Kubrick, Kundera, and why cinematics in gaming suck balls

[Bohrain]

I like cutscenes when they feel like a reward of sorts. Beginning of a stage, pre-boss clips and stuff like that. On the shorter side and decently directed. Half the fun in No More Heroes are those cutscenes before and after the bosses, it basically elevated the overall quality to another level since the gameplay in that series is pretty basic. Stuff like this is great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhrwA4PiLjo

Cinematics tend to be awful when the whole game is designed with cinematic storytelling in mind. If you put all the cutscenes, voiced dialogue and so forth together in a game like say, Mass Effect or Witcher 3 you'll get probably at least 10 hours of cinematic content. The sheer scope tends to results in fuckups of some caliber, but usually it boils down to scripts that don't get much if any editing passes or incompetent voice direction. Add the limitations that the in-engine scenes have for cinematography and you have janky cinematic content that the player start to skip or fast forward after a while. People don't like watching shitty movies that are long, same principle applies to games. And David Cage-esque crap that tries to bake interactivity into everything mostly via QTE's are equally shitty. Yes, games are about interactivity, but it's like going to a seafood restaurant and finding out that they put a mackerel in your coffee to make it thematically appropriate.

 

[anvi]

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I agree! I've been trying to say the same thing about lots of decline things for years but with a lot of it, it's hard to argue with, "stfu boomer everything is subjective". But it's also hard to care about them.

 

[Morenatsu.]

2001 sucks and tarkovsky's solaris is better therefore your argument is shit lmao

 

[Trashos]

I was not impressed by Solaris, so I have only watched it once. I vaguely remember that Tarkovsky tried to humanize the whole thing too much, which is exactly the opposite of what Kubrick did. Anyway, I do not feel I have the right to be judging Solaris.

Now, Stalker was awesome.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Stalker is better than Solaris, but not by that much. On the other hand, 2001 is about some pretentious nonsense of muh evuhlooshun mixed with absolute dread and aliens and space babies. If the point was to show the horror of such ideas, I guess it's really good, but I get the idea that's not the intent. Very well made but ultimately profoundly retarded.