SOMA at least has Half-Life-esque totally-not-a-cutscene NPC monologues. Done badly where you are confined to a relatively small area without anything for the player to do these can be much worse than real cutscenes because without a cutscene interface there is also no way to skip them and are forced to watch things play out. In SOMA an additional problem is that the protagonist isn't silent and you have to listen to the character you are supposedly playing right now make statements that are retarded with even an average players understanding of what's going on.
Games should strive to tell their story through the gameplay first and only resort to other options when that's not possible (and even then, consider a story better suited to the medium).
Not sure what you mean there. In SOMA almost all talking is related to quests, meaning you have a quest to do, and with as much freedom of movement as can be expected in a corridor game. Often the talking is also the logical result of player action, like interacting with communication devices, in contrast with most cutscene games where control is taken away from the player at any unexpected and/or inconvenient moment.
Obviously you can't skip the very quests that the talking is part of. But the writing in SOMA is so much better than the inane cutscenes in most other games that I don't see why you'd even want that in the first place.
Agree completely.
Writer who can't make you feel immersed from the very first sound yer old english guy makes is a hack writer.
You mean those where the NPC walks much slower than the protagonist, so you have to wait for the NPC again and again?
I agree as well, but there are setpieces and interactions that are simply impossible to convey through gameplay. Even the likes of Half-Life originally had a few cutscenes, one including a female scientist that was supposed to betray you to the marines, but those had to be scrapped due to time constraints. Did it's removal have any impact on Half-Life's barebones plot?, no, but it shows that even Valve felt some cutscenes were necessary to add flavor to the game. Even that one scene where you are dumped in the trash compactor was a cutscene, not gameplay. I can think of many moments in games that simply wouldn't click as well if it were told while I was shooting at monsters, or walking along a corridor. I also do not think walls of text are an appropriate way to tell a video game story either, far too static and dull for an interactive medium.
Half-Life had ingame cutscenes, which are the best kind of cutscenes, to be honest, as they make sense within the game world.
When I start game and try to find proper graphic settings to be sure I can play it properly.
But those are the worst kind, because they're baked into the gameplay and you can't skip them. The way Half-Life did it was the 'most' disrespectful to the player. At least genuine cutscenes are usually skippable, but with Half-Life you either have to sit through the ENTIRE opening tram ride sequence every time, or use a console command. Which is far from the intended way to experience the game and doesn't excuse it at all.
You definitely should play it.
You talking about cutscene before first settings screen? Why do they do that? Or throwing right into cutscene followed by gameplay. No point presenting the cutscene to me if I haven't even made sure yet that it plays correctly on my setup.
