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Cinematics Are Killing Gameplay?
Howard Brown writes "David Rodriguez is a Lead Game Designer at High Voltage Software. His latest article on Buzzscope discusses videogaming's overabundance of cinematics, and how their misuse is taking us further and further away from what videogaming is all about." From the article: "I made it perhaps three virtual feet before managing to trigger another cinematic. Silently biting back a curse I again attempted to button through it, but those rat-bastard developers were bound and determined to have me watch their cinematic magic. Idly tapping the button, as if hoping that somehow the rules would change, I sat and listened as some NPC taught me all about targeting."
I can't stand these things. I bought a GAME to PLAY. Not a POORLY ANIMATED MOVIE to WATCH. Whenever I get a title that I think might be "rich" with cinematics, I look at the preferences to see if there's a way to speed them up. I turn off the sound in them if possible, I make text scroll as fast as possible, etc. I know they want to "advance the story"; but if a game wants to have any CHANCE at replay value, it'd better allow me to skip the damn cinematics. That's why I can still play Prince of Persia:Sands of Time.
blarg.
I could write pages, on this but I'll try to keep it brief...
Cinematics are killing gameplay in many games... not all, something like an RPG, or a graphic adventure should have gobs of them, but I shouldn't have to sit through 5 minutes of cinematics before I start running and jumping in a Sonic or Mario type game... Cinematics and story in general are great, but they should be used in moderation when the story is not the main focus of the game.
Another issue is that cinematics can take gamers out of the game, and kill that adrenaline rush they had going. Making them short and sweet, and always using in-game graphics whenever possible is the best way to remedy this. Sure, those hyper-realistic pre-rendered cinematics are pretty and all, but it reminds you subconciously that this is seperate from the rest of the game.
Another big gripe I have for cinematics is that developers want you to watch these movies, but they don't give you a decent control mechanism like you have for DVDs and such. Whenever you're watching a cinematic you should always be able to hit start/pause and be able to replay or skip them.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Simple solution: allow game authors to add whatever cutscenes they want, but make it clear that it's very bad form to not allow the user to skip the cutscene by pressing a key. Then everybody wins.
Hey some games have lots of cutscenes, some have few. RPGs require more cutscenes than other genres, but having too many/too few is bad for any genre. But, there is a huge difference between a CGI cutscene and a real-time cutscene. Always keep that in mind when talking about cutscenes.
Some people encrypt by using rot-13 twice. I prefer the more secure method of using rot-1 a total of twenty six times.
He never actually says which game hes talking about.
Personally im having a hard time thinking of any game with really impressive cinematics that has turned out to be a terrible. Nor can I think of a game where the game is really good but completely destroyed by cinematics. I mean the cinematics arnt even done by the same team as the people who make the gameplay and even the most non linear worlds such as Final Fantasy 7 managed to pull off being good with cinematics. (The lack of skipping was an issue but not with the cinematics themselves.)
I just dont see cinematics as a way of judging a game whether its good or bad. Nor do I see the cinematics as damaging a game.
If a game is bad its not because of some movies. If anything the movies are the only saving grace.
(I do take his point about being forced in to situations when youd have to have your brain replaced with a small carrot to actually do the things in the movie shown to you. That isnt a cinematics problem thats a plot problem. If the plot for getting you in to the situation was spot on then you wouldnt give a crap about the cinematic being there. Indeed I enjoy watching the cinematics of a game with a decent story.)
You may defend that crappy cutscenes supporting a rubbish storyline hurt games. The emphasys should be, however, on rubbish storylines killing gameplay. Cinematics merely amplify the impact of the story on the game bundle.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
The most frustrated I've ever been with cinematics in a game was in Zelda the Windwaker. I was trying to sneak up on a guy and hit him from behind. As soon as I got within a few feet, I get a cut scene to him noticing me, then turning around and heading toward me. Of course, I couldn't react during that time. By the time I could react, he was nearly on top of me and I lost some health before I could get away.
It only happens the first time you approach the guy, but it sure is annoying.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
"Lead Game Designer"
or as we call them Dead Weight, or Box Placement Technicians...
Wake me up when someone who actually MAKES games has something to say. Listeing to one of these industry resource leeches is like getting advice from one of our artists about my physics code.
When I need someone to decide if two or three boxes go in a certain room or if the boxes should have a health power up or ammo, I'm sure Dave's the man. Until then...
This article nails the issue on the head and voices a common complaint of mine regardling cinematics in games. The single greatest source of irritation for me is watching a 3 - 5 minute FMV (full motion video) segment and then once its over and the mission/chapter/whatever starts, realizing that whatever was in that video has no effect at all what so ever on the gameplay or how I will continue playing the game. Funnily enough, as a kid, FMV was all the rage (remember the Multimedia/CDROM explosion) and I ate it up without hesitation. Video games with real life video in them, awesome, thats like something out of the movies! But now, about 90% of the time, if possible, I will just skip the FMV (assuming like the author noted, that its possible, damn thats annoying) since its usually not too great and also completely irrelevant to the gameplay that follows. Note that this is also due to the fact that very often, game stories are nothing more than half-hazardly used glue to keep levels/missions together; if you remove the story, the game loses some context but the mission objectives remain nonetheless.
Its kind of how a soldier IRL is given a set of orders but is rarely given a great deal of context regarding their orders outside of the immediate need of whats required to complete their mission. Johnny Soldier just needs to know that he needs to storm that building and secure 3 known surviving civilians and eliminate any hostiles. Whether that building was is additionally the center of a complex political plot involving several governments and trans-national companies is largely irrelevant to his mission.
Games with FMV will give you a nice 5 minute cinematic on that whole political plot and then will put you, virtual Johnny Solder into the mission with the actual objectives (secure building, rescue civs, eliminate hostiles), and in the end, that whole cinematic doesnt matter one bit when completing your mission so long as you just follow your objectives. Maybe a scripted event happens relating back, but more often than not, theres only the mission. This is also partially to blame on the saturation of purely linear stories and largely non-open games. The future is surely in games like Elder Scrolls Oblivion rather than Final Fantasy since while Final Fantasy may tell some nice stories, the games are little more than interactive showcases for stories. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed FF as a kid but these days I prefer the gameplay itself to be the sole means of telling the story as well as the ability for emergent gameplay as the article said, and non-linearity. Heres a salute to all those that are forging that road into the emergent future.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
I hate it when games want to install introductions, company cutscenes, game cutscenes, etc. to the HDD to take up precious disk space. I miss the days when they were on CD. Or at least make an option to install cutscenes or not especially on fast computers. Now, those company logos cutscenes are plain annoying!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Didn't I just say that?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
In some games cutscenes are good, in some games they might be bad.
In some senseless shooting games, it might be pointless to have cutscenes, but in some games where a story is told its nice to watch them.
I am playing Age Of Mythology right now and I love the cutscenes. After every mission that I complete I see a small cinematic on whats going on and I love it since I still feel I am immersed in the environment, and it gives me a small breather before going into the next campaign.
When I sit down to play a game, that's what I want to do - play. I get sick of waiting for some weak story or lame plot to unfold in front of me. For me, it isn't about that. It's about blowing stuff up or solving puzzles. I don't need a whole convoluted back-story to enjoy myself.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
...had a home cinematic interface - Play, Pause, Rewind, Next, etc... Everybody wins.
Someone's got it! I've been hating these for years. All cinemas get immediately skipped as soon as I start a game. In addition, more proof you don't need Blue-frigging RAY for games. I bet PS3 BR discs will have half the media filled up with cinematics.
I don't play many console games except when I go over to a friends house (who owns all the consoles pretty much ever made) and he pointed out something interesting when we played RE4 on his game cube. The cut scenes melded perfectly between gameplay and the cenematics.
He handed the controller to me and I died a few times because I couldn't tell where the CGI sequence began and ended which resulted in me having to start playing right away. I was finding myself just sitting there waiting for the screen to change and then the guy with chainsaw lops me into peices. Although a bit annoying for a newbie, there wasn't that jaring feature where you had to jump from gameplay into a non-related 20 minute cgi sequence.
It was rather seamless.
I will have to say that back in 1997 I didn't mind the FF7 CGIs mostly because they were draw dropping, but these days they have to flow well.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Way to support a bad product by paying $50 for it. The author "gave these asses FIFTY dollars" and THEN "went to look at the reviews for the game and saw that it was averaging a 4/10". I almost never buy a game without checking out at least one or two online reviews to see if it's worth my money or not. Had he done the same, I'm guessing he wouldn't have bought it. Even if the game got good reviews, he would have found out that it relies heavily on cinematics, and would've at least second guessed the purchase. If he bought it anyway.. well, he was warned.
Fox Hunt(My personal favorite), Dragon's Lair, Psychic Detective, Nightrap...sure these games are kind of campy, but I think they're fun as hell. I want to see some more "interactive movies". As far as cinematics killing gameplay, if it's a game that doesn't need it (sonic, mario, a racing game) then as long as I can hit the start button and skip the video I don't really care. I guess I only care if they're wasting significant resources on making these things. Cinematics actually _add_ to gameplay in those interactive adventure games and RPGs, games with a heavy story. But I still wish they made some FMV games...
It's not from a blog, genius.
I've put some time into Xenosage a couple times through now. It's one game that's HEAVY on cutscences for progressing the story. I don't mind it in an RPG but the one thing they did that I love is give you the option to pause/skip the cutscenes. The other biggies is that I guess they realized how crappy the ps2 can be at reading dual layer discs and when you get read errors, you can actually restart he cutscene.
Wouldnt you like to be a pepper too?
Cinematics are bad when they "play" parts of the game for you. E.g. you are _shown_ how you save the world, instead of acctually doing it. Cinematics should be keept to a minimum, letting players play the game. Otherwise, games risk loosing the things that seperates them from plain old movies: game play, interactivity and the freedom to (well, sort of) create your own stories.
Nothing makes me regret a rental like a big unskippable cutscene. What really burns me up Super Mario Sunshine did this very thing. That's the opposite of what Mario should be, dammit! What happened to "Princess Toadstool is missing again. Looks like Bowser is at it again." There's a story you can get behind! Unlike "yeah, some guy who looks just like you except he's a totally different colour (Sonic Adventure 2 anyone?) drew graffiti and stole the shine sprites with a device that lets him do whatever he wants but he still can't kill Mario and argh! If I wanted a cinimatic, I would've rented a movie.
(For the record I thought Sunshine was a fantastic game).
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
The feel of control you get by being able to look around and even for the most part stall as much as you would like in scripted events strengthens the illusion. I'm assuming it takes more time to make those, but they sure do a better job then in game cutscenes.
There is no spoon.
Starcraft, anything by Bioware, Halo, Final Fantasy and others use cutscenes to advance the plot and also tell you what you need to do. Some games abuse them, many don't, and I know that a lot of them wouldn't be anywhere near as good as they are if there weren't any cutscenes.
Playing games is fun, but lets also experience a good story while we're at it :).
Beyond the Polygons : Because 50,000 polygo
If I have to see that unskippable "Knights of the Round" sequence one more time...
Cutscenes are tolerable when they are short and use the in-game engine. Some games like Xenosaga and Final Fantasy make you watch these super high resolution movies for 10 minutes then drop you back into a pixelated world thus killing the reality.
Some games like Knights of the Old Republic were great because the interactive and non interactive cutscenes used the in-game engine, were quick, and drew you into the game more. They were believable because it was using the same graphics and scenery that I was used to for previous hours.
Maybe it goes to show the perspective of gaming of the Japanese vs Western Countries. Maybe that's why Japan was in a slump this generation and Western games sold more and ranked higher (Halo, GTA, Bioware games, EA Sports games, Tom Clancy games).
Was gonna write something painful, but I'll keep it short.
1. Cutscenes are a favorite critic whipping-boy. Nobody likes them in theory. Well, except for the ones we like.
2. Big problem with video games is the underlying amateur attitude. You give developers huge teams and big budgets, and they get to the cutscene or the fancy camera angles and they ignore the fact that cinema is its own art, with its own rules. Frankly, I don't have a problem with a cutscene, or a part of a game with cinematic elements, if it's done right. An example of this would be the distinction between description and narration. Consider a Covert Ops mission or a social dinner party. Both of these involve a bit of "setting the stage": The FRAGO, The invitation, the layout of the swank uptown digs, the brothel where General Manfredsohn's mistress works. A cutscene is a fine way to show these elements (provided you can skip through it if you've seen it already). Or anything that involves boring, repetitive action. After I've made the drug score, I'm not going to mind a montage of driving around town, delivering it to my boys with Curtis Mayfield in the background.
But as it stands, it seems that many of these games get it backwards, and use cinematics for the narrative, and leave to the player the boring stuff better spent in montages. When they do get the purpose right, there's no guarantee they'll follow the basic conventions of direction, which are necessary for describing space in a coherent fashion. Instead we get gee-whiz camera angles, flyin gcameras and superzooms.
Grow Up.
You brought up my favorite example for this argument. Sands of Time stands is not just an example that gameplay does not need cinematics, but that you can have a rewarding and thorough narrative accompanying your game without resulting in endless cutscenes.
Sands of Time still manages to tell a great story through character monologue and vocal narrative, and that game literally had more depth of character than most games with hours of cinematics.
I always tell everyone to play it just to see for themselves. It's a great excercise in design by Ubisoft on that one.
I have to disagree with the RPG comment. Cutscenes in RPGs are a somewhat new thing. RPGs are all about player-driver stories; that's what Role-Playing is.
Only in the later console generation have we had oodles of over-produced, pretty animated sequences to look at. If you look at PC RPGs they continue in the more traditional direction: YOU are the player, and YOU tell your own story. If I want to play the role of another character in another world, watching someone's camera work and seeing the character I'm supposed to identify with speak his own mind without my input, I immediately detach from the experience.
Say no to Cinematics. Save Lives.
No wonder the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory game was so awful. David was too busy watching cinematics and writing articles to develop a decent game. Fortunately, the cinematics in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory skippable. Unfortunately, skipping some of the cinematics caused bugs.
I think HL1/HL2 has it perfectly right. The perspective should never leave first-person. Keep the camera locked in the player's eyes. Any cutscenes that need to take place, do that in-game, in-engine, from the player's perspective.
Even when HL2 had fixed pov cutscenes (the teleporter, the citadel, etc), it was still from the first person POV, and you could still look around.
Even if you have your character talking and holding conversations, keep that from the first person perspective.
I'll admit that there are some times that I think cutscenes are OK. Beginning and end of game (Even HL2's intro, while still first-person, sort of blurred the line), not so bad. But the rest, no reason it should be anything but first person perspective. And with modern engines, no reason that even the beginning and end stuff shouldn't be in-engine.
I guess this must be talking about Japanese console games, since as a mainly PC gamer I haven't been annoyed by cutscenes/cinematics. On Japanese consoles, however, I feel that there is WAY WAY WAY too much handholding and inane dialogue (cinematic or otherwise). I think I just have a different idea of what makes a good game (e.g. pacing, timing, quality minimal dialogue, character driven story over combat sysem gimmicks, etc.) than do the Japanese and their fans.
Handholding is a different issue:
I often rant to my console gaming friends about how games USED to just make early levels more forgiving and let you learn how to play by PLAYING, but for some reason game designers feel like they need to subject you to a two-hour tutorial level at the beginning to teach you how every little thing in the game works. Next to the issues in the above paragraph, I think excessive handholding has contributed the most to making me stop playing a lot of games over the past few years.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
This is actually an issue that has been plaguing me with Kingdom Hearts 2 as of late. It seems like the only time that the game play is NOT in a cutscene is when you're fighting enemies in a pre-scripted battle.
Fight 20 enemies.
Watch 10 minute cut scene
Fight Enemies.
Watch 20 mintue cut scene.
Repeat
Although the cutscenes are interesting, it makes me feel like I'm not playing a game, but rather watching a story where I occasionally get to beat up bad guys. In one section there was a room full of treasures chests that I ran through in a cut scene. I then had to defeat the main boss, which gave me a cutscene, and then exited me out to the world map. I had to go BACK to the stage. Fight through the ENTIRE stage again, just to get the treasure chests that I ran by in the cut scene.
FMVs are great. Cut scenes are great. But they have to be used sparingly, otherwise it stops feeling like you're playing a game, and more like you're watching a movie.
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Nothing can be done before the tremendous power!
RabidComics
That's a game that now sits at the bottom of my stack unfinished because of damned unskippable cinematics.
I loved that whole game and never really minded the cinematics until I got to the boss, had my ass handed to me, and tried it again.
So I load up my save, walk through the portal, and sit through probably three weeks of badly compressed video. I mean, that first time I wouldn't have thought to skip it- it was helping develop the story. Check out those elder gods! Second time? Don't need it. Just let me get in there and try to finish the game. Then I died again.
Third time, I stepped through the portal, went outside and had a smoke, and came back to find that the damned scene still wasn't done. There's no reason for that. If your cinematic is that damned important, at least let me save after it so I don't have to watch it every single time.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
I've worked in the industry a good 10 years now... and i've got to say that cinematics are the worst excess of the industry, maybe second to crap marketing (read G4).
Let me tell you, a serious game Dev project involves about 60 people and 12-18 months. A whole lot of that time/effort is spent building the graphics. This involves artists working long hard hours pushing pixels and vertexes around, just to get models, textures and UI ready.
So why do game projects often take a good half the artists and devote them to these big, expensively rendered, extravagant FMVs? It is especially maddening when you consider that they are almost always skipped by people eager to get to the game play!
It's all just a matter of self-serving ego or laziness. The artists want 'hot' stuff on their reels, especially since the vast majority of them are sad-sack losers wishing they worked at ILM or Pixar. The Art Directors need to show their state-of-the-art grasp of tools like Maya and 3D Studio (watch for how often 'realistic' looking smoke, fire and water are used in these FMVs) and their ability to wring the fanciest looking stuff out of their artists... The producers go along with it so they are able to show non-gaming bean counters and check writers something flashy in a dark conference room, and the marketers are all behind it so they can show the flash at g3 and the other garish, cheesy game conferences. Last, we have the designers, who leverage these FMVs to give a false sense of 'depth' by establishing some silly context for their weak or uninspired game design.
In short, these FMVs represent and tie together all that is disgusting and pathetic about the game industry, with a very short list of exceptions. They are both the cause and the effect of and endless cycle of crap games, cheesy spectacle, increasingly more expensive and less entertaining choices we have today.
Unskippable company logos at the beginning. This is particularly horrible in CnC Generals, forcing me to go in and fuck with the game files, because the cinematic refused to play properly. The cinematic telling me that E fucking A made the game is the cause of the game failing to run. That's a cutscene ruining the experience.
Set the wayback machine to the early 1970's. Back then I used to play Colossal Cave a lot. It was one of the original text adventure games, preceding Zork by at least 10 years. When I played, it was on a chugga-chugga-ding!ding! teletype attached to a 110 baud modem, which meant 10 characters per second. When you got to some place where the author wanted you to be suitably impressed, he'd "tart up" the description, running it to several paragraphs. (The mirror spanning the lake comes to mind.) But it was awful to have to sit there and wait for the whole description to print out before you could continue, even though it was the same description you'd read every time you played the game before.
Even back then, the game programmer had the good sense to only show you the "long description" once. If you wanted, you could always type "LOOK" and you'd get to read it again (the descriptions sometimes held clues.) So in that respect, games have actually gone backwards in user friendliness!
John
To me, a video game is best when it is a movie that I can play. I enjoy the cinematics when they add to the plot and draw me into the game. But obviously, they should be skippable. I doubt that the testers and developers manage to complete the product without a skip option. And playing the same cinematic more than once during a gaming session doesn't make sense either. This is just plain common sense.
The problem is not the cinematics, it's the crappy implementation of them.
I don't mind the FBI warning on the front of a DVD - I just mind that I can't skip it.
...in Tetris. Before you could play, you had to watch this little movie sequence on how the square-shaped Tetris pieces were taking over the land of Tetrisania and were oppressing the T-shaped pieces. Then you ran into the L-shaped pieces and their back story.
It's only going to get worse when the Tetris MMORPG is released. You have to talk to the RED L-shaped piece to go on a quest to defeat the evil 4-blocks-in-a-line monster, but get a magic item from the zig-zag piece first.
The shortest in-game movie sequences? pac man.
Cinematic elements in games including scripted sequences, fmv's, in game cutscenes etc are closely parralled to the beginning of film.
They didn't know how to use the medium so they just taped plays and tried to show them in cinema's.
Game makers are using film in an interactive medium, why?
Video games are currently a mixture between classic skill and strategy games and film.
Sports became platformers,
Martial arts became fighting games
Chess became things like Quake and CS (Ask anyone who's getting good)...
Film has it's place there too but there are enough classic gameplay elements in other areas of entertainment that it's not necessary.
The problem isn't that the two are being combined but that the genres we have don't reflect the inherent division between passive and active entertainment.
We're going to see genre's emerge that are more tied to the area of the gamers interest and less to classic notions of genre established by film or sports.
Full cinematics, professional actors (and their union bullshit), professional voice talent... why do you think games are so high priced these days? Each new game must out-do the last, so more money is allocated to hire the people that apply the lipstick and makeup to the pig.
Good games don't need this.
I think ciniematic effects are a thing of balance, but also the developer needs to know if he can tell the story without the cinematics gettin in the way: Two games: Halo and Half Life 2. Halo: Cinematics: Short, to the point, and highly relevant to the story. Could Bungie have told the halo story without cinematics? Perhaps, but I think it would have taken away from the epic scale that I think they were aiming for. half life 2: No cinematics: Excellent story (did the game life up to the hype? Not really...), told first person exclusivly. You don't say anythng. And not once do you lose control of your character in a non-sensical way. Which was better? I can't tell you. I liked 'em both.
One of the worst offenders of this unskippable crime is the original Black & White. Whenever you started a new game you were forced to go through a 40-minute intro learning every little aspect of the control scheme, no matter how many times you've already done it!
Pre-rendered cutscenes are sooooo early 90s.
Cutscenes are not bad per se. You just have to do it right. A great example of a game where the cutscenes where like they should is Anachronox.
FMV in games can be a positive influence that increases the richness of a game but in the last couple of years they have become in increasing burden that the rest of the game has to make up for.
When FMV really became popular/possible around the N64/playstation time there were good reasons to have it. Twenty seconds of FMV can explain more about a situation, the motivation of the character, the relationships between the characters and why the player should give a damn than a half dozen pages of text (which the player wont read anyway) ever could. It's the 'a picture is worth a thousand words' thing and 'don't tell when you can show'.
At the same time if a FMV doesn't explain anything pertinent to the situation it detracts from the game since it is essentially a waste of time. Imagine a Final Fantasy intro to a game of Tetris. It doesn't work because nothing in the intro can have any relevance to falling blocks. Simply dramatizing the blocks doesn't work since the player would rather be playing than watching and dramatizing such a trivial thing approaches mock-epic.
There are also multiple ways of showing things. Game producers dont need to rely on FMV all the time. If an RPG needs to have an army getting ripped to shreds the designer does not need a five minute FMV showing it getting ripped to shreds. A thirty second intro to the battle then allowing the player to take part in the battle while other soldiers make passing comments like "Retreat!" or even "We're getting ripped to shreds!" works just fine. It shows there is a battle and allows the player the play the game while conveying the needed information (IE. They're losing. Badly.)
The point of a game is to play it and FMV should aid game play, not the other way around. It seems that many game designers want to be directors and are fashioning games to show off their directorial prowess. In the beginning FMV had to be short because of hardware limitations but as that progressed they got longer and more frequent to the point where at least parts of games can be more FMV than game. Ironically, these are usually the parts of the game that are supposed to be the most exciting to play but end up frustrating because the player is constantly being interrupted from playing by being shown yet another dramatic entrance of the villain.
Game designers are even trying to turn dialogue exchanges into FMV. A prime example is in StarOcean:TEOT where all the dialogue breaks are directed and shown from multiple camera angles to make it really pretty to watch. Whatever happened to short, snappy dialogue that gets the point across and lets the player continue playing? Pretty FMV dialouge scenes dont dont do anything that NES text boxes didnt do while making the player wait even longer to continue playing.
FMV can be a benefit games but they're being used far past their ability to aid games to the point that they are hurting them.
... are not so much the cutscenes in games themselves but when game manufacturers market their games by showing NOTHING BUT cutscenes on the TV ads. Check out any of the XBox 360 games' ads other than King Kong to see what I'm talking about.
Some games, like God of War, are impressively enhanced by the cutscenes and how they add to the storyline.
Now, I'm not saying Fallout 2 was overburdened with cutscenes--it sure as hell wasn't, and since most of those that I can remember involved nuclear explosions, I think we can easily overlook those. However, it had one cutscene of unspeakable unimportance, awkward placement, and inane length: the tanker launch. Yes, it's significant in that the tanker takes you to the final area of the game. Yes, it's a lot of work getting the taker going (relatively speaking--nothing in FO2 was all that much work). Yes, it's slightly impressive to watch the tanker take out half the dock because the dipshit player forgot to unhook the mooring lines, whatever. Yes, the water was somewhat well-rendered.
You still spend a very, very long time watching an old rust-bucket tanker _slowly_ trawl off into the sunset while overly dramatic music plays. No characters are visible. No dialog. No real action. I understand that they want to build tension, but a long scene involving an incredibly slow-moving object really doesn't do that for me. It's probably the single most pointless cinematic scene in a video game--they could've cut its length by two-thirds and nobody would have shit a kitten. My point isn't that it wasn't skippable or that I don't have the patience to sit for a two-minute movie. Rather, I think it's sad that they spent money and time developing such a long and pointless rendition of an unimportant scene. Now, the cinematic where you finally arrive at your destination is much less pointless, even though it also has some needlessly drawn-out parts. They could've spend that money giving another NPC a "talking head." Vic or Cassidy or Goris could've used one.
Can anyone else think of other examples of uninteresting or criminally unimportant cutscenes from video games?
(Heh. Criminal Insignificance. "Peter Gibbons, you've lead a trite and meaningless life. And you're a very bad person.")
I remember back in my Nintendo/SuperNintendo days feeling cheated if they didn't have some sort of cutscene at the end of the game. "What? Just credits? I'm supposed to be rewarded with at least a sliding picture of each of the main characters in the game!" Back then, I'd try to beat a game a second time only faster or after finding all the secrets only to unlock a second hidden bonus "ending".
To issue a broad-sweeping statement that all cut-scenes "suck" is well... for lack of a better phrase right now... garbage. CGIs are a dying breed that i'm a fan of. Hating CGIs, I believe, is just a byproduct of twitch-gamers. I don't find that cinematics take away from the game if they're well done, so to issue a general statement saying that they ALL suck is absolutely ridiculous. I appreciate them if they're done well. Like most, I hate them if they do in fact "suck." But there's no way you'll get me to believe that you've sat down and watched the introductory cinematic to WarHammer 40000: Dawn of War, or any of the Blizzard Cinematics team's CGI's from WarCraft I to the WoW Intro and not walked away absolutely SCREAMING for more. Just to name a few, Dawn of War, StarCraft & Brood War, WarCraft (I, II & III), Diablo (I, II, and LoD), Command & Conquer (every single game in the series), Armies of Exigo intro, Any of the Armored Core series of games... any of those cinematics are all wonderfully done. Personally, I'm not a fan of game-rendered cinematics, but, I'm a huge lover of a well done CG sequence.
Does anyone remember that cutscene with the guys building the ark, where they'd sing that annoying song that was about five minutes long and UNSKIPPABLE? I think they must have thrown that in there just to poke fun at ridiculous cutscenes.