Most AAA game engines have both ways to bake in physics _and_ to use the exact same system, real time. If you work with Unreal Engine, you use the same tool to

Most AAA game engines have both ways to bake in physics _and_ to use the exact same system, real time. If you work with Unreal Engine, you use the same tool to get your cloth physics and you can just click a button to bake it and replay it. And this applies to... everything in the engine. Moving outside of your editor absolutely blows, and the less you do it, the better it is. Unless the alternatives are thousands of times better (nothing comes close to Substance Painter, and tools like Houdini still do some things better than internal tools for example. And of course, well, 3D modeling is still a hellscape of zbrush and Maya.), you just stay in with your tools. Nothing sucks more than having yet another editor and needing to have a pipeline to keep everything in sync. It's not about needing crazy physics calculations directly in your engine (although your particle system being affected by it can do cool things), it's about not having to deal with yet another tool that fixes one problem and brings in 20 more. Also, as said, the days of fully scripted movement are pretty much gone. There's physics interactions any time you have vehicles involved unless you want to feel it slide around and feel like crap, for example.