When we found out that God of War III’s cutscenes wouldn’t contain any CG trickery, we still questioned whether the in-engine scenes would be pre-recorded and played back as videos (ie. pre-rendered.) When we further discovered that God of War III would be on a dual-layer Blu-ray, we felt that we had further evidence to point towards the huge amount of disc space required for FMVs, but now Sony Santa Monica has corrected us.

Bruno Velazquez of Sony Santa Monica originally revealed that the game would not feature CG cutscenes, and has today responded to the question as to whether they would still play as pre-rendered videos:

“I will make this clear, the E3 demo does not have any cutscenes that play as videos, those are all 100 percent real-time cinematics, including the opening (Kratos, Helios, grunts running towards the screen) to the end (Kratos diving towards the Titan),” Velazquex writes on his blog.

“When I mentioned that GOW3 has no CG, I was referring to the fact that we do not have pre-renderd scenes that were created outside of the game engine, like GOW 1 and 2. In GOW3 all the cutscenes are created using our in-game engine, however some scenes were just to epic to run real time and thus are recorded videos. This is not the case for the majority of the cutscenes in the game which are mostly running real time. This way you can enjoy the bonus costumes for most of the cutscenes in the game, including those found in the E3 demo!”

That is excellent news for those who were all ready to sport their pre-order costumes. Velazquez adds for those who have a soft spot for high-end CGI:

“I hope you guys won’t miss the CG, I know I don’t miss it. The current cutscenes make the game feel more unified and flows from story to action better IMO.”

In Sony Santa Monica we trust.