I think they probably would, they were excellent BIKERs in the first TW :D

Trust me, they're not prerendered.

Some of them are….. sorry DArt. I got curious and checked it out. Most of them however are not.

The ones mentioned are DEFINITELY not. As I said, I'm only up to Chapter 2.

The scene with the king, and the one in the cave are NOT pre-rendered. I will swear to this with my life :)

Oww, but now I will until the end of the game be worried if the cut-scene I'm watching is pre-rendered or not! The game is ruined! ;)

But if those scenes I've seen until now are not pre-renders, then those are some seriously high-res textures!!

I like how Uncharted used in-engine, pre-rendered cut-scenes during load times resulting in zero (perceived) load time, but I still disliked that it wasn't real-time.

Are you going to provide something that backs up that claim? ;) jk

The only scenes I recall looking pre-rendered were the finishing moves on some of the boss battles.

I'd say the Iorveth/Letho scene could be a candidate.

That's the cave scene, and it's not pre-rendered.

I'm good with these things.

The first thing you notice with a pre-rendered scene is the movie compression. Unless they have bluray quality movies (very few games have them, because they take up way too much storage space for the benefit) - you will see the difference if you know what to look for.

Beyond that, you can look for engine specific quirks and glitches. In the Iorveth/Letho scene, you can look at Letho's face and how the shadows interact with the forms. It's glitchy - and you don't have glitchy shadows in a pre-rendered movie. You CAN have glitches if the pre-rendered movie is just the engine rendering and recorded as a movie, but then you'd notice the compression - and the engine will most likely render it much better real-time. They do this, sometimes, because they want to ensure cutscenes run at a minimum level of quality - for people running at lowest settings. But since there is NO compression, it's not the case with these scenes.

Lastly, you can look for performance issues. Movie formats are developed to play smoothly on "multimedia" capable PCs. So, unless you have codec issues or similar, there won't be "lag" or anything like that. So, if a cutscene hitches or there's a slowdown - it's almost certainly not pre-rendered.

The easy way to test this, is to put the game on lowest settings - and load the game just before a cutscene.

I won't bother, because I'm 100% sure. But for those in doubt, they can test it that way.

I cannot provide you with the info of which ones until I actually buy the game and play it……. as mentioned in another thread that won't be until after my trip.. so could be quite a long time.

However certain reviews already confirmed that some of them are.

I actually think CDProjket deserves huge credit for people debating this sort of thing though :D I think there are very few other games where you can't notice.

For example from the review at Gaming Shogun:

You trust the experience/knowledge of an average reviewer over mine?

Big mistake :)

In any case, yes, there ARE a few pre-rendered scenes - but they're either cartoons or past Chapter 2 at the point I'm at.

I'm not sure the "killing blows" are rendered real-time - but I'd think I'd have noticed Geralt switching gear.

Well, usually regarding game related things you are much more competent than the average reviewer IMHO. On the other hand if he writes that in his review and he is wrong he'd be in trouble for spreading false information.

However after that risen 2 debate regarding this particular issue… I don't have as much fate in your opinion about this as regarding other aspects. It could very well be you are both right though and those cut-scenes are after chapter 2.

It's an innocent mistake of a kind I see in a LOT of reviews. Basically, I've lost faith in the media regarding games a LONG time ago. The vast majority of reviewers don't really know shit.

Actually, I'm pretty sure I was right about Risen 2 as well. But let's not go through all that again.

Or, the reviewer could just have been talking about the cartoon cut-scenes and worded it really badly. In any case, maybe it's because I'm playing on a 1370x768 LCD TV, but the artifacts in pre-rendered sequences are really hard to spot these days when they use high-quality video.

In regards to the differences between in-game and pre-rendered, developers these days use their game engine more often than not for pre-rendered. I mean, look at some of those old Warcraft 3 cut-scenes. I've never seen a real-time graphics engine spit that out and it's very, very easy to see it's pre-rendered.

I can't believe some people claim cutscenes are pre-rendered. Wow.

No, they are not. There is not a single CGI cutscene in the game. Only comics like flashbacks, and that few second text intro. Everything else is in engine calculated in realtime, including finishers. And yes, it looks utterly stunning.

The last cutscene that happens after final combat (if you choose it) looks maybe even better than CGI cutscene at the end if TW1. It is THAT good.

At least one scene is pre-rendered. Most are not.

Try it out with the Kayran armor - the big Oompa Luumpa looking thing. That's how I noticed it the first time: I was staring at some form of striped sleeves and my head wasn't covered in rags. I can't recall which scene it was, but it was early in the game and obviously after killing the Kayran. I eventually upgraded from that armor to armors without the headpiece so it wouldn't have been as easy to notice, nor did it really bother me.

Thanks for the help drithius hope these guys will try it out themselves and hopefully change their minds…..

Unfortunately, it's more difficult to try out in scenes where the witcher doesn't play a part (e.g. the cave scene). But I'll try some of those in low quality and note the difference.

In some cases you would be able to tell because of the load times, but since my SSD drive is lightning fast, everything loads almost instantaneously.

Change our minds about what?

We're talking about whether the cutscenes are pre-rendered or not. Not whether they remove the headpiece for cinematic effect in some scenes - which is a common approach. They do the same thing in Mass Effect.

You have no idea what you're talking about, and yet you want people to change their minds based on what you read in some random review.

Maybe there's a single cutscene somewhere in the first chapter, that - for no reason at all - is pre-rendered. Sometimes you have to think a little - and ask yourself why they'd do that - and whether a single scene makes a difference. We're talking about what the engine is capable of, and as I said - the two scenes mentioned that are so impressive are NOT pre-rendered.

As for the vague description by Drithius who also called the shadow technology a "glitch" - that's not exactly evidence carrying much weight.

I'd be able to spot video compression on an old fashioned TV, as it's very obvious - especially during scenes with a lot of movement. Not if it was true HD - but it almost never is.

They do this because they're targeting machines with low specs, and they need the cutscenes to look right. They don't do it because the engine couldn't render it real-time on screen.

So, even if The Witcher 2 used recorded realtime rendering (which it doesn't) - it would still mean the engine is capable of doing what you're seeing.

Monitor the gpu utilization and you'll have proof either way.