Games "must be like Hollywood" is the worst decline in gaming

[Lemming42]

Half-Life 1 only locks you in twice, from what I remember - right before the experiment, and right before the Lambda teleporter. You can just walk past all the other fuckers who try to chat with you (guy in the blast door control room at the end of We've Got Hostiles, security guy at the start of On A Rail, dude before the freezer room who inanely warns you that the freezer is cold, loser at the start of Lambda Core who wants to tell you all about the labs, etc).

It's not too bad in HL1 regardless though because the dialogue is so scarce and only ever comes up on the rare occasion that the game wants to impart some information that, unlike 95% of the plot, can't be conveyed through gameplay. HL2 is different story though with Gordon constantly being surrounded by boring dickheads who block his path and force him to listen to them chatter about bullshit.

 

[NecroLord]

Half-Life 1 only locks you in twice, from what I remember - right before the experiment, and right before the Lambda teleporter. You can just walk past all the other fuckers who try to chat with you (guy in the blast door control room at the end of We've Got Hostiles, security guy at the start of On A Rail, dude before the freezer room who inanely warns you that the freezer is cold, loser at the start of Lambda Core who wants to tell you all about the labs, etc).

It's not too bad in HL1 regardless though because the dialogue is so scarce and only ever comes up on the rare occasion that the game wants to impart some information that, unlike 95% of the plot, can't be conveyed through gameplay. HL2 is different story though with Gordon constantly being surrounded by boring dickheads who block his path and force him to listen to them chatter about bullshit.

What's the matter?
You don't like listening to Alyx's corny dialogue?

 

[JarlFrank]

Wait, you people listen to Alyx's dialog? I just whack her in the boobs with my crowbar while she smiles at me. Bitch loves it rough. Can't hear her words over the THUNK THUNK THUNK but I think she's saying "Please hit me again daddy."

 

[Viata]

I don't even remember who is Alyx.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Wait, you people listen to Alyx's dialog? I just whack her in the boobs with my crowbar while she smiles at me. Bitch loves it rough. Can't hear her words over the THUNK THUNK THUNK but I think she's saying "Please hit me again daddy."

You. Have. Issues. A hell lot of issues.

 

[Konjad]

Wait, you people listen to Alyx's dialog? I just whack her in the boobs with my crowbar while she smiles at me. Bitch loves it rough. Can't hear her words over the THUNK THUNK THUNK but I think she's saying "Please hit me again daddy."

You. Have. Issues. A hell lot of issues.

but crowbar ain't one

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

There's a lot of cool ways that cutscenes/scripted events change based on what you've already done though - one example that springs to mind is that if you pickpocket the book from the woman who can teleport you to Avernus, she'll play out the cutscene as normal but when the time comes for her to get the book out, she'll realise it's been stolen, correctly blame you, and tell you to get out of her store, which forces you to figure out the ritual on your own.

That sounds cool

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

if games must be like hollywood, who is harvey weinstein?

 

[AlwaysBrotoMen]

Star Control 2 , freespace 2 and games like civilization tell a way better story than any cinematic cutscenes. I miss those types of games and hope they come back soon.

 

[NecroLord]

if games must be like hollywood, who is harvey weinstein?

Todd Howard.

Nah, just kidding. Todd, in spite of all his lying and propensity for gross overexaggeration, seems to be a pretty decent guy who is willing to talk to fans, game publications, give interviews, and so on. Of course, this doesn't magically absolve Bethesda of its sins, which are many.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Fallout also did that with the talking heads and full voice acting for major characters. And it was a major improvement over the usual static screen with text that most characters got during dialogue. This decision added a ton of soul to the likes of Master.

But the thing is that partial VA isn't only thing that Fallout was doing.

Fallout experimented with mechanics which were considered "old school" during that time. Some of those, like parser, didn't lead anywhere.
Fixed isometric camera, for example, instead of 1st person view or 3d camera from varying angles like Return to Krondor had.
Besides full character creation was a somewhat rarity during those days.

Meeting with Master might've been good, but it wasn't buried under stream of tech gimmick or cinematic shit.

I wouldn’t say having something like an isometric camera, especially in PC games, was something that felt “old” in 1998. You could say Return to Krondor with it’s fixed camera angles like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy 7, and Blade Runner felt fresher. But the biggest PC games around that time are still things with “isometric” cameras like Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, RollerCoaster Tycoon, SimCity 3000, The Sims, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Diablo, Diablo 2, StarCraft, Nox, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Age of Empires 2, and Sid Meier's SimGolf. Not even how Fallout went about producing it’s visuals would get called out as being old until Arcanum came out in 2001 and was doing things the same way. I think Half-Life is basically the only late ‘90s PC game that could hang with the majority of those late ‘90s and early 2000s isometric games I listed sales wise, so it’s not like the PC audience was over isometric in ‘97 and ‘98.

Even the parser I wouldn’t really call old in ‘97. Adventure games were big in the ‘90s, and some Adventure games still having a parser function wasn’t unheard of around the time Fallout came out.

I’m not really sure I’d say Fallout was experimenting with anything that felt old at the time. And some of the stuff it was doing felt new. I mean there’s the talking heads, which besides being fully voiced would also change expressions based on how they felt about you. I’m not sure something like that really shows up outside of Fallout and Fallout 2 until the face stuff in LA Noire. Oblivion has a stupid (but funny) version of this I guess with the persuasion wheel where characters make faces to tell you how much they like or dislike an option before you select it; it’s kind of the same be also not. And in world where the biggest game around is the JRPG Final Fantasy 7, which has combat that hearkens back to Wizardry, Fallout and it’s tactical combat had a fresh feel to it.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

People forget how beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds used to look on a smallish CRT screen(most screens were generally much smaller, since the bigger the screen, larger and deeper the TV/monitor had to be). People complained/made fun of games with low poly characters like FF7 or LBA, but never about the fixed camera with the pre-rendered backgrounds. Only in the early 2000s where you could approximate the quality of pre-rendered stuff in real time did it become old-fashioned. Full voice acting I suppose was the confluence of increased storage space with DVDs and some franchises becoming huge, but there was always appetite for it. Games like Metal Gear Solid had demonstrated it could be done at a extremely high level throughout, although it was already a feature of less popular adventure games.

EDIT: I suppose by 1999 or so, certain games had demonstrated you could do "cinematic" stuff even with real time rendering. Metal Gear Solid, Soul Reaver, Half-Life... I also think devs are biased towards things that give them more control. I don't want to dismiss that as a factor.

 

[Vic]

People forget how beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds used to look on a smallish CRT screen(most screens were generally much smaller, since the bigger the screen, larger and deeper the TV/monitor had to be).

I hate playing old games in fullscreen. When I emulate old console games I play them in 2x scale in windowed mode.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

People forget how beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds used to look on a smallish CRT screen(most screens were generally much smaller, since the bigger the screen, larger and deeper the TV/monitor had to be).

I hate playing old games in fullscreen. When I emulate old console games I play them in 2x scale in windowed mode.

I don't mind playing with black borders(some people are allergic, for some reason). I generally prefer it to windowed mode, as the window pane and the Windows background ruin my imershun.

 

[Vic]

People forget how beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds used to look on a smallish CRT screen(most screens were generally much smaller, since the bigger the screen, larger and deeper the TV/monitor had to be).

I hate playing old games in fullscreen. When I emulate old console games I play them in 2x scale in windowed mode.

I don't mind playing with black borders(some people are allergic, for some reason). I generally prefer it to windowed mode, as the window pane and the Windows background ruin my imershun.

I have a black desktop background and desktop icons disabled for that reason. also dark accent color so the title bar is dark.

 

[Azdul]

People complained/made fun of games with low poly characters like FF7 or LBA, but never about the fixed camera with the pre-rendered backgrounds.

I remember being angry about quest items being lost behind a tree or a building in isometric games. Why couldn't they make it full 3D ?

Of course early 3D games had shown me later that a quest item falling through cracks in geometry is somewhat worse.

 

[Modron]

if games must be like hollywood, who is harvey weinstein?

Robert Altman.

 

[Vic]

if games must be like hollywood, who is harvey weinstein?

 

[Dadd]

Hollywood RPG:
Pick your character and class:
1. Nigger Rapper.
2. Casting Couch Enthusiastic Woman
3. Jew Producer.
4. Jew Director.
5. Strong Woman.
6. Hypocritical Leftist White Male.

Etc.

7. Tranny ex-pornstar DLC

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

Witcher 1 should be the limit of how much voice acting there is in a game. Yet by the end of the series you're sitting there for 10+mins at a time listening to every nobody with boring dialogue and no personality/soul voice acting.

 

[Azdul]

I don't think that voice acting is a huge issue anymore - when compared to visuals.

RDR2 developers spent 1000 of hours remaking / rearranging cutscenes after the 'game director' decided that they would look better with black bars - for that 'cinematic look'. Naughty Dog was crunching for years to make 8 hours long Uncharted game.

The little known secret is that motion capture does not really speed things up all that much - and mocap animations need to be cleaned up by hand.

I've played ScummVM Monkey Island Full Talkie edition - classic game with voices ripped from remake. It would be stupid to release such thing in the 90s due to disk space requirements - but nowadays it is perfectly fine. Recording voices took probably about a week - and the game is perfectly playable with or without them. The same goes for The Dig or Teenagent. 2D graphics in 320x200 resolution always feels like a game - not a poor attempt at making Hollywood movie.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Well, it could always be worse. Games could be like Bollywood.

 

[Reinhardt]

Star Control 2 , freespace 2 and games like civilization tell a way better story than any cinematic cutscenes. I miss those types of games and hope they come back soon.

try battle brothers

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I wonder if part of the reliance on cutscenes is that a lot of current devs will have grown up in the 80s/90s, where cinematic elements were still exciting. I remember rushing through the levels in Command & Conquer and Crusader: No Remorse just so I could see the next FMV sequence, and loving the cutscenes between Tomb Raider levels so much that I wished they'd make a whole movie of them.

Of course the novelty of those elements in games has long since worn off, but I wonder if a lot of modern developers are just trying to recapture how impressed they were at some older games, especially in the mid-90s, that first started playing around with movie-like qualities. It's interesting to think back to the era of QTEs because, even though they were shit, they were an sincere and genuine attempt to fuse gameplay and cutscenes.

The final release doesn't let you do this anymore, but I "broke" one of their early cutscenes in EA. It's in the crypt at the starting area. There's a bunch of undead that rise when you push a lever. I picked up those undead and threw them into a fireball trap nearby. THEN I pulled the lever... This worked insofar as that the undead were toasted when they rose. In the movie.mpg aka staged cutscene beforehand however, they were clearly shown rising in their usual place. Naturally so. It's a movie somebody had staged beforehand. I could have thrown those undead someplace else. Anywhere else. The movie would have always shown them rising in the place I picked them up from. Larian's solution to this was to limit your agency. You cannot touch these guys anymore without the cutscene being triggered and them rising immediately. This is a simple example. But one that shows the dilemma.

This is a really good case study. I do think BG3 generally does a fair job of letting the player improvise and play with game systems (you can skip the entire Nightsong arena battle and the entire Cazador battle, plus maybe some others, with the right amount of thinking ahead, and the game allows for it) but that undead thing is definitely an example of them getting it wrong.

There's a lot of cool ways that cutscenes/scripted events change based on what you've already done though - one example that springs to mind is that if you pickpocket the book from the woman who can teleport you to Avernus, she'll play out the cutscene as normal but when the time comes for her to get the book out, she'll realise it's been stolen, correctly blame you, and tell you to get out of her store, which forces you to figure out the ritual on your own.

What modern games are you and the other guy talking about? It seems like cutscene, especially in western developed games, are far less prevalent than they were during the PSX era and into the PS2 era. Western game philosophy now seems to be built around the Warren Spector idea that games shouldn’t have cutscenes that take the player out of the game, and instead should be in-game moments. Which was an interesting idea in the late ‘90s and early 2000s when he’d talk about it. But after more than a decade of video games where you control the character doing nothing during what is essentially long unskippable cutscene that happen in game, (which means you can’t cut like you would during an actual cutscene, so something that could’ve taken a minute in a cutscene because this boring ten minute thing where you’re just walking around or some other bullshit) I’d more than welcome a return to cutscenes.

 

[NecroLord]

Well, it could always be worse. Games could be like Bollywood.

Then they need proper dancing mechanics.