Games with pre-rendered cutscenes using their game engine?

[The Duke Of Nukes]

I'm pretty sure that most people don't care about this kind of stuff, but I decided make this topic anyway, just to get this off my chest. If you're interested in this subject and have something to say then please post your thoughts here.

 

Most games nowadays use pre-rendered cutscenes almost always, but what's interesting is that some games use pre-rendered cutscenes using the game's engine, which supposedly creates the illusion of the cutscene being rendered in real-time although it's just a video file playing. I'm sure that Rockstar Games doesn't do this (to my knowledge), but many others do, and that's rather odd to me. This is interesting to me because although it's a pretty nice concept, it entirely defeats the purpose of pre-rendered cutscenes, which are to make the scenes look like an actual movie is playing rather then a game. I believe if they are going to do that they might as well play them in real-time. I have many reasons why I believe that:

 

1. It's very limiting. If you mod your game and try to improve the graphics or do any visual changes, it won't show up during the cutscenes no matter what you do because it's a video file. There's no way to change this unless you use some kind of video editing software, but it would be extremely hard (especially considering the huge number of cutscenes there are) and most likely will never look the same as your gameplay.

 

2. It often looks worse than the actual gameplay. This isn't an issue for console games because it's likely already running at the same resolution (and maybe FPS), but it's a big issue for PC gamers because they sometimes can run these games at higher resolutions (like 4K) and higher frame-rates. This really breaks the immersion for some and doesn't mesh well with the rest of the game.

 

3. It wastes TONS of unnecessary space. SERIOUSLY! WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? Most games are really big nowadays, but NOT for the reasons you'd usually think. These games usually consist of 4-10 or so gigabytes of assets, animations, sounds, etc, BUT 30+ GIGABYTES OF PRE-RENDERED CUTSCENES! I know these numbers aren't exact and might be hyperboles, but the cutscenes really do waste a lot of space, and usually take up around half or more of the game's size, which means that half the game isn't even the game itself, it's the CUTSCENES! Seriously, why don't they render these things in real-time at this point? I would assume that rendering them at real-time would take a lot less space and would be more effective (although it would take more computing power), but how should I know? I'm not a game developer.

 

I also want to know a list of games that do this (I know mostly WB Games' games), so if you know any more of them that use this method, please share them with me. I currently have a list that follows:

 

Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat X

Injustice

Injustice 2 (presumably)

All of the Arkham games (except maybe Arkham Knight)

Mafia 3

Max Payne 3

Gears of War 4

Ryse: Son of Rome

Dead Island

Infamous: Second Son

The Witcher Games

The Evil Within

Resident Evil 5

Mirror's Edge 2

Battlefield 1

Star Wars: TFU I & II

 

What do you think?

Edited November 5, 2016 by The Duke Of Nukes

[Mr. Scratch]

I know Mafia 3 and Max Payne 3 use them for the most part.

[The Duke Of Nukes]

I know Mafia 3 and Max Payne 3 use them for the most part.

Thanks! I also forgot to put Gears of War 4 in there, Whoops! Not all cutscenes are pre-rendered there though, there are just a few. Edited October 31, 2016 by The Duke Of Nukes

[Maxxeine]

You're mostly on point - it's even worse when the "cutscenes" are really just .bik files, and so the quality is very choppy and blocky... it really ruins the immersion, especially considering they're video files and so can't be manipulated with in-game mods.

 

I could give Max Payne 3 a pass though considering the "cutscenes" act more as loading screens than anything else, but for games such as GTA V it wouldn't work at all, which is why I think V did good here utilizing in-game animations, and having all cutscenes in-game - not only does it look better, but you don't get that nasty .bik blockyness/compression that you see a lot in other games.

 

To my understanding though it's somewhat tricky to pull off real-time cutscenes, especially considering you need a custom animation set to be able to be triggered in-game - .biks and pre-rendered files help to alleviate this since the designers are able to use custom tools - though it does make things look less impressive. It really comes down to saving time, which is fine for lower-quality games or games that use them as "loading screens" - but it does kill the immersion for me, which is why I prefer cutscenes to be done in the scene as it's happening. It's even worse when the cutscenes show characters differently than they appear, such as blood stains and even attire choices. This happened a lot in Dead Island (which didn't use .biks, but were pre-rendered), and it annoyed the heck out of me (again another reason why real-time cutscenes are better - they show the character/player's real appearance).

[Hit by Lightning]

^^ We should also give Infamous Second Son a pass!

The developers said that we can't skip the cutscenes because game assets are loading in the back

Edited October 30, 2016 by Hit by Lightning

[The Duke Of Nukes]

^^ We should also give Infamous Second Son a pass!

The developers said that we can't skip the cutscenes because game assets are loading in the back

That's an interesting usage of pre-rendered cutscenes, but I believe that if they even bother doing pre-rendered cutscenes they should make them on full-blown CG instead of using the game's actual engine. I think that if they make the pre-rendered cutscenes in CG it wouldn't look like absolute crap when playing in a graphically enhanced game at maximum settings, even on a low resolution and frame-rate. I know their purpose in making this as such is to immerse you and fool your eyes into thinking that it's the actual game and that it's running at real-time, but on PC it does the exact opposite and breaks the immersion while seeing clearly that it's pre-rendered. Maybe they should even make those CG cutscenes at 4K and downscale them depending on your resolution, but what am I talking about? That would increase the game's size drastically! Maybe these pre-rendered game engine cutscenes will die out eventually, games are already starting to look like CG and Unreal Engine 4 now has a cutscene editor to make real-time cutscenes easier to make, but for now we are stuck with these crappy cutscenes.

[RogerWho]

I'm quite sure the devs have good reasons for doing so. Out of top of my head, these could be some of them:

 

1) Memory constraints. Playing a .bik file requires what, 2 megs of RAM I think? (I don't remember the exact figure but I've read the mem footprint of BINK is ridiculously low.) While an in-game cutscene requires to load up all the animation files, perhaps assets and whatnot. This may be an issue especially on consoles. Take a note for example that with some games released on multiple platforms, it's often the case that the version for the lower-spec'd machine has pre-rendered cutscenes while the higher end has in-engine.

 

2) While a pre-rendered cutscene is playing, the game may be loading other stuff for the game itself. This is probably #1 reason and used very often in games. They're basically used instead of loading screens.

 

3) The game can't screw up. In-engine cutscenes may have bugs. During one in-engine cutscene in MP3, I got killed. Other crazy stuff can occur - NPCs getting stuck, your character falling through the floor or whatever. This stuff happens and is not worth troubleshooting/testing if the cutscene can just be pre-rendered and be done with.

 

4) I'd guess that using dedicated animation tools such as Maya or whatever (I really don't know what's usually used) are simply more practical to use. While modern engines can import full animations from the dedicated tools, they may need debugging, cleaning up etc., again it may not be worth the extra work.

 

As for why not make much higher quality cutscenes instead of using the quality the game provides? Cost, duh. You already have all the assets for the game, why spend extra time to make higher quality ones? I mean, it's the game that's the important part and time/money should be spend on that, not on movies I think. Same goes if you'd argue the other way around - i.e. to make better models/textures first and then use degraded versions for the game. Same reason - it's better if the resources are spent directly on the game. I'll rather have a good game with passable cinematics rather than a short mediocre game with a full-blown CGI movie cut up into it.

 

Besides, today it's not even a big deal, the games look good enough. It's not early 2000's where the game looked like ass so it was worthwhile doing extra cinematics.

 

As for pre-rendering them in 4K, that would defeat the advantage of the small memory footprint and usage while loading since playing a 4k video is very cpu- and memory-intensive, often more so than the game itself. Especially when using more efficient codecs. My PC can only play 4k or h265 videos using an nvidia CUDA renderer, otherwhise the CPU itself just doesn't manage. So of course that would make no sense for using in a game because playing the video would either throttle up my CPU or GPU

Edited October 31, 2016 by RogerWho

[gajrajgchouhan]

I don't think Arkham Knight uses the pre-rendered .bink files,it just loads the cutscenes as they should.

[Osho]

While real time rendering certainly saves the disc space, but because of this advantage the games are now relying too much on cutscenes, and scripted events, too. Rockstar games are the worst offenders in this case.

They have started to include real time cutscenes for the most simple actions like walking through a door, that the game don't necessarily have to do it for the player under the garb of fancy animations and movie-like experiences.

Its worse than pre-rendered cutscenes. I don't recall many games in the past with pre-rendered cutscenes break the flow of the gameplay as badly as the in-game cutscenes now pop-up so often and even include portions that last too long to sit and watch that it becomes annoying on repeated playthroughs as these are most likely unskippable, or allow only certain segments of the missions with very small loading times to skip them easily.

Refer: Let me Skip

 

I'd prefer real time rendering if the developers reduce the use of cutscenes in game, and adopt smarter ways to connect the gameplay with cutscenes that doesn't take away too much control from the player. Similar to Far Cry 2's unique approach with no cutscenes that over step my right to control the character. The pace is never broken up by lengthy cutscenes and scripted segments that forcibly attempt to throw a cinematic moment.

Refer: The Player as Storyteller in Far Cry 2

 

@ TheStaff - Please note: Getting too many "Bad gateway" / "CloudFlare" errors today, each time while surfing any section ( and posting ) on the site.

[D9fred95]

The Arkham series barring Knight uses them I think. Knight uses the actual engine for its cutscenes.

[The Duke Of Nukes]

I'm quite sure the devs have good reasons for doing so. Out of top of my head, these could be some of them:

 

1) Memory constraints. Playing a .bik file requires what, 2 megs of RAM I think? (I don't remember the exact figure but I've read the mem footprint of BINK is ridiculously low.) While an in-game cutscene requires to load up all the animation files, perhaps assets and whatnot. This may be an issue especially on consoles. Take a note for example that with some games released on multiple platforms, it's often the case that the version for the lower-spec'd machine has pre-rendered cutscenes while the higher end has in-engine.

 

2) While a pre-rendered cutscene is playing, the game may be loading other stuff for the game itself. This is probably #1 reason and used very often in games. They're basically used instead of loading screens.

 

3) The game can't screw up. In-engine cutscenes may have bugs. During one in-engine cutscene in MP3, I got killed. Other crazy stuff can occur - NPCs getting stuck, your character falling through the floor or whatever. This stuff happens and is not worth troubleshooting/testing if the cutscene can just be pre-rendered and be done with.

 

4) I'd guess that using dedicated animation tools such as Maya or whatever (I really don't know what's usually used) are simply more practical to use. While modern engines can import full animations from the dedicated tools, they may need debugging, cleaning up etc., again it may not be worth the extra work.

 

As for why not make much higher quality cutscenes instead of using the quality the game provides? Cost, duh. You already have all the assets for the game, why spend extra time to make higher quality ones? I mean, it's the game that's the important part and time/money should be spend on that, not on movies I think. Same goes if you'd argue the other way around - i.e. to make better models/textures first and then use degraded versions for the game. Same reason - it's better if the resources are spent directly on the game. I'll rather have a good game with passable cinematics rather than a short mediocre game with a full-blown CGI movie cut up into it.

 

Besides, today it's not even a big deal, the games look good enough. It's not early 2000's where the game looked like ass so it was worthwhile doing extra cinematics.

 

As for pre-rendering them in 4K, that would defeat the advantage of the small memory footprint and usage while loading since playing a 4k video is very cpu- and memory-intensive, often more so than the game itself. Especially when using more efficient codecs. My PC can only play 4k or h265 videos using an nvidia CUDA renderer, otherwhise the CPU itself just doesn't manage. So of course that would make no sense for using in a game because playing the video would either throttle up my CPU or GPU

I MIGHT be fine with pre-rendered cutscenes on consoles and other PeasantWare (JK, no real elitism here), but on PC it's totally freaking unnecessary. I also don't see some of your points.

 

1. From what I know, cutscenes take less processing power than the actual gameplay. After all, the gameplay has to render much more things in real-time, like AI, particles, controls, button registration, actions, MULTIPLE different animations simultaneously, and multiple other things at the same time. This doesn't also consider the fact that the settings could be turned down for the weaker PCs, so pre-rendered cutscenes for this reason is unnecessary.

 

2. This is the best reason to use cutscenes, but most games I play that use cutscenes make them to be skip-able, so I don't know about that, besides, it would still be better to have them rendered in CG though, which I will get into a bit.

 

3. How hard could it be? The short, scripted in-game sequences rarely ever mess up (I don't remember the last time they did mess up), so why would these? The games I've seen with pre-rendered cutscenes have real-time ones mixed in there, and you can't tell the difference between any of them, which brings up the question; why did they bother pre-rendering them if all the other cutscenes are rendered in real-time? The scenes that were pre-rendered weren't all that complex and intensive anyway, so why do the do this?

 

4. I can't really say much about this one though, I don't know how this works.

 

Pre-rendering them at 4K can be an issue though, it's actually a bit impractical, but I don't think that rendering them in CG will be an issue. The CG cutscenes can use the game's models but improve the lighting in such a way that it no longer looks like the game. If you want to se an example of pre-rendered cutscenes that use game assets but are rendered in CG then just look at Sonic Heroes. The character models (obviously) are in much higher quality than the in-game ones because this was released during the PS2/Xbox/GameCube era, and the in-game character models wouldn't suffice, but if you pay close attention to the scenery where it's taking place (in the later cutscenes), you can see that they use the actual in-game stage models and you can notice the low-resolution textures that make up the stage. You would be able to notice this the most during the cutscenes that take place in the Lost Jungle. You wouldn't be able to tell that they are the game models unless I told you because the lighting drastically changed the look and it still feels like a CG cutscenes. Now that I think of it, I don't think anyone else noticed that except me, because I haven't seen anyone else point it out. This kind of tactic would be even more effective nowadays because the graphics standards have increased dramatically, and with that special lighting CG adds on you wouldn't be able to tell it uses the game models.

 

You know WHAT games use real-time cutscenes all the time no matter what? The LEGO Games... of all things... at least the PC versions do to my knowledge. As if those games weren't polished enough with superb animations beyond imagination (just look at the transformation animations, especially Venom's), they always use real-time cutscenes, and it shows.

 

I don't think there's an excuse at this point, they should all be real-time unless they use CG cutscenes.

[Original Light]

It will also prove difficult with Mafia 3's upcoming character customization DLC. Let's say Lincoln is wearing a DLC outfit, but the cutscenes will show him wearing the default Army outfit. Unless they make 7 versions of every cutscene, or however many outfits they're including, it's not going to work.

 

I don't think The Witcher 3 really used these, only in a few. The scenes that did were usually grainy, which was really obvious paired with the default outfits when the alternative appearance DLC was enabled (Triss, Ciri, Yennefer).

Edited October 31, 2016 by Original Light

[The Duke Of Nukes]

Quick question: do all games nowadays use pre-rendered cutscenes amongst real-time ones? Because I'm seeing a lot of games with both being thrown into the mix. Do they all?

 

Also, thanks for sharing some of your games and please keep sharing more of them. Remember: at least one pre-rendered cutscene using the game's engine counts to be on the list.

[luisniko]

It feels to me Mafia 3 doesn't use pre-rendered cutscenes. I have PS4 version and I've seen a lot of stuff such as late lighting transition and slow texture loading most of the time during McGuire and Father James scenes, which is understandable if they used higher poly models and texture for those 'big' cutscenes and PS4 hardware just can't work it on time.

 

As for 'smaller' cutscenes, like during special speech with lieutenants and underbosses' personal favors, I've seen bugs there too related to models (like duplicates, blinking model parts), which didn't happen when I reloaded my game and triggered the cutscene again.

[PB&Ritz]

After playing The Evil Within and Resident Evil 5 recently, it seems those games use pre-rendered cutscenes. Same goes for Alien: Isolation - judging from what I've seen on Youtube.

Edited November 1, 2016 by PB&Ritz

[RogerWho]

First time I noticed pre-rendered cutscenes that looked like in-engine was in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. It was rather silly since the game had about 20 gig install size, with 16 or so being just cinematics.

 

TFU II had a mix of both and it was quite funny because graphically they were completely undistinguishable; the only way to tell them apart was whether the protagonist's lightsabers were the right colors.

 

So yea I'm aware of it and it can be annoying at times, but like I said, the devs surely have good reasons for doing it.

 

Besides there's the other side of the coin. If someone is running the game at some low setting where the game looks like ass, at least they'll get to see nice cutscenes (just like back in the days when the 3D graphics was crap). Also like luisinko mentioned, textures popping in and such stuff can actually detract from the quality of the cinematics too. So it's not so clear-cut.

[Joemoetoe]

Mirrors edge 2. With games that let you change your appearance are they still pre rendered?

 

I'm still waiting for games to have ps2 pre rendered cutscene graphics lol

[PoeticWhisper]

Battlefield 1 uses pre-rendered cutscenes as well.

I like them, for the most part. Especially in BF1 cause they look gorgeous. However, the in engine cutscenes work so much better for open world games and such I think. The way Rockstar blended the cutscenes and gameplay seamlessly in GTA V was awesome. It really made the game feel a lot less like a game, if that makes sense.

[The Duke Of Nukes]

Thanks guys! Are there any more? What's your opinions?