How often do you skip cutscenes?

[Ezekiel]

I skip them more and more. Have been doing it to some extent for years. I try, but the devs are almost all so pretentious and bad at it.

 

[Glop_dweller]

Never. I generally view all cutscenes as campaign milestones.

*...and also a welcome respite from controlling the game.
(Especially in Homeworld, or Homeworld:Cataclysm; it's damn near sacrilegious to skip any of those cutscenes.)

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Only if I already saw them. I'd just stop playing the game if I got to the point I'm not even interested in knowing what's going on.

 

[gabel]

First playthrough? Almost never.
However, if I realise they're unskippable, I stop playing and refund the game.

 

[Lemming42]

There's a specific type of cutscene I skip on instinct and I don't know why. A lot of indie games do it. There's a type of intro cutscene right after you click new game where there'll be a panning shot of an old faded map, and then an old english guy will start narrating with some shit like "In the Year 448 of the Era of Alberon, two kingdoms battled for dominance" and 100% of the time I'm like fuck this, I don't care, I'll just glean whatever I need from playing the game.

 

[Melcar]

Always. Speed read the dialogue too for the most part. Fuck that shit.

 

[Wasteland]

20 years ago, I was a storyfag, or something close to it. Nowadays I'm the opposite--old, cynical, not at all easily impressed with modern video-game writing, or genre fiction generally. I skip every cutscene I possibly can.

I haven't played BG3, but I just realized that if one did play BG3 with my skip-every-cutscene approach, hypothetically you could finish the whole game without even knowing if your own character turned out to be gay.

 

[MasterofThunder]

Unless the cutscenes are short and entertaining, I no longer bother with them. Games should never strive to be movies. And if the cutscenes are pre-rendered, not only do they look like shit but they take up multiple gigabytes of space. Up to dozens of gigabytes, no less.

 

[Avonaeon]

I usually don't skip unless I've already seen it. Tutorial cutscenes or cutscenes showing objectives I pretty much always skip, since it can usually be read somewhere else afterward.

 

[Tehdagah]

Most of time. Videogames rarely have well-directed cutscenes.

 

[NecroLord]

I skip them more and more. Have been doing it to some extent for years. I try, but the devs are almost all so pretentious and bad at it.

When playing a game like Thief?
Never.
It really depends on the game in question and whether or not I've already seen the cutscene, but was forced to reload to a previous save game and don't want to go through the cutscene again.

 

[Iucounu]

I no longer try new games that seem to contain many cutscenes. Usually they are bad in other ways too.

 

[Mise]

100%. Who designers think they, to get me out of my zone just to give me an story details that some NPC is thinking aloud about something, especially you Ubisoft. You can add your stupid narratives and not get me out of my zone aka Bioshock.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

Quite often sadly, most game stories and characters are just really bad.

 

[ds]

Rarely unless I have already seen the same cutscene. Still, there are games that have annoyed me with how often I am interrupted and have my control taken away with absolutely pointless cutscenes.

 

[Stavrophore]

I don't hate cutscenes, on provision they have no dialogue choices and the dialogue is spoken fairly fast, still there shouldn't be more cutscenes than necessary, even well made cutscenes are annoying when there are literally >5-6 hours of them. What i truly hate is a cutscene WITH a dialogue wheel that have multiple mindless, slow and winded dialogue options. Horizon Zero Dawn is the best example of such trash approach, and generally any npc interaction.

You want good cutscenes? Look at Last of Us cutscenes, here's a great example:

No nonsense, smooth transition to gameplay, made with ingame engine. The best cutscenes are no cutscenes, where player have always control, but this at least is enjoyable. Every good game should aim to have minimal amount of cutscenes and show what is needed ingame if possible.

 

[Modron]

I skip them more and more. Have been doing it to some extent for years. I try, but the devs are almost all so pretentious and bad at it.

Only on accident. Do main menu movies count because I skip those in every Yakuza game since they are just montages of in game cinematics and spoil the plot quite a bit and I think one of the Nier games did this as well.

 

[Reinhardt]

You want good cutscenes? Look at Last of Us cutscenes, here's a great example:

people just standing there talking is never a good cutscene. they could just as well talk when walking to next questmark, saving me time.

 

[Hellraiser]

I fast forward dialogue and read the subtitles unless I am really into the story, which isn't often nowadays.

 

[Hag]

There are so many games doing away with cutscenes to deliver their story through solid gameplay (SOMA, Obra Dinn, The Outer Wilds, etc.) that I believe cutscenes are the lazy developer solution. If anything, I'd rather have the wall-of-text-in-your-face approach of Age of Decadence and read a well-written paragraph than to suffer through those tedious moments that are almost never interesting nor well played.

So yeah, I fast forward through cutscenes when I don't ditch them entirely.

 

[MasterofThunder]

As a slight hot take, I feel that some cinematic elements are necessary in a game. Not only to add flavor, but to bring the game up to a higher level of art. However, they should not be the FOCUS of a game or compromise on it's other aspects. Ideally they would be handled by a department independent of the development team, which would focus on gameplay and level design, and always be skippable without impacting the enjoyability of the game.

A game without any story is nihilistic. The games that lack a story tend to be old arcade games, where obtaining the highest score and mastering the game was a "story" in and of itself. But even if you're talking about a Japanese SHMUP, the visuals alone tell a vague story of some kind. Some even include short story segments/cutscenes that can be fast forwarded.

 

[luj1]

always

i have never not skipped them

 

[Ezekiel]

You want good cutscenes? Look at Last of Us cutscenes, here's a great example:

people just standing there talking is never a good cutscene. they could just as well talk when walking to next questmark, saving me time.

Often better to make it a cutscene, because I don't pay as much attention when I am playing the game, interacting.

 

[Reinhardt]

You want good cutscenes? Look at Last of Us cutscenes, here's a great example:

people just standing there talking is never a good cutscene. they could just as well talk when walking to next questmark, saving me time.

Often better to make it a cutscene, because I don't pay as much attention when I am playing the game, interacting.

most of the time you lose nothing for not paying attention

 

[Shinji]

I think it's worse with indie games.

They so desperately want to add cutscenes to their games that they don't even bother asking themselves if they should.
Usually the end result is a very lame "visual novel" sequence, where the characters are just standing there while the text is the only thing getting animated.

If you're going to add cutscenes, use them for something that you can't do otherwise with gameplay.
I mean, that's what cutscenes were meant to be used for.