That’s why everything looks so flawless.įinally, in-game trailers take place inside the actual environment of the game. They can also add custom animations or other cinematic effects that you wouldn’t see in-game, even if they require more processing power than a normal gaming PC would be able to handle. An artist can push more graphical fidelity to a character’s face while blurring the background, or add more processing power to animations instead of loading the character’s artificial intelligence. It’s easy to make in-engine shots look good because you can fine tune exactly how many resources the engine is using for any given element. RELATED: How to Tweak Your Video Game Options for Better Graphics and Performance You may also see these referred to as “pre-rendered” trailers.

“In-engine” trailers, like that Killzone trailer in 2005 (or the Total War: Warhammer trailer above), are a bit different. When you make an in-engine trailer, it works similarly to the pre-rendered CGI model, except that the 3D artists are animating characters using only the game’s engine to create a static cutscene. Even though CGI trailers are a divisive promotional tool in the gaming community, they’re also commonly accepted as part of the advertising blitz necessary to get a game to sell by the time it’s on shelves. These usually include Pixar-esque cinematics that involve characters in the story fighting some kind of battle or having a lot of dialogue. There are a few different ways game developers can create a trailer. Full CGI trailers, like the Overwatch trailer above, are made completely separate from the game engine.

As more actual in-game screenshots leaked out over the next few months, journalists and gamers alike started to wonder if the trailer they were shown at E3 was really telling the whole story. Turns out Guerilla (the developers of Killzone) had used a technique known as “in-engine rendering”, which allowed the developers to add in extra lighting elements, new animations, or other alterations to clean up the final product. Of course, it didn’t take long for the press to dissect the trailer bit by bit. Used as advertising fodder to show off the increased graphical capabilities of the PS3, the trailer was posted and reposted by every gaming news outlet in the country, and heralded as the launching point for “gaming’s second renaissance”. The animations and character models were so fluid they looked like they were ripped straight from a computer-generated movie.

In 2005, the Killzone 2 trailer debuted at E3, featuring graphics unlike anything anyone had ever seen before (console or otherwise).

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