FYI, the camera is NOT fixed. It is highly scripted to provide a highly cinematic play experience, yes, but in no meaning of the word is the camera fixed! Within the setup cinematic parameters there is a LOT of room for the camera to adjust (zooming, panning, etc) to the action that happens on the screen (where the player is, where the enemies are, etc). Because of the amount of adjustments the camera system can make automatically, there are very few assumptions that can be made about what to render or not render.

Not only has the camera system in GoW been described in detail at a lecture at GDC in the past, but if you paid attention during game play, it would be apparent that the camera does have several degrees of freedom outside of its scripted nature.

We could easily allow the user full control of the camera during game play. The reason we do not is because we feel it breaks the cinematic experience that we have carefully crafted, not because there is some geometry missing if you turn around (as you imply).

Brilliant stuff. Except the fundamental assumption you made about the existence of some sort of "glide path of the camera", that the remainder of your post rested on. There is no "glide path of the camera" in any God of War game. Your assumptions of how the camera works may (may!) have held true for, say, Panzer Dragoon 15 years ago, but it just isn't how the camera works in GoW3.

There are paths, but not for the camera but for the equivalent to a "camera dolly" (in film terms). Continuing the film analog, one could say that our game camera is mounted on the dolly arm and can move both in and out, can pan, tilt, and zoom, etc. (In actuality, our camera is more sophisticated than a dolly cam and can do things no physical camera could do.) Which of these movements the camera makes is dependent on parameters that our camera designers have carefully set, but ultimately on the location of the player and the enemies on screen. This decision is made at run-time, not tool-time. I repeat: for every game frame, we determine at run-time the position and orientation of the camera. In other words, the possible movement space for the camera is an irregularly-shaped 3D volume, not some simplistic "glide path." As a general rule, neither position nor orientation of the camera within this volume can be predetermined for any particular game play moment.

So I'm afraid your assumption of how the camera system works in GoW3 is wrong, as is everything else you claimed based on those assumptions.

But moreover, even if it WAS possible to predetermine it, it just isn't a good idea anyway. First, the time to implement such a system would be better spent doing something else. Second, it would detrimentally affect the time it takes to build levels which negatively affects what art and design can achieve in a fixed amount of time. Third, just outright rendering those objects in the first place would be faster than trying to be "clever."