[360] Alan Wake - Still awake

Most games today seem to use these "pre-recorded, rendered by game engine" and "using in-game assets" cut scenes.
Rendered by game engine doesn't mean it's rendered by your console, it probably is rendered by a high end PC developer station running the game engine much faster than a console, or even rendering a frame per second and edited and post-processed to full motion video.

I think MGS4 is one of the rare games today that render most (all?) of it's cutscenes truly in-game.

 

A little OT: What about Batman: Arkham Asylum? On the PC the Cutscenes looks like utter shit (no AA) even when everything is set to high in the settings.

 

A lot of the Resident Evil 5 cutscenes were realtime, no?

It's a little disappointing that all of the cutscenes are pre-rendered. Hopefully they don't look too blocky.

 

Every single cutscene in RE5 was real time & by God those were phenomenal !
Maybe remedy went this route to save on the load times ?

IIRC only a handful of them were pre-recorded videos running on a much powerful hardware, same with GOW3.

 

to me, rendered with the engine means nothing, it's exactly like a CG, you could render un CG with the console as well, but it would take months, as long as the cutscene can't be rendered in realtime by the console itself (like RE5), then i can't be impressed.

 

why is it so important to you guys, if the cutscene is real time or not?
as long as the difference of in-game and cutscene is not dramatic...I am completely fine with it, especially if this means that load times are reduced...

 

I tend to not like prerecorded, because with the DVD on 360 you get standard definition and the difference from the in-game is apparent. I'm curious how that trailer was done, because most of everything looks HD, to me, and none of it looks SD. So did they cut the trailer using in-game footage and HD versions of the cutscenes?

 

who said pre-recorded means SD ?
There is not a single current gen game where pre-recorded videos are SD videos.

 

Really? I thought most of the pre-recorded vids on 360 were 480p. Most of the ones I can think of look poor, like the ones in Batman: AA. I could be very wrong though. I just didn't think they had space for HD vids on the DVD format.

 

Its the compression artifacts that you are mistaking for low resolution.

 

Ah, either way ....

Actually wouldn't 480p with less artifacts be better than 720p with artifacts? Oh well. Less than ideal. It's always nice when the cutscenes look as good as the ones Resident Evil 5.

 

Btw is this game open world ? or just semi open world like you get to choose few branching paths once in a while with few driving specific missions & that's about it ?
Cause if its open world then wow....I have no more words.

 

I think they said it's not open world

 

Here are impression from someone who played it at some event yesterday:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=20662358&postcount=946

 

I heard something about how they made the story more linear story mostly takes place at night. And the day part is for open world exploration.

 

yea thats what i heard also. Makes sence.

 

True, and the fact that they often use dozens of characters on screen is even more incredible. [there are however, a couple of instances where the story required an absurd number of characters and those bits are indeed prerendered].
I think, it will most likely remain the most impressive achievement in realtime cinematography of this generation.

Sad to hear most other games still go down the prerenered route, surprisingly even more than in previous generations.

 

Most likely cause its far more taxing on the console doing the night stuff (lights/shadows) thus they wanna have the player in a more controlled environment so the FPS doesnt take too much of a hit

 

I'm most certain that the cutscenes in Res5 were all pre rendered judging from the huge difference in lighting, reflection shaders and the inconsistency of the player costumes. It's almost like they're using a whole different rendering engine to the realtime footage.

Also a very similar case in Alan Wake's case, the player model and shader effects from cutscene has a big contrast to the ingame version. Hence the reason I mentioned the jarring disparity before. If cutscenes are done right like in MGS4 or Gow3 "for the most part" then it'll make the whole visual experience so much more cohesive without feeling disjointed. It's probably better to tone down the high res model and POST from the cutscene to match with the ingame just so the difference isn't too sever at this point.

 

Costume changes are reflected in the cutscenes for most if not all cutscenes, I think. So they have to be real time.