Remember the live-action FMVs, what happened to them?

FaxModem1 · Post by **FaxModem1** » 2006-08-15 07:25pm

Okay, we all remember Command and Conquer, especially Tiberian Sun, which had Michael Biehn, and of course, James Earl Jones, and these movies were great(if a bit corny).

And there was Myst, The Journeyman Project, 11th hour, etc.

What happened to this style of movies for games? Did they just find it too expensive and went all into CGI?

Also, where can one find these movies, to view without the games, because we can't find the games or we don't wish to spend the money?

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2006-08-15 07:27pm

Mainly, it was because the vast majority of them sucked and were poorly made, they were often very expensive, and the bottom fell out of the multimedia boom of the early 1990s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMV_game

I recall that Gamespy has a good critique of both the multimedia boom and FMV games.

Why C&C held on to the whole FMV thing, I have no idea. Maybe they're just dorks who liked to burn money...

EDIT: Sorry, I thought you meant actual FMV games. Regarding live action FMVs, it was because they were always expensive, and CGI simply caught up and became cheaper and easier to realise content.

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-08-15 07:32pm

Wing Commander 4 was probably the best example of this. There were dozens of hours of FMV, across dozens of storylines and multiple branching paths for each mission. You could beat the whole game once through in three hours, so you'd have to play dozens of time to see most of the major scenes.

It also cost some 15 million dollars to film. The budget unfortunately, didn't get made up by sales. ;_;

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-08-15 07:58pm

To be honest, it's really down to the fact that ingame cutscenes can look so good with modern graphics now that they don't need to do full CGI or live-action FMVs for story exposition. Bar the intro or something, people now expect the story to be fluid with transitions from game to cutscene being transparent. Look at the original Resident Evil and compare it to the GC remake. The ingame graphics of the remake look better than the original's painstakingly animated CGI FMV. The MGS franchise also helped with using ingame models after Kojima-san went against FMVs for taking the player out of the game world (you can still see parts of the CGI FMVs planned in the E3 '97 trailers).

Let's face it. While live-action and CGI story sequences may look great now and then, they're really too expensive and out-of-place nowadays when you can achieve just as much with a decent game engine. RE4 is testament to that, as are the later FF games like FFX, though people actually paid for VCDs with the FFVII FMVs and I imagine the same happened with WCIV which had proper 35 mm film shot scenes.

Batman · Post by **Batman** » 2006-08-15 08:08pm

That's about it-live action is too freaking expensive (especially when you want actors people actually know) and these days, game engine visuals are good enough that you don't need dedicated video sequences anymore.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-08-15 08:27pm

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:Mainly, it was because the vast majority of them sucked and were poorly made, they were often very expensive, and the bottom fell out of the multimedia boom of the early 1990s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMV_game

I recall that Gamespy has a good critique of both the multimedia boom and FMV games.

Why C&C held on to the whole FMV thing, I have no idea. Maybe they're just dorks who liked to burn money...

EDIT: Sorry, I thought you meant actual FMV games. Regarding live action FMVs, it was because they were always expensive, and CGI simply caught up and became cheaper and easier to realise content.

A lot of people bitched when C&C Generals dropped the cheesy FMV plot that had underlined all the other C&C games.

Hell, I loved getting orders from Kane, or General Sheppard. Way better than some lame text saying "blow up the stuff here."

Batman · Post by **Batman** » 2006-08-15 08:34pm

Uraniun235 wrote: A lot of people bitched when C&C Generals dropped the cheesy FMV plot that had underlined all the other C&C games.
Hell, I loved getting orders from Kane, or General Sheppard. Way better than some lame text saying "blow up the stuff here."

Video sequences to advance the story are alive and well. This is about the death of live action FMV, as opposed to games using CGI and lately, game engine based videos (at least from what I gathered).

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2006-08-15 08:36pm

That struck me as being the same thing Uranium was talking about.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-08-15 08:43pm

Batman wrote:
Uraniun235 wrote: A lot of people bitched when C&C Generals dropped the cheesy FMV plot that had underlined all the other C&C games.
Hell, I loved getting orders from Kane, or General Sheppard. Way better than some lame text saying "blow up the stuff here."
Video sequences to advance the story are alive and well. This is about the death of live action FMV, as opposed to games using CGI and lately, game engine based videos (at least from what I gathered).

What, didn't you ever play Command and Conquer? Kane and Sheppard (and Stalin, and Tanya, and...) were all played by live actors in front of a camera.

Sorry, but even Half-Life 2's engine can't come close to duplicating the glee of seeing Kane's twisted smile as he orders the destruction of GDI.

I would also suggest that game-engine cinematics can easily limit what you can show; for instance, if a game focused on squad-level tactics wants to show a nuke hitting a city (let's say the mission calls for your team to enter a city that just got nuked), odds are good that the game engine is not going to really be up to it, or will at least make it look lamer than FDR's legs.

I'm not saying game-engine cinematics are bad, just that they're not the end-all be-all of FMV/cinematic solutions.

Darth Raptor · Post by **Darth Raptor** » 2006-08-15 08:48pm

Uraniun235 wrote:A lot of people bitched when C&C Generals dropped the cheesy FMV plot that had underlined all the other C&C games.

So much so that they brought them back for Zero Hour, albeit in the form of in-universe news broadcasts instead of briefings. Generals just didn't have all the backstabbing and political intrigue of the other games, but in ZH unique officers were introduced that at least had some semblance of personality. Not Kane, but still.

Batman · Post by **Batman** » 2006-08-15 09:00pm

Uraniun235 wrote: What, didn't you ever play Command and Conquer? Kane and Sheppard (and Stalin, and Tanya, and...) were all played by live actors in front of a camera.
Sorry, but even Half-Life 2's engine can't come close to duplicating the glee of seeing Kane's twisted smile as he orders the destruction of GDI.

I HAVE played C&C and while HL2 may not come up to that, Jedi Outcast and KOTOR DO (and they're not even particularly recent games).

I would also suggest that game-engine cinematics can easily limit what you can show; for instance, if a game focused on squad-level tactics wants to show a nuke hitting a city (let's say the mission calls for your team to enter a city that just got nuked), odds are good that the game engine is not going to really be up to it, or will at least make it look lamer than FDR's legs.

And I'm not disagreeing. I'm arguing for a lot of games in-game visuals are so good dedicated video sequences are no longer neccessary.

I'm not saying game-engine cinematics are bad, just that they're not the end-all be-all of FMV/cinematic solutions.

And neither do I. However, even with games where the game engine doesn't support engine-based cut sequences, by now a CGI sequence is likely a lot more cost-efficient than a live-action one.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-08-15 09:04pm

Erm, are you saying Jedi Outcast cutscenes had better expression and acting than the C&C 'Kane' cutscenes?

You're on crack.

Even KotoR has only the most rudimentary 'acting' going on, certainly nothing on the level of Kane's bombastic insanity.

Darth Raptor · Post by **Darth Raptor** » 2006-08-15 09:17pm

Or Zofia's unmitigated hottness.

Enigma · Post by **Enigma** » 2006-08-15 11:09pm

Darth Raptor wrote:Or Zofia's unmitigated hottness.

[img]snip[/img]

Unfortunately she reminds me of Celine Dion.

FaxModem1 · Post by **FaxModem1** » 2006-08-16 02:48am

See, I just miss it, because in C&C, you felt like you were in a movie.

Also, is there anywhere where you can watch the movies without the game?

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2006-08-16 03:22am

Smuggler's Run: Warzones is the last game I saw that still had live-action cutscenes. I miss those; it really brings a game alive, makes it seem more real.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-08-16 03:52am

Wait wait wait - Act of War. The most excellent, b-grade, hammy Tom Clancy movie military stuff. Those live action cutscenes RULED. I'm totally down with the idea that briefing with live action are way better than text briefings or the lame map-based, 'spinning target model' style briefings you usually get in games. However, that Freespace briefing cutscene (all the briefings were text-and-display, but there's a cutscene of a briefing) and even though it's CGI it still had that noisy, kinetic atmosphere.

Post by **weemadando** » 2006-08-16 05:47am

Damnit! You fucking beat me to it Stark. Act of War's cutscenes played like an episode of 24 or Spooks a lot of the time... Beautifully done, though obviously with a very low budget. Fantastic all the same. I love the images of the taskforce rushing through the (CG) streets of London engaged in street battles.

The best FMV cutscene of all time was the introduction of Kane in CnC though. Watching Seth get capped then having Kane appear. Hot diggity daffodil.

FedRebel · Post by **FedRebel** » 2006-08-16 07:49am

FaxModem1 wrote:See, I just miss it, because in C&C, you felt like you were in a movie.

Also, is there anywhere where you can watch the movies without the game?

Red Alert 2, is the only one

Inorder to view the movies you need to extract the .bik files with xccmixer and play them with Bink Player

the other games movies (if you can find them) are a diffrent format and can only be played in xccmixer (only problem is I can't figure out how to get audio to work)

Chris OFarrell · Post by **Chris OFarrell** » 2006-08-16 07:53am

weemadando wrote:Damnit! You fucking beat me to it Stark. Act of War's cutscenes played like an episode of 24 or Spooks a lot of the time... Beautifully done, though obviously with a very low budget. Fantastic all the same. I love the images of the taskforce rushing through the (CG) streets of London engaged in street battles.

The best FMV cutscene of all time was the introduction of Kane in CnC though. Watching Seth get capped then having Kane appear. Hot diggity daffodil.

Yes. Never before or after that FMV in my life have I EVER felt the need to salute a computer screen so heavily...

Lazarus · Post by **Lazarus** » 2006-08-16 08:35am

PC Gamer reports that the new C&C game will feature a return to FMV sequences, which is excellent news for me. I loved the FMV sequences ion any game, especially Westwood RTS' like Emperor: Battle for Dune (Michael Dorn FTW!).