You still don’t understand, do you? They can save all that disk space AND make the cutscenes look better if they let your computer run them in real-time! Instead they are BLOATING the game size with low quality video files. That are unnecessary. Is it sinking in yet?

Having the cutscenes play real time in-engine does not take up any more space than necessary. It simply loads the assets and scripts instead of using a pre-rendered video.

If you want an example of a recent game that does this look at Assassin’s Creed 4. Every cutscene is real time.

Don’t mean to stoke the fire but I’ve been working in the games industry for the past 5 years as a 3D artist so I hopefully can clear up some of the confusion. RAGE’s in game textures were needed whatever route they took for their cutscenes.

When a custcene is “rendered” in-game it means nothing (or very little) extra needs to be loaded (it just reuses the existing assets during gameplay). So no, it’s not taking assets “from thin air” but it is not adding to file size because those assets are already in the game archive.

For instance think of Raiden fighting with a Boss (during gameplay). The player lands the final blow and then the cutscene is triggered. At this point the developer either triggers a separate video (taking up its own extra/unique space) or if it’s still realtime (in-engine) then user control is removed. In the latter case the same character models/textures/environment assets as used in gameplay are used in the in-game cutscene.

Eg. Raiden walks up to the dying Boss and has a conversation – both their character models and textures (as well as all the other assets – environment textures etc) are already in the game so there’s no extra memory footprint. Those assets are what you see when you’re not in a cut-scene. Therefore doing cutscenes in-engine saves on disk space because video is larger.

A proviso though is sometimes realtime in-engine cutscenes swap in a few higher quality assets eg larger poly count, texture res, frambuffer, shader quality etc. This has extra memory footprint BUT a higher poly count Raiden could be used in many other cutscenes. A video can only be used as is (i.e once in one situation). Plus you can compress the shit out of videos but its much smaller to compress the shit out of a few extra high res textures and animations.

Video has advantages over realtime/in-engine cutscenes. As video is basically a bunch of 2D images – you can apply all kinds of effects / compositing work. You can run the most complex physics/lighting simulations you like because if it takes ten days to render out each frame you’ll still have a video at the end you can play back at 24fps or whatever your target is. I’d imagine this freedom to do all kinds of visual FX/explosions etc really gave a visual quality that wasn’t possible realtime (on consoles). I wonder if the extra large filesize is higher quality pre-rendered videos. The PC version of Deus Ex HR had horrible cutscene vids that were much lower res and color mismatched so lets hope we get something better.