old mind
They maybe could have had something modeled out but it would take more effort than it’s worth to create and then optimize. You can do quite a lot if you constrain what the player can do and see. These days I think they have so many game engine tools that it wouldn’t be as time consuming to do that. Probably even have specific tools for the specific purpose of creating low-detail 3D background environments.
One of the ending scenes in Death Stranding popped into my head, the one where Die-Hardman is crying. His face is so insanely detailed that they clearly had to zoom in on it and have nothing in the background (it’s set in a very empty hallway). It was really cool but also bizarre because nothing else in the game looked that good. And of course it had way more impact than if they had just used the standard resolution animations and models used for the other cutscenes. That’s basically the inverse of what your clip shows.
I also love your clip at the end where it cuts to the other character looking like they’re repeatedly stabbing themself with a sound effect.
Also agree about the movie set thing. Even new video games still feel like that. Even more so than movies.
They maybe could have had something modeled out but it would take more effort than it’s worth to create and then optimize. You can do quite a lot if you constrain what the player can do and see. These days I think they have so many game engine tools that it wouldn’t be as time consuming to do that. Probably even have specific tools for the specific purpose of creating low-detail 3D background environments.
I guess they would have had real constraints on how many polygons they could have had on the screen on the PS2
I also love your clip at the end where it cuts to the other character looking like they’re repeatedly stabbing themself with a sound effect.
He’s supposed to be impatiently bouncing his giant sword on his shoulder while idle
I love stuff like this. One of my favorites is how the did a lot of the video calls in HL2. They literally just had a “set” with the character models elsewhere, with a virtual camera pointed at them as the scene played out.
I love skyboxes in Source Engine games, they’re just a miniature floating in a void some distance away from the actual map with tiny low-detail buildings straight from a kaiju film
