Cutscenes in games have been around for years now, and are something that in most cases, really enhance the story. A lot of videos on youtube show all of the cutscenes taken out from a game to make a mini movie and some of these work really well on their own, showing just how much effort is put into the more cinematic side and story of a game.
Cutscenes are made in two different ways; pre-rendered, and real time. Real time is a cutscene that happens in game, using the console/platform's own graphics and processing power to render out frames as they are shown. This means that the cutscenes might not always look as good as they can, depending on the limitations of the platform and the rig in game.
Pre-rendered on the other hand is when video files are made outside of the game, which are then put into it and play with all of the frames already having been made. This often ups the quality of of the cutscene - they can use better renderers and aren't limited to the technology of the console. A downside of this is that if any characters etc are customiseable in the game, that won't be shown - only the default character will be.
A lot of games now, especially RPGs like to concentrate on customisation and making characters as personalised as possible, like Bioware's Mass Effect or Dragon Age games - this means that real time is a much better option for them. Games like Final Fantasy that prefer characters that rarely change instead have much higher quality cutscenes and don't have to worry about rendering in game, because any differences that you could actually make to a character will only be minor, or not visible at all.
That doesn't mean that cutscenes will work like this forever though - as technology for consoles improve much more, so does the quality of the cutscenes rendered in real time.
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