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Excuse Me, Your Cut Scene is In My Game
Via GameSetWatch, an interesting critique of game cut scenes at the blog ItBurns. He compares and contrasts several games and their use of story, gameplay, and in-game movies (with video) to get across his point. "Splinter Cell takes a more simulative approach to many of the character interactions that occur in the game. In the next clip, Sam Fisher grabs his target, Sadono, from behind and places a gun at his temple. Using Sadono as a shield, Fisher backs towards the door and forces Sadono's head into the retinal scanner to open the lock. Fisher continues through the doorway towards the roof, interrogating Sadono as they walk to the waiting helicopter for extraction. At no time during this sequence does the player relinquish control."
Cut scenes were originally used to fowward the plot in games because the computational power to render those scenes was not available in a real-time system. They were run in batches and the resulting movie was tied to a trigger in-game. It stands to reason that as computers became more powerful, the reliance on pre-rendered cut-scenes would diminish. For evidence, look at HL2: almost no cut-scenes at all.
Another game that did it "properly" was Prince of Persia: Sands of Time... where a lot of the plot-advancing stuff occurred during gameplay (e.g. the main character musing aloud).
The idea is that the player wants to play out the storyline of a cool movie. Not watch short clips from a movie that get in the way of controlling action scenes.
Cut scenes are just like anything else in gaming, they might suck, they might be good. It's all a matter of taste. Take FF for example. Every FF game will have pretty much a feature length movie built into it. Now if you don't have the slightest care why you are fighting strange looking birds or large rocks, you probably hate the cutscenes. But if you want to have any idea what is going on in the strange plots, the cut scenes are a must.
Plus most of us can't sit on the edge of our seats for hours on end. The cut scenes are good for a bit of relaxation and setting up the mindframe for your next objective. Now if the scenes don't drive a good story, and don't prepare you for what is going to happen next, yes, they do suck. But that isn't because it is a cutscene, it's because it's a shitty game.
Is when a game is designed poorly in that there's no way to save within seconds of hitting a difficult stage of the story. For example, Independence War was an incredible game but the missions were very long with lots of scripting, lots of difficult points, and no way to save between stages. There was this one simply awful mission where you had to fly escort for some ship setting up observation satellites. Fifteen minutes or so elapsed from mission start to the beginning of the battle. Horrifying. The original Wing Commander Privateer was like that. The final mission to destroy that alien superweapon involved five minutes of dialog before the fight began.
Regardless of the frustration factor concerning gameplay, this also cuts down on the drama of the moment. If you're forced to watch the same moment fifty times before you get through that spot of the game, the emotional impact is reduced.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
cut scenes can be good, or they can be bad. as with everything else under the sun, it is how they are done which matters.
All of which completely misses the point. A cutscene is a cutscene, whether it's rendered in-engine or pre-rendered video. You've removed the user's interaction. The article compared MGS to Splinter Cell in that MGS had a big, long cutscene prior to the Ocelot fight (doesn't matter that it was rendered in-engine) while Splinter Cell had the player actually executing the steps that would've been shown as a cutscene in MGS. Half-Life is another game that does this very well, where you're in Gordon's perspective from the very start to the very end, and you always have control to move around. The HL1 tram intro is a perfect example. Any other game would've shown the tram from different camera angles and used the scene as a non-interactive movie. Valve put you right in Gordon's shoes and you can move around within the tram, looking out whichever windows you choose (or not).
I hate long cut scenes that you can't skip. If you wanna put them in your game, fine. If you wanna force me to watch them, thats usually ok too, as long as they are fairly short.
It completely sucks though, when you pop in a new game and want to jump right into the action, but it makes you watch a freaking 15 minute movie before the game starts. And then as soon as it starts, you might be unfortunate enough to lose or have to stop playing before you reach a save point, and then you have to watch the crap ALL OVER AGAIN.
Especially the 10 minutes-long ones they put right before an ultra-hard boss battle that you'll have to go through 6 times in a row before you figure out how to beat it. Those make my urge to kill rise, and rise, and rise...
You can't take the sky from me...
Half-Life 2 most certainly had cutscenes. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 even has a cutscene in the most traditional sense: there's a section after the Antlion Nest where you lose control of everything, including the camera, while the Gman talks to you.
Back to Half-Life 2, though: it also had cutscenes. Early in the game it mostly consisted of waiting around for someone to finish talking and finally open the door until you can move on. Not a cutscene in the traditional "you lose control of the game" cutscene but a cutscene in the "you can't progress until Alyx stops talking and opens the door" cutscene. Later in the game there were cutscenes were you had a limited view - you could look around and zoom in on things, but you had no real control until the event completed.
I actually find Half-Life 2's style to be more annoying than the more traditional "interrupt the action" cutscene for two reasons. The first, huge, giant, annoying reason is that cutscenes in Half-Life 2 can't be skipped. Ever. You have to wait for the event to play out before you can move on. This isn't a big deal the first run through the game, but if you ever find yourself replaying a section, waiting for Alyx to finish talking to her dad and just deactivate the damned force field can get annoying.
The second thing is that it turns the game from playing into a game of "run to whoever's talking so you can hear them." In response to this, most people just turn on the captioning and sit and watch while the NPCs run around poking things. Ultimately Half-Life 2's cutscenes become these events that you can hop up and down during, but no more a "real" part of the game than any other cutscene.
If I can't do anything useful during the cutscene, there's no real point to give me control, other than to allow me to miss something because I'm not looking in the right direction. They might as well use an actual cutscene: at least then you don't have to worry about missing something.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Did you read what the parent said?
Being able to jump around still has no sense, if you can't do anything worthwile - the battle is ended, there is no gameplay happening, you can't go to the next goal, you have to wait until some NPC finishes the monologue. YES, you haven't "lost control", but it still is effectively the same, only worse - since in other games, when you don't want to hear the monologue (say, because it's your third replay through the game), then you can usually skip back to action, but in HL2 your only choice is to wait. Or run around aimlessly while waiting. Or shoot in the air while waiting. Does that ability improve anything? You might as well go to kitchen and fetch some coffee while waiting.