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

[Kev Inkline]

I think this is the pinnacle of wannabe movie shittiness. My condolences if you made it through watching it all.

 

[Yuber]

Depends on the ratio for me, I need more gameplay than cutscenes. Hate games there they talk 80% of the time

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

I think this is the pinnacle of wannabe movie shittiness. My condolences if you made it through watching it all.

The vast majority of that mission were gameplay sections

 

[Kev Inkline]

I think this is the pinnacle of wannabe movie shittiness. My condolences if you made it through watching it all.

The vast majority of that mission were gameplay sections

Well, I meant how bad the cutscene was.

 

[Lucumo]

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.

The Anstoss series has character portraits changing their expression depending on how the contract negotiations go.

 

[MerchantKing]

If someone sets off that canon it would be extremely painful.

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

I think this is the pinnacle of wannabe movie shittiness. My condolences if you made it through watching it all.

The vast majority of that mission were gameplay sections

Well, I meant how bad the cutscene was.

Eh, I can forgive it. They're trying to set the mood right before the final rush to find the person you've been pursuing all game. And it does provide some exposition + world building on the Salarians. It serves a purpose, cringe it may be.

That's much different than any no name NPC telling boring monologs for minutes at a time with "high tier voice acting and camera movement" like actual wannabe movie games do.

 

[Falksi]

I'd be a hypocrite if I slated cut-scenes in games as I really enjoyed a lot of games which were pretty heavy with them (Persona 5 Royal, Yakuza Like A Dragon, Witcher 1 & 2, Deus Ex Human Revolution), but gameplay is always king and I agree that far too many games get the balance wrong.

I'm just rerunning Avernum: Escape From The Pit, and I'm constantly finding myself thinking "this is genius....this is a game all potential devs need to play and study". I definitely don't do that with most cinematic games, they tend to be played then forgotten.

 

[Kev Inkline]

I think this is the pinnacle of wannabe movie shittiness. My condolences if you made it through watching it all.

The vast majority of that mission were gameplay sections

Well, I meant how bad the cutscene was.

Eh, I can forgive it. They're trying to set the mood right before the final rush to find the person you've been pursuing all game. And it does provide some exposition + world building on the Salarians. It serves a purpose, cringe it may be.

That's much different than any no name NPC telling boring monologs for minutes at a time with "high tier voice acting and camera movement" like actual wannabe movie games do.

Uh, isn't Mass Effect a prototypical wannabe movie game, though? They themselves speak about a cinematic experience at Bioware. For me, just another shade of brown. I enjoyed the game to some extent, still, ngl.

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

Uh, isn't Mass Effect a prototypical wannabe movie game, though? They themselves speak about a cinematic experience at Bioware. For me, just another shade of brown. I enjoyed the game to some extent, still, ngl.

A few "Movie scenes" mixed into there but I don't think ME1 went full *cinematic experience*. Intro sequence, visiting Citadel for first time, Escaping Virmire, Attack on Citadel and the like only happen at key points and last a couple of minutes at most. It's not Hollywood levels of scene after scene.

That's coupled with how the gameplay and "talking" sections are pretty seamless in their transitions, they're not separated. No stupid monologs from NPCs, mostly straight to the point if a little too much info dumping at times and awkward exposition.

ME2 onwards is when you start getting a full separation of gsmeplay and cinematics, where you have a stark contrast between cinematic/talking time & corridor shooting gameplay time, which never seamlessly transitions, almost always accompanied by a loading screen or something.

I can't really compare it to much though, I haven't played many of these movie simulators, Witcher 3 was the most egregious one and I can't really think of anything I've played thst comes close except my unfortunate decision trying to play the Spiderman game. The games where I tell myself I'll put the game down after the scene and I end up sitting there for minutes just waiting for it to end , only to be thrown into dialogue while someone drones on and on.

 

[thesecret1]

The main issue isn't whether it's cinematic or not, but that the bulk of writing in games nowadays is garbage.

 

[JarlFrank]

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.

Yes, that's the problem: cutscenes are still prevalent they just changed shape.

Cutscenes should be removed entirely, or at least relegated to between-mission treats.

Remember games like Thief and Tomb Raider? They had cutscenes only between levels. There was absolutely NOTHING getting in your way during gameplay. That's what it should be like.

If your story requires cutscenes, it's not an appropriate story for a video game and you need to rewrite.

 

[Lord_Potato]

If your story requires cutscenes, it's not an appropriate story for a video game and you need to rewrite.

Like most absolute statements, this one is completely wrong.

 

[antimeridian]

Something I see a lot in specifically PS4/Xbone gen console titles is a fade to black and loading period before and after many real time cutscenes. I assume it's a result of those consoles being incredibly underpowered and bad at loading/streaming in data. It's astonishing how many developers thought this was an acceptable solution, though, rather than reevaluating their storytelling methods. It's bad enough having the constant cutscenes, but sitting through the transitions makes it even worse.

Granted, majority of the games I've seen do this were shit games anyway, but it still crops up in the occasional title I actually liked. For example I played and enjoyed Days Gone on PC, but it still had the same issues with cutscenes due to how the game was architected. It'll never be solved in these games because fundamentally the game is loading and unloading a "gameplay space" vs a "cutscene space". It's not something faster hardware can just power through. I've seen the problem disappearing now that consoles have much faster memory and storage, though.

 

[antimeridian]

If your story requires cutscenes, it's not an appropriate story for a video game and you need to rewrite.

Rewrite this, motherfucker.

 

[JarlFrank]

If your story requires cutscenes, it's not an appropriate story for a video game and you need to rewrite.

Like most absolute statements, this one is completely wrong.

Like all of my statements, this one is entirely correct.

 

[Modron]

The Dig

I enjoy how The Dig is your example of games not trying to be Hollywood like when it was based on a concept by Stephen Spielberg.

 

[samuraigaiden]

Fortunately we still have Larian's Belgian greatness. As long as our Flemish overlords got us covered, we'll be OK.

 

[Azdul]

The Dig

I enjoy how The Dig is your example of games not trying to be Hollywood like when it was based on a concept by Stephen Spielberg.

I must admit - first few minutes of The Dig are VERY cinematic:

Few initial trivial puzzles with nuclear explosion in-between also seem like Spielberg's idea.

I suspect that Mr Spielberg lost interest after that - because it turns into LucasArts adventure. One of the slower paced and difficult ones.

In the mid 90's even side-scrolling platformers had few minutes long cinematic intro and orchestral soundtrack - because customers who just spent serious cash on CD-ROM (or Amiga CD-32) would feel cheated if the game would not fill at least quarter of CD.

 

[Butter]

Fortunately we still have Larian's Belgian greatness. As long as our Flemish overlords got us covered, we'll be OK.

Which Bond movie was this?

 

[Lemming42]

It's from "The Bear Who Loved Me".

 

[Modron]

It's from "The Bear Who Loved Me".

Which was deemed too salacious for moviegoers and subsequently all copies were destroyed with this still being the only surviving image of from the film.

 

[Butter]

It's from "The Bear Who Loved Me".

Sure it wasn't The Man with the Golden Barrel?

 

[Lemming42]

Not sure, I think the same actor was in a few others, like "You Only Short Rest Twice" and "Flayerpussy".

 

[Viata]

Daily reminder that a good game only has cutscene at the beginning of the level and at the end of the level. Everything else must be 100% gameplay. I myself prefer to play games that have two cutscenes only, one before the game starts and one after the game ends.