Sony: Most GOWIII cutscenes won’t be pre-rendered

When we found out that God of War III’s cutscenes wouldn’t contain any CG trickery, we still questioned whether the in-engine scenes would be pre-recorded and played back as videos (ie. pre-rendered.) When we further discovered that God of War III would be on a dual-layer Blu-ray, we felt that we had further evidence to point towards the huge amount of disc space required for FMVs, but now Sony Santa Monica has corrected us.

Bruno Velazquez of Sony Santa Monica originally revealed that the game would not feature CG cutscenes, and has today responded to the question as to whether they would still play as pre-rendered videos:

“I will make this clear, the E3 demo does not have any cutscenes that play as videos, those are all 100 percent real-time cinematics, including the opening (Kratos, Helios, grunts running towards the screen) to the end (Kratos diving towards the Titan),” Velazquex writes on his blog.

“When I mentioned that GOW3 has no CG, I was referring to the fact that we do not have pre-renderd scenes that were created outside of the game engine, like GOW 1 and 2. In GOW3 all the cutscenes are created using our in-game engine, however some scenes were just to epic to run real time and thus are recorded videos. This is not the case for the majority of the cutscenes in the game which are mostly running real time. This way you can enjoy the bonus costumes for most of the cutscenes in the game, including those found in the E3 demo!”

That is excellent news for those who were all ready to sport their pre-order costumes. Velazquez adds for those who have a soft spot for high-end CGI:

“I hope you guys won’t miss the CG, I know I don’t miss it. The current cutscenes make the game feel more unified and flows from story to action better IMO.”

In Sony Santa Monica we trust.

Readers Comments (38)

  1. WE already know that silly Sony

  2. No we didn’t =)

  3. Cool. Even if it had pre rendered videos all along, I wouldn’t care (As is the case with almost everyone). Knowing that pretty much everything is real time just makes it better.

  4. its all good, no matter what this game will be awesome, can i say “game of the century yet”?

  5. Yes we did .

  6. @Blinky

    No, nobody knew except for the development team. The cut-scenes could have easily been pre-rendered work.

  7. i hope they bring back the potato suit from GoW chains of olympus, that one always made me giggle lol

  8. LOl in sonty santa monica we trust

  9. Real time is always great, I’m glad we don’t have pre-rendered scenes so then the game as well as the story will seem like one XD (Remember the old Final Fantasies?)

  10. Thats sweet. Just adds to the experience of the game.

  11. 35 gigs of data on blu-ray and No CGI, what hell SANTA MONICA have filled on to this disc

  12. Please read the whole article and not the just the title Blinky. Considering I wrote the original article on “no CG in God of War III,” I would not be so silly as to write another article on it if I thought we already knew that they weren’t pre-rendered.

  13. SlaughterMeister February 23, 2010 @ 18:18

    They should do a chunky version of Kratos, like “Doughnut Drake” from Uncharted 2.

    lol

  14. Apparently your the only one who didn’t know.

  15. /facepalm

    didnt they tell us this before?

    nothing new

  16. I’m the only one who didn’t know? Ignoring the fact that we brought you the news in the first place before any other website? I hate to quote the article above, as I shouldn’t need to:

    “When we found out that God of War III’s cutscenes wouldn’t contain any CG trickery, we still questioned whether the in-engine scenes would be pre-recorded and played back as videos (ie. pre-rendered.) ”

    Therefore, we knew they weren’t CG, but we didn’t know whether they would be recorded as videos, like Uncharted 2. The advantage of having them as real-time is that we can use customisable costumes eg. Cod of War.

    This story not only confirms different costumes in the cutscenes, it reveals that some of the cutscenes will be pre-rendered. So first article states “NO CGI” and the second states “SOME will be pre-rendered” – is that enough to prove that CGI does not necessarily equal pre-rendered?

    So not only is this news new, it differs significantly from our previous report, which brought the GOWIII cutscene pre-rendered/real-time news to the interwebs in the first place.

    I bid you good day.

  17. God of War III is so beautiful . . . this game is gonna rock.

  18. @Patrick
    Oh i never knew about the pre-render and real-time cut-scenes, previously i assumed there were only two type of Cut-scenes CGI and real time, thnx for clearing that out

  19. Not big news as I see it. Most of them are made of ingame cutscenes, aren’t they?

  20. can i wright articles?? lol

    GOD OF WAR Looks EPIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  21. @Patrick Steen: ahh i see now…thanks for the info!

    so it wont be pre-rendered, eh? reminds me of MGS3 with all the costumes and whatnot!

    i still wonder tho…why only some? wouldnt it be odd for the bonus skin to be in one scene…just to have this pre-rendered cutscene show Kratos in the next?? I wonder how this will turn out

  22. @taus90 – The vocabularily is certainly confusing and not set in stone. For example, surely everything rendered by a computer system, real-time or otherwise, is “Computer Generated (CG)”.

    Lots of people like to say “pre-rendered” – but it doesn’t tell the whole story. As far as I’m concerned, there’s pre-rendered high-end CG, and pre-rendered in-engine, and then real-time. GOWIII will have a mixture of the latter two.

    Dr Moogle – it was the same issue with MGS4 – two of the game’s major cutscenes were pre-rendered (but still in-engine) and Snake would lose his costumes – it’s not too jarring.

  23. @patrick steen: ahh like the beggining and the end (and the prologues) yeah, thats understandable

    i just wonder how it would be with a costume of another character (i think i heard something like that)….id still be a bit weirder, since youre playing as another character.

    well im sure it wont be a problem anyways…idk why im still blabbering on :\

  24. The big cutscene on the boat was pre-rendered in MGS4 – as they couldn’t keep the frame-rate up for it to be real-time.

    We all know why Dr Moogle =)

  25. Im not bothered whether the cutscenes are pre-rendered or in game. makes no difference to me.

  26. We are coming to the days where ingame visuals are becoming close or on par as cg visuals.

  27. Another movie wannabe on the PS3 an 3/10 for sure just wait for Teletext to review it, Teletext is the only non viased website on the net!

    This game is Kratos whine whine , press button on screen see movie repeat ….

  28. “Another movie wannabe on the PS3 an 3/10 for sure just wait for Teletext to review it, Teletext is the only non viased website on the net!

    This game is Kratos whine whine , press button on screen see movie repeat ….”

    Wow I guess we have some sort of halo fanboy here, We are talking about the pre-rendering, and no CG in this game, when you wanna troll try staying on topic XD

  29. God of War is a pretty neat PS game.. I have already played the first two versions and they were good, have to get the 3rd one..i’m sure it would be nice as well…

  30. Speaking of GOW has anyone seen this video yet? Hot Chick + GOW III = Orgasm

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXUDTnoXYXE

  31. That’s actually quite awesome. Knowing that we’ve come to the point where we don’t need CG for cutscenes and instead use the engine is simply awesome.

  32. I agree with you about how the game and the scenes should be unified this will give you the feeling that you are having a very pleasant and decent experience as well.

  33. You guys need to get a life

  34. @Come get some:

    Whatever. . . . . . .

    I belive having real time cutscened allows to have a far more inmersive experience. MGS4 and Uncharted 2 (?) make a really good point at that.

  35. @ come get some, what are you talking about. They have lives or they would not be posting comments on here.

  36. lol @ sony junkie…….
    @ Patrick…. was it the same case with UC2, mix of pre rendered (ingame engine) and real time cut scenes? Coz they are really gooooood….

  37. @patrick: yeah, but they dont need it in real time…there wasnt anymore gameplay after that anyways :\

    and seeing as GoW3 will have MOST of their cutscenes ummm non-prerendered…this shall be quite interesting to see…..

  38. God of War 3 rendering the scenes in real-time is awesome because there is also less loading time, since you don’t have to load the cinematics video. God of War 3 will be an awesome game that plays well.

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