White Haven wrote:I've always found the anti-cutscene crowd...odd. Honestly? I love a good, well-done, dramatic cutscene. By the time in-game engines can match up to what current pre-rendered cutscenes can do, the state of pre-rendered cutscenes will be even better, and that's always been the progression. I don't even comprehend why people think that's a bad thing, it just doesn't compute.
You miss the point.
It's not about making something pretty or look amazing, it's about the fact that you are taking control away from the player for minutes at a time (often much MUCH longer) and are making them watch a movie, rather than play a game.
Yeah, cutscenes aren't bad, and in heaps of games are a good way to tell stories. That just changes the second you lie about having 'choice' or 'variable plot' or whatever, especially when lots of games can't be bothered even having your man hold the right gun in cutscenes, let alone reflect plot state.
Yeah, I'd find a strict anti-cutscene stance weird too.
LOL!
The stuff Starglider mentions, the totally scripted in-game stuff, is something I really dislike. In DEHR there's heaps of it; here is a magic window, watch some guys do some stuff you can't interact with or affect in any way. Stunning... somehow.
Audio logs are an interesting example, because their use seems to have changed a great deal over time and I think they're tacked-on lameness in many games.
weemadando wrote:It's not about making something pretty or look amazing, it's about the fact that you are taking control away from the player for minutes at a time (often much MUCH longer) and are making them watch a movie, rather than play a game.
And...so?
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weemadando wrote:it's about the fact that you are taking control away from the player for minutes at a time (often much MUCH longer) and are making them watch a movie, rather than play a game.
Next time I am in a quant meeting I am totally going to shout 'OMG! You are taking away control and making me watch powerpoint, rather than doing engineering!'
I completely agree that sometimes cutscenes are the best option. However I also think that contemporary games tend to spam them excessively and ignore opportunities where in-game storytelling would be more effective. This is yet another case of movie producer mentality and preferring artist time over programmer cleverness; cutscenes are something you outsource to whichever offshore CGI shop is cheapest, and hope they roughly match up with the game when they come back (otherwise you get the Mass Effect 1 space battle). Valve style in-engine exposition is part of your main dev cycle and needs lots of scripting (e.g. all the 'alternate positions and moves depending on where the player is' stuff in HL:E2) and QA.
I don't mind cutscenes when it's at the start of a level to set the stage (the Halo method) but when you start getting more than two or three during a level it gets really annoying. Gears 3 was an excellent example, you couldn't open a fucking door in that game without a cutscene. Sections of the game where you are trapped in slo walk and people talk at you as you walk by can get annoying too if you simply don't give a shit. It was so bad that the two biggest Gears fans I know put down the controller and refused to finish the game.
Gears 3 admittedly also had the problem of all this random crap and new characters awkardly shoe horned into it, which baffled the crap out of me till I read somewhere that Karen Traviss was a writer. I can still taste the WTF feeling I had at the end of the game when India's Navy appeared out of nowhere to save the day.
I'm not sure whether the "cut scene" or "in game (Half Life 2)" methods are better; the in game method is pretty damn clunky, the Half Life 2 lab expository dump was extremely painful and kind of SOD ruining. Cut scenes, unless the dev is an asshole, are at least skippable. Gears 2 had an awesome infodump interrupt method; Anya would start the infodump over the radio, and you could hit a button to have Marcus tell her to STFU and make me a sandwitch. If you absolutely have to take a story dump in the middle of the action, this is how you do it.
Bottom line is that devs easily can and definetly should work it so both the "fuck the story" (people like my wife and del Torio) crowd and the "backstory junkies" people can be happy. Skippable cutscenes work. So does STFU and make me a sandwitch Anya. Trapped in slo mo walk while people talk at you and trapped in a lab while people talk at you do not.
Cutscenes should be skippable or there should be an option to disable them altogether. They can be mesmerizing on first playthrough but can drag down even a great game when replaying.
I have to tell you something everything I wrote above is a lie.
aieeegrunt wrote:Gears 3 was an excellent example, you couldn't open a fucking door in that game without a cutscene. Sections of the game where you are trapped in slo walk and people talk at you as you walk by can get annoying too if you simply don't give a shit. It was so bad that the two biggest Gears fans I know put down the controller and refused to finish the game
Gears style slow-walk is actually a stealth loading screen. Slowing down the player or trapping them behind a door until you've loaded what's on the other side.
aieeegrunt wrote:Gears 3 was an excellent example, you couldn't open a fucking door in that game without a cutscene. Sections of the game where you are trapped in slo walk and people talk at you as you walk by can get annoying too if you simply don't give a shit. It was so bad that the two biggest Gears fans I know put down the controller and refused to finish the game
Gears style slow-walk is actually a stealth loading screen. Slowing down the player or trapping them behind a door until you've loaded what's on the other side.
Yeah, and when the slow-walk is well done (as it sometimes is in Gears and Batman) you get story telling done not just via the talking, but through the environment that you are traversing too.
People need to separate content from mechanism. Slow sections or s-bends or elevators are for loading, and that's just part of video games. When the content is awful, that's bad, but doesn't somehow makes the concept invalid.
Saying something sucks becuase it was used in Gears3's horrible story is stupid. It's the story that sucked, not the storytelling mechanics.
Stark wrote:People need to separate content from mechanism. Slow sections or s-bends or elevators are for loading, and that's just part of video games.
No, that's a budget and/or dev team competence issue. The GTA and Just Cause games let you wander over areas vastly larger than the average FPS level without loading screens, because they have decent streaming load systems. RAGE manages to do this with totally custom geometry and textures for everything. The majority of games could be made with fully streaming load, but loading screens don't seem to piss players off enough to make it a developer priority (i.e. worth sacrificing other engine features for).
Gears 2 you could skip almost all of the slo mo walk sections by hitting a button and telling Anya to STFU. There were one or two you could not, and they were clearly set piece story telling parts where you walked in slow motion through a Stranded camp and they told you how much you sucked.
A game as primitive as Halo CE you could positively sprint through the loading mechanism s bends.
Halo had nothing to stream. UE3 has a really strange/poor way of preloading which leads to the common texture pop effect.
None of this changes that you can't dismiss a storytelling tool be wher it was used in a bad story. That's like saying love triangles are bad because Twilight had one.
Only real problem i have with cutscenes is when they forces the player to do something he would never do - Like doing a no-kill run in Deus Ex Human Revolution and then getting forced to kill a boss in a cutscene,That's just fucked up and poor game design.
Mass Effect 3 is going to try something new on this by the way - You can play the game in 3 modes - RPG, Story and Action mode - RPG mode will be the way we know from the two earlier games, Story mode will be for those who doesn't really care about the combat and want to explore the story(laughable easy combat) and Action mode will be for those who just wanna shoot shit(conversations and cutscenes are at minimum) - it will be interesting to see how it works out.
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I've read through this thread and found it pretty interesting. I've been playing CRPG's for a fair number of years right back from the gold box days of Buck Rogers:Countdown to Doomsday and Curse of the Azure Bonds (now that WAS female armour pandering to the fanboys), right up to Dragon Age, Mass Effect and so on.
I've noticed it mentioned that too many games are pretty linear and I'll agree with Stark that Alpha Protocol was an awesome game, and sadly that's one that doesn't look like it will ever get a review, shame that. I've noticed one pop up on GOG that let you do pretty much what you wanted, and while the game is very primitive now, in its time it was quite good and that was the complete Ultima 7.
Bethesda always seem to have been overly ambitious with their Elder Scrolls games with the exception of Redguard which was a glorified Tomb Raider style game. I remember Daggerfall being a badly bugged mess. Is it any coincidence that the game worlds in each succesive game seem to be getting smaller and smaller, though to be honest I can't speak for Skyrim, but compare Arena with the entirety of Tamriel, albeit just being duplicated cities everywhere to Oblivion which was just in a smallish world.
There's also the JRPG market which in my mind has got too samey. FFXIII was just a linear combat game, even more restrictive than many JRPG's. The only JRPG's I could ever be bothered completing were Skies of Arcadia and Legiaa 2.
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The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.
Jade Falcon wrote:I've read through this thread and found it pretty interesting. I've been playing CRPG's for a fair number of years right back from the gold box days of Buck Rogers:Countdown to Doomsday and Curse of the Azure Bonds (now that WAS female armour pandering to the fanboys), right up to Dragon Age, Mass Effect and so on.
I've noticed it mentioned that too many games are pretty linear and I'll agree with Stark that Alpha Protocol was an awesome game, and sadly that's one that doesn't look like it will ever get a review, shame that. I've noticed one pop up on GOG that let you do pretty much what you wanted, and while the game is very primitive now, in its time it was quite good and that was the complete Ultima 7.
Bethesda always seem to have been overly ambitious with their Elder Scrolls games with the exception of Redguard which was a glorified Tomb Raider style game. I remember Daggerfall being a badly bugged mess. Is it any coincidence that the game worlds in each succesive game seem to be getting smaller and smaller, though to be honest I can't speak for Skyrim, but compare Arena with the entirety of Tamriel, albeit just being duplicated cities everywhere to Oblivion which was just in a smallish world.
There's also the JRPG market which in my mind has got too samey. FFXIII was just a linear combat game, even more restrictive than many JRPG's. The only JRPG's I could ever be bothered completing were Skies of Arcadia and Legiaa 2.
JRPG's tend to use similar plots and formulas, but there's a couple I think are amazing. The Shin Megami Tensei Persona games are spectacular.
I loved that opening cutscene when I first played. Even watching it now, it makes me want to finish that game. The only problem I have with it is the grinding portions of the game are very long.
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Perhaps, but in the UK we only ever had a fraction of the JRPG's that were available in the US and Japan.
For the Playstation and PS2 we only ever really had the Final Fantasy games, Grandia 1 and 2, Suikoden 1 and 4, Wild Arms, Legiaa 1 and 2, one Star Ocean game and a couple of others like Kingdom Hearts and Shadow Hearts. There was also one other game that had a monster tower and you could build up the town but that's one I don't recall the name of.
Don't Move you're surrounded by Armed Bastards - Gene Hunt's attempt at Diplomacy
I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own - Number 6
The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.
Anacronian wrote:Only real problem i have with cutscenes is when they forces the player to do something he would never do - Like doing a no-kill run in Deus Ex Human Revolution and then getting forced to kill a boss in a cutscene,That's just fucked up and poor game design.
Or suddenly getting his ass kicked by the same idiot raiders he's been killing the whole game without batting an eye. And with pathetic lead pipes, of all things, while he is a walking tank with Hellfire armor and a plasma rifle.
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JRPGs are different in that they often have a fundamentally different approach to storytelling. They're often about a pre-existing character that you drive through their personal story, rather than a western-style customised self-insert character that you use to put a personal stamp on the game.
Jade Falcon wrote:Perhaps, but in the UK we only ever had a fraction of the JRPG's that were available in the US and Japan.
For the Playstation and PS2 we only ever really had the Final Fantasy games, Grandia 1 and 2, Suikoden 1 and 4, Wild Arms, Legiaa 1 and 2, one Star Ocean game and a couple of others like Kingdom Hearts and Shadow Hearts. There was also one other game that had a monster tower and you could build up the town but that's one I don't recall the name of.
Ironically, the one other game you can't remember the name of (Azure Dreams) represents a whole other strain of JRPGs that we get even less of in the west, which is Mysterious Dungeon games. They're essentially Japan's take on Roguelikes, and are usually very narrative light rather than being a visual novel with random encounters.
Stark wrote:JRPGs are different in that they often have a fundamentally different approach to storytelling. They're often about a pre-existing character that you drive through their personal story, rather than a western-style customised self-insert character that you use to put a personal stamp on the game.
I think the current brand of self-insert character RPGs have been lacking. The last RPG following that formula I enjoyed the plot, characters and character building in was KOTOR. I really enjoy the Persona way of story telling. You have a character that you're playing that is thrown into an unusual situation. You're railroaded into solving the problem, but have many ways solve it, or ways to play the game. This makes the story telling and characters a lot more interesting overall since the developers only have to worry about 10 very significant characters and 20 secondary characters. I would love a Skyrim, or Oblivion scale world if the world or characters actually meant anything.
If it waddles like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a KV-5.
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Yeah my post was more in reaction to the typical criticisms of JRPGs by people who don't understand what they're doing and expect all RPGs everywhere to be the same. I actually prefer games with named protaganists that already have a character.
Stark wrote:JRPGs are different in that they often have a fundamentally different approach to storytelling. They're often about a pre-existing character that you drive through their personal story, rather than a western-style customised self-insert character that you use to put a personal stamp on the game.
I think the current brand of self-insert character RPGs have been lacking. The last RPG following that formula I enjoyed the plot, characters and character building in was KOTOR. I really enjoy the Persona way of story telling. You have a character that you're playing that is thrown into an unusual situation. You're railroaded into solving the problem, but have many ways solve it, or ways to play the game. This makes the story telling and characters a lot more interesting overall since the developers only have to worry about 10 very significant characters and 20 secondary characters. I would love a Skyrim, or Oblivion scale world if the world or characters actually meant anything.
I read somewhere (rock paper shotgun I think) that if you perfect your pickpocketing skill you can basically disrobe every NPC in Skyrim and they won't even notice or get upset at you.
10/10 GOTY
One of the things that really bothered me about Oblivion is that there are literally hundreds of named NPCs in the game, but there are only what, half a dozen voice actors? Not counting Emperor Picard, Boromir and Zod. Bioware has a lot of faults but they at least make it so they have multiple characters with different voices in their games.
Bioware still has individual quests where half the NPCs have the same actor, but that's usually in DLC (where I guess they didn't bother phoning up too many actors'
The only Bioware game I tolerate is Mass Effect and only because it's a new sci-fi universe (it isn't jedi wanking or Star Trek). I can't stand their fantasy games (Dragon Age): their top down combat system is annoying, the characters aren't anything special, the plot is uninteresting and they foist DLC on you. Nothing is more annoying than a cutscene where you talk with a guy about his problems and after the conversation to try to start his quest and tells you that you must buy DLC to play it. That is the biggest immersion fail ever.
Also that romance writer... Twilight much?
If it waddles like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a KV-5.
Vote Electron Standard, vote Tron Paul 2012
Stark wrote:Halo had nothing to stream. UE3 has a really strange/poor way of preloading which leads to the common texture pop effect.
None of this changes that you can't dismiss a storytelling tool be wher it was used in a bad story. That's like saying love triangles are bad because Twilight had one.
Unskippable infodumps don't suck because Gears 3 had a shitty story, their suckage is intrinsic to their nature. Halo Reach had one of the stupidest story ideas ever with horrible execution to match, but two button presses at the start of the level and you're free of it. Gears 2 I only remember one "walk slowly while people rabble at you" torture crawl the guantlet section, but Gears 3 it was every ten seconds. If this was due to some sort of engine limitation then I rest my case on just how much the obsession over graphical bling is ruining game development.
