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Anime How come games dont use real actors anymore?

TheGreatOne

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Short answer is "both are shit".
Anyway, having posted this thread you have outed yourself.
Yours is an uncodexian mind thinking uncodexian thoughts.
Why do you care? It only affects shitty big budget games, which you should not be enjoying in the first place. The kind that attracts designers who want to make movies. Roguelikes, Grand strategy, 4X, shoot em ups/bullet hells, most CRPGs, competitive fighting games, arena shooters, good 2D platformers, TBS, SRPGs, RTS, puzzle games, sim games (=space sim, realistic FPS, immersive sims, flight sims etc), building games... none of these genres are affected by either of those. Point&click adventure games and CRPGs are the closest to being affected by them due to story faggotry, but other than that, these are purely gameplay centric games. And in pretty much all of these cases if they are affected by storyfaggotry, scripted events&in engine storytelling are far more intrusive than FMV stuff: compare the long ass conversations in Warcraft 3 to having to watch a cutscene between missions which you can skip.

The question is how come David Cage, PS3 era Naughty Dog, Rockstar etc don't just make honest to god movies, not why blobbers and 4X games dont have live action cutscenes (though like already pointed, Serpent in the Staglands has some in its intro and its the most monocled RPG of 2015 so far)
Long answer is:...
You're not really answering my question, just listing technical details that make scripting easier&cheaper to use. What you fail to answer is this: how does a Bioware dialogue wheel differ from a Wing Commander dialogue option? Yes, there are varying degrees of scripting, but in most modern games you're on such a linear track that you might as well take the control away from the player. Take Beyond: Two Souls as an example. I think I read that there's a car chase scene where there isn't a fail state. So you get to steer a car but nothing you do has any influence on anything. And this is a game that's marketed as an "interactive drama action-adventure video game" that has "interactive storytelling".
Animated cutscenes are much cheaper
No they're not. Proper animation is time consuming and costs a lot more than putting the janitor next to a green screen.
They would still be if they featured exactly 0 FMVs, so that's besides the point.
The point is that Terra Nova and later Wing Commander titles decided to do their storytelling through live acted scenes. The gameplay exists as a separate entity from the story, water and oil. Not very ideal, as video games are an interactive medium. Many modern games integrate storytelling into the gameplay, which should be a better solution. Yet in so many games developers effectively remove all control away from the player so you can follow the story/action sequence exactly how they envisioned it. While its not really representative of all of FMV gaming, Wing Commander offers a more interactive and branching storyline than the Half Life games, which are completely linear. And even Half Life 2 is way less scripted than modern AAA games.

When you think about it, separating the game into gameplay and story bits is starting to become a thing of the past. These days AAA games dont suffer from excessive cutscenes as much as they suffer from half the game being one big playable cutscene.
 
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Telengard

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The real answer is Immersion. There's this running theory (going for over a decade now) that any time one changes the game state, one breaks immersion. That is, it will do so with the standard target bro audience. So, flipping from gameplay to FMV changes the game state, which makes the player realize they're in a game. Whereas the long, scripted corridor using existing assets is just as non-interactive, but it doesn't change the game state so much.

And when I say the game state, I don't just mean the state of 1) playing 2) watching. Though that is part of it. It is also the change in the flavor of the graphics, from plain in-game assets to fuzzy green screen with crisp bodies on top. It is the change of camera focus and the amount of action displayed on the screen. It s the change from actions that the player takes to actions being taken for him.

The modern AAA is all about keeping the player engaged as much as possible while keeping their brains as inactive as possible. Keeping you in the moment, in the action, being the superbro action marine Spartan mass-murderer. FMV these days can easily be way cheaper than in-asset stuff, particularly using cheap actors, but stops the player from feeling like he's in the movie. And being in the movie is like the goal of AAA.
 

Metro

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It's because we've reached the point where CGI looks better than cheesy live-action cutscenes. And, I think as someone mentioned, you don't need to dick around with unions and such hiring lighting, cameramen, gaffers, whatever. You create everything and bring in the voice actors.
 

TheGreatOne

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The modern AAA is all about keeping the player engaged as much as possible while keeping their brains as inactive as possible. Keeping you in the moment, in the action, being the superbro action marine Spartan mass-murderer. FMV these days can easily be way cheaper than in-asset stuff, particularly using cheap actors, but stops the player from feeling like he's in the movie. And being in the movie is like the goal of AAA.
That's the essence of decline. No matter how long the cutscenes are, they are just that. Scripted scenes mess up the purity of the gameplay, which is far worse. You can't be in charge of the experience even when you're playing the game. Play a few levels, watch a short movie, rinse and repeat is very 90s design.
 

Telengard

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It is decline, I agree. But, it is what it is. There's a whole horde of people who don't like fmv or cgi or anything that "takes them out of the experience". That's the key phrase, repeated ad nauseum. Or at least it was before "immersion" became a thing.

Thing is, those same people love interactive cutscenes, and for the a parallel reason. You're not actually doing anything, but it feels like you are the one in control. And feels is all that matters. Because the brodude Spartan mass-murderer hero can do so much more awesome shit during a scripted scene than during uncotnrolled gameplay, and people wanna be awesome bro heroes doing awesome movie things. While switching out to cutscenes allows a lot more versatility in what can happen (and usually allows for a lot more display of character and personality through visual expression rather than just verbal), the bro can't feel like he's the one being awesome during a cutscene, unlike a scripted sequence.

There's even a bunch of essays out there on the topic, even a bunch from the fmv days somewhere buried out there. But quotes scripted scene master David Jaffe are always easy to find:
http://www.1up.com/news/david-jaffe-hates-cut-scenes
A number of videogames attempt to converge Hollywood style filmmaking within a videogame framework, Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series being a prime example of a game successfully applying impressive cinematography techniques within its storyline.

To God of War creator David Jaffe, though, that style of storytelling takes players out of the game too much, and he's approaching plot reveals in a different manner with the PSP game he's working on: there won't be a single cut scene in the entire game.

Jaffe isn't saying players don't welcome this style, but claims it's not the best approach. "It's almost like you appreciate the creativity but as a game it doesn't work," he says in his latest video blog, citing Super Mario 64 as a good example of a game that works without cinematics. "Obviously Mario 64 doesn't evoke a lot of emotion and political ideas, but it keeps you in the game."

There isn't much known about what Jaffe has up his sleeve for Sony's handheld, but given the amount of time he's dedicated to discussing the game and heavily suggesting the game will have strong political and emotional themes leads us to believe it's hardly your typical PSP platformer.

The game didn't originally function without cutscenes, though, and now the problem facing Jaffe and his team is moving forward without them. "We're ripping out all this kinda stuff we thought was clever when we came up with it that pulls you out of the game," he says. "And now the real trick is how do we keep you in the game and make it more than a game, make it emotional and make it political."
 

pippin

Guest
"Obviously Mario 64 doesn't evoke a lot of emotion and political ideas, but it keeps you in the game."

This again
This shit right here is the soul of decline. Not sticky cover, not regenerating health, not 3 guns at once. This stupid fucking shit is.
 
Unwanted

a Goat

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It's stupid. It's hard to use FMV for not-adventure game in meaningful way and if you'd make cutscenes live, the modern cutscene-gameplay transition that's so popular would be broken.

Other than that - voice actors are already fucking hell to deal with. In some countries they work 3-4 days a week and can't record for more than 2-4h a day because of teh throat. Imagine hollywood superstars.
 

Gozma

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I think FMV being completely unfashionable is a contingent thing caused by how games developed. The first wave of FMV games were cheap and shitty beyond belief. They looked much, much worse than cartoony 256 VGA, were made because it was cheap to do, and FMV became a byword for chiseling incompetence. If games had been capitalized like late '00s era and they had good acting/directing/editing/cinematography/writing people would have eaten it up and there's a good chance it could have been the respectable, middlebrow way to do storygames.
 

mondblut

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Final Liberation wouldn't be half the game it was without Commissar Holt.

"For tomorrow you sail for the kingdom of Daggerfall".

Scripted on-engine cutscenes with lameass models are just gay.
 

lemon-lime

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"Obviously Mario 64 doesn't evoke a lot of emotion and political ideas, but it keeps you in the game."

This again
This shit right here is the soul of decline. Not sticky cover, not regenerating health, not 3 guns at once. This stupid fucking shit is.

You are wrong here. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is chock full of political ideas and Sister Miriam Godwinson evokes emotions of hate and anger, it's not even funny. Until you feel the satisfaction of hearing her scream in the punishment sphere. That is funny. (In before diagnosed with misogyny. But: If it was misogyny, it was a good misogyny.)
The cutscenes of SMAC are pretty interesting as they mix very different styles. Typically 90s CGI render graphics, actual live action movie scenes (from "Baraka") and some other stuff (like that Microsoft advertisement spoof).

Generally I've never liked FMV sequences in games. "Interactive movies" were mocked in the 90s, with good reason. There was one title that was supposed to be half decent for what it was: "Tender Loving Care", 1998. It had some proper B-movie production values (and featured John Hurt), because they produced it as both a game and a seperate movie. I remember playing some demo of it and later seeing the movie broadcasted on TV.

Even Jedi Knight's cutscenes didn't give me much. I preferred the visual style of original Dark Forces and Tie Fighter cutscenes.
 

pippin

Guest
SMAC didn't tried to be a hollywood-esque "experience"; the emotions and politics were part of the game's mechanics and it reacted according to the things you did, instead of trying to make you feel you were there, living a movie.
 

80s Stallone

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74520-command-conquer-tiberian-sun-windows-screenshot-if-you-select.jpg
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

Guest
You guys forgot about LA Noire. Actually, you didn't, it's barely a game.
mickey-cohen.png
 

DraQ

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Why do you care?
Wrong.
Why do YOU care? Because you clearly DO care - enough to start a thread to complain about it.

It only affects shitty big budget games, which you should not be enjoying in the first place. The kind that attracts designers who want to make movies. Roguelikes, Grand strategy, 4X, shoot em ups/bullet hells, most CRPGs, competitive fighting games, arena shooters, good 2D platformers, TBS, SRPGs, RTS, puzzle games, sim games (=space sim, realistic FPS, immersive sims, flight sims etc), building games... none of these genres are affected by either of those.
Actually, the games which have no or close to no assets that could be used to portray whatever story they try to tell are the ones that might have legitimate use for FMV - you know, RTS, space sims, flight sims, strategies, etc.
Games that do have in game assets close enough to what they would like to show in cutscenes use no FMVs because that would be a lunacy.

Coincidentally a lot fewer games back when FMVs were popular had anything close to visuals they would need to portray whatever they wanted to portray in between akshun sequences so they can at least be excused if not exactly forgiven.

And in pretty much all of these cases if they are affected by storyfaggotry, scripted events&in engine storytelling are far more intrusive than FMV stuff: compare the long ass conversations in Warcraft 3 to having to watch a cutscene between missions which you can skip.
Between-missions cutscenes can run in-engine just as well as they can be FMVs, slides or whatever. It has no bearing on their skippability.
In-engine, mid-gameplay dialogue can also be made skippable - see Skyrim, for example (it's bloody useful there too).

You're not really answering my question, just listing technical details that make scripting easier&cheaper to use. What you fail to answer is this: how does a Bioware dialogue wheel differ from a Wing Commander dialogue option?
Again, both are shit. One is the kind of shit that also consumes disproportional amount of resources and has less chance of being not-shitty. Why the fuck would I want it back?

Yes, there are varying degrees of scripting, but in most modern games you're on such a linear track that you might as well take the control away from the player.
Coincidentally most modern games warrant neither purchase nor download so I'm not affected.
Also, movies make better movies than games.
Take Beyond: Two Souls as an example.
I won't because I don't fucking care.
And this is a game that's marketed as an "interactive drama action-adventure video game" that has "interactive storytelling".
And in 90s you had CDs full of cheesy FMVs marketed as "interactive movies". They too were shit.

No they're not. Proper animation is time consuming and costs a lot more than putting the janitor next to a green screen.
Proper acting is also much more expensive than teaching your janitor some basic flash?

They would still be if they featured exactly 0 FMVs, so that's besides the point.
The point is that Terra Nova and later Wing Commander titles decided to do their storytelling through live acted scenes.
And if Terra Nova didn't blow massive part of its budget on cheesy B-grade sci-fi flick maybe we would now be playing glorious powered armour simulators rather than dirty dudebro popamoles.
Why the fuck would I want FMVs back?

Oh, HI! I'm gonna play myself some Lands Of Lore II!
Look it's a Hul... uh.. no. Fuck.
It's just a faggot with fake cat ears because MUH GRORIOUS FMV OF TEH FUTURE!!!1

Fuck off.

The gameplay exists as a separate entity from the story, water and oil. Not very ideal, as video games are an interactive medium.
Yet you apparently see it as desirable state of affairs because with FMVs there is physically no other way.

Hell, why don't you GTFO to BSN? They seem to think that too there, even allowing you to toggle gameplay off while still having all the cutscenes and assorted 'emoshunul engagment'.

Many modern games integrate storytelling into the gameplay, which should be a better solution. Yet in so many games developers effectively remove all control away from the player so you can follow the story/action sequence exactly how they envisioned it.
So your solution to the existence of shit is making it obligatory and suck as much money as possible from non-shit parts? Makes sense.
 

DraQ

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Imagine

but with shitty live action instead of shitty CGI cutscenes.
So wow, much incline.

The modern AAA is all about keeping the player engaged as much as possible while keeping their brains as inactive as possible.
And I would gladly keep the former part if the letter could be persuaded to go die in a ditch.
Sadly that's not the AAA way.
 

deuxhero

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Daggerfall's intro is as powerful as it is because of limitations: They realized that by setting the scene at night by a single torch like that they could just skip building a set and props and not have to hire actors for anyone but the emperor and silent torch bearer (who is the he supposed to be lore wise?).

If they had an actual budget, it wouldn't be nearly as good.
 

Drax

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Daggerfall's intro is as powerful as it is because of limitations: They realized that by setting the scene at night by a single torch like that they could just skip building a set and props and not have to hire actors for anyone but the emperor and silent torch bearer (who is the he supposed to be lore wise?).

If they had an actual budget, it wouldn't be nearly as good.

Yep, true craftmanship is born out of need. Or something.
See? Austere stalinism is a great promoter of human creativity.
 
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TheGreatOne

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Why do YOU care? Because you clearly DO care - enough to start a thread to complain about it.
Yeah, asking on forum dedicated to gaming discussion why director wanna be designers dont make FMVs anymore is clearly the same as complaining about lack of FMV :retarded:
I asked how come they aren't used anymore since it's obvious thats what most video game writers would like to do, I didn't complain about the death of FMV.

Actually, the games which have no or close to no assets that could be used to portray whatever story they try to tell are the ones that might have legitimate use for FMV - you know, RTS, space sims, flight sims, strategies, etc.
In other words, good games.

In-engine, mid-gameplay dialogue can also be made skippable - see Skyrim, for example (it's bloody useful there too).
As if that was the only thing that was scripted in modern games. And it depends from the game. Characters wont stop talking in most narrative driven big budgeg games (Gears of War, Rockstar games, Cowadooty, Uncharted, The Last of Us etc etc).
Scripting is a far bigger threat as it can (and these days does) affect a much larger portion of the game. So it doesn't just affect AAA shit you wont play anyways, it's a cancer that affects games that could've been good/could've been better than they ended up being if not for the "immersive storytelling"(=scripting). A/AA games like Dishonored that would've been like Thief/Doom/insert game here, had they been made 10/15/20 years earlier. Thief had cutscenes between levels, Dishonored had immersive Half Life storytelling.

Again, both are shit. One is the kind of shit that also consumes disproportional amount of resources and has less chance of being not-shitty. Why the fuck would I want it back?
Read the OP. Again I'm looking at this from modern game designers perspective, who dont give a shit about interactivity in the first place. I'm asking why they rather use polygon characters rather than real ones. Which you already gave an answer to, it's cheaper and more practical to use in game assets.

Coincidentally most modern games warrant neither purchase nor download so I'm not affected. Also, movies make better movies than games.
I won't because I don't fucking care.
So why are you posting in this thread in the first place? Read the OP. We're not discussing this from a consumers perspective but from the POV of popamole AAA game designers. They're the ones pushing shit like Heavy Rain on consumers.

Proper acting is also much more expensive than teaching your janitor some basic flash?
Yet Wing Commander was less expensive to produce and more interactive than shit like The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite. Don't get me wrong though, awful low budget actors would be a tremendous boon for many big budget games as it would produce hilarity, make the games less serious and also drive away the hacks who take themselves way too seriously because they want to make "high art" (=Bioshock Infinite).

And if Terra Nova didn't blow massive part of its budget on cheesy B-grade sci-fi flick maybe we would now be playing glorious powered armour simulators rather than dirty dudebro popamoles.
Yeah because we're knee deep in Ultima Underworld, System Shock and Thief clones these days. Developers just cant stop aping those succesful Looking Glass titles. Dont delude yourself.

Yet you apparently see it as desirable state of affairs because with FMVs there is physically no other way.
I don't see emulating FMV gaming desirable as much as emulating the state of the industry that gave birth to them. Hokey low grade shlock filling in the segments between gameplay. No adult could take that shit seriously, and thus the industry remained pure from the influence of "auteurs" trying to make "high art" and "emotional experiences" by directing in engine movies (Last of Us/Bioshock Infinite). That is untill Metal Gear Solid and Half Life came along and bad designers started unsuccesfully copying them.
Scripted on-engine cutscenes with lameass models are just gay.
Also for the last time, learn the difference between discussing a topic and advocating for it. Asking why developers who want to make shit like Heavy Rain dont just make movies and stating the fact that gaming was better off in the 90s != demanding that every single game should have FMV

Hell, why don't you GTFO to BSN? They seem to think that too there, even allowing you to toggle gameplay off while still having all the cutscenes and assorted 'emoshunul engagment'.
What the hell is BSN? And why dont you GTFO back to MLG forums and come back when you've played Wizardry 7? :obviously:

So your solution to the existence of shit is making it obligatory and suck as much money as possible from non-shit parts? Makes sense.
No, I'm just stating the fact that after FMV died and developers started aping Half Life, games became even less interactive and more railroaded, all in the name of immershun.
 

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