Prerendered Cinematics

#1 On consoles, it's still quite feasible as the resolution of a TV is low. The PS2 version of Resident Evil 4, for example, uses cut scenes cut from the GC version. For computer games, when you take into account that many gamers find anything under 1024x860 unplayable, they don't fit well into the standard gameplay. As Blizzard uses them, though, for introductions and conclusions, there's still a bit of life left in them.

I can't remember where I read it, but generally keeping all in-game scenes actually in-game improves immersion quite substantially. When you're taken from a gorgeous CG to less pretty graphics, it can get pretty jarring.

#2 I am going to use Cut scenes in my game, even if it might be not needed but thats the way I want to tell the story, such as how final fantasy did it. For you, just do what you want to do, it might take a little more time and effort but it might be worth it.

#3 Oh yeah, I completely forgot about TV resolutions. I usually don't play below 1280x1024, unless my video card cannot handle the game at decent framerates in that resolution. Yet depending on the codec and bitrate, many videos that are 640x480 or less look just as good fullscreen on 1280x1024 a desktop.

Although I too, would like to do it like Final Fantasy, I think I will only make a prerendered opening scene for my game, and probably pair it with an ending. I won't be making scenes all througout my game, not this game anyways. Maybe when I have a successful company, I can afford to get professional animators, but not now.

I read in a gaming magazine several years back that Final Fantasy 8 cost $200 million to make, and I can imagine most of that money probably went into making their cut scenes, since they are the most detailed part of the game.

#4 Pre-rendered scenes reduce flexibility though... Your ideas have to be set in concrete when you design your cut scenes, they take an absolute age to do when you'd probably be able to do something a lot quicker and cheaper by recording a demo of a multiplayer game Red vs Blue style..

The best opening sequences in my opinion are the ones you experience for yourself... The Intro to Halflife 1 for example, introduced the game, environment and control system before you ever saw baddie.

The cut scenes in Max Payne 2, added to the feeling that you're playing a movie, the fact that you could run through a lot of the heavily scripted scenes meant that you had to do a lot more than press ESC to quit the movie.

Pre-rendered cut scenes used to make me go "WOW!" but these days I hate them.. seen too many of them, good ones, bad ones.
Generally I'll watch them once and then skip past them. It really makes me annoyed when I can't skip them. C&C Generals for example had mission intro scenes you had to sit through each time you restarted a mission.. very annoying especially if you're as crap at RTS games as I am.

So, in my book...

They're expensive to make involving a lot of additional art for a lot less screen time than the regular art.
They're often seen once and sometimes not at all.
They consume disk space
They sometimes rely of additional licenced technology for playback and encoding
Their days are numbered on anything other than a console game where you don't mind watching a pretty movie, 'cos you want value out of your

#5 @ Jason:

Thanks for your opinions and the comparison (although, it was quite biased). You have some very good points there that I cannot ignore, therefore I must take into consideration.

I am leaning a lot towards not having prerendered scenes in the middle of the game. I definately want a prerendered opening scene though, but now you have me thinking of cutting it for the ending, for the possibility of multiple endings in real time rendering.

There's only one thing that I disagree with you on, and that was your last statement, about real-time rendering being comparable to prerendered scenes. There's a reason why renderers take several seconds or even minutes to process a still shot of a simple scene that a game engine can do in a fraction of a second. The only game engine I've seen demo footage of that can render graphics in real time comparable to a very high quality render (like Final Fantasy the movie) is the Unreal Engine 3, which runs on the next gen hardware, in which today's best GPUs are going to be at the low end of hardware requirements. Realistically, my movies aren't going to be anywhere close to that kind of detail anyways, so I guess my point doesn't really go anywhere in my situation.

I imagine the TSE would be a pretty good comparison to prerendering what I need to do, with its advanced shaders and normal mapping, I'm sure it can pull off very beautiful work in real time. Problem is, for as cheap as TSE is right now, I'm going to have to wait to get it, if at all.

#6 @Jeffrey, You are right.

My opinion is quite heavily biased towards in-game cut scenes made by the game renderer. Probably due to my own experiences with attempting to make a pre-rendered intro, seeing how much work it involved then running away screaming into the hills.

I also accept that a decent CG studio is going to produce a quality of movie far in advance of what's available through any game engine in existance that will run on current consumer hardware. But I think my point was more aimed at the Indi scene.

People like EA games can afford to pay for the services of a studio to animate and render their intro's... These movies take time to prepare, the skills of many animators and artists and time to render.. Plus all of the other things like motion capture, sound, music.. As things become more like real movies, they become harder to produce. I don't know if most Indi companies can afford such luxuries.

I heard somewhere once that the basic time to render a frame of animation is 1 hour. If it takes less time, then you can add more detail and make it more realistic..
Tron was a tremendous achievement in the computer animation arena... think each frame took around an hour to render.. now it can be done using the lowest level comsumer hardware in real time. (only talking about the CG aspect, the live action and back lit effects are a whole different ball game)

Pixar's animation with the lamps (can't remember the name) can now be done in real time..

Realtime will always be a few steps behind the really good studios... but who can afford their services or the time and effort to do it yourself?

So I believe that if A-N-Other Indi ltd were to attempt to make a really nice pre-rendered movie, they might do a bang up job and it might look really cool, but the time and effort it would have taken would kill their development budget. Time and effort probably better spent adding polish to their game to make it stand out from the crows and get people saying "Yes, I think I will buy that now I've tried it"