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Speaking With the Blizzard Cinematics Team
TheFrunj writes "Blizzard's games, such as World of Warcraft and StarCraft, are perhaps known for their breathtaking cinematics as much as for their gameplay. The process behind these cinematics is complex, involving an entire modeling and coding team — they even needed to make their own physics engine! AtomicMPC has the full story behind these incredible videos. Quoting: 'Storyboards become animated storyboards (thanks to a storyboard team who are also trained animators) complete with temporary music to help set the tone and get the pacing right. Then the animators and modeling team get involved, creating a rough 3D version of the final animation. While the modeling team works on characters and environments, the animators work with very low polygon characters and as the models are refined and updated the animations are refined. This is also where production technicians get involved, supporting the more technical developments like hair and skeletal systems for the characters. And then the effects team kicks into gear. '"
Too bad we just get one of these each year or so :(
I have mixed feelings about the Starcraft cinematics.
Video-production-wise, they were not just par but good (or higher) for the course. They were interlaced, not exactly high-res and 256 color palette (IIRC). But damn those zergs attacking the terrans in the science vessel sent you "omg, this is baaad".
But narration-wise, they didn't do much. The first can be summarised as "two terrans get ambushed by zergs in the wastelands". Great, but that's only a minor piece of the story. The bulk of the story is told, not shown (nor played).
To me, they seem like they're bling which is there mostly for the sake of being bling. That doesn't mean they're good bling, though ;-)
Let's compare to Warcraft III (Say, reign of chaos since that's what I know best). Each campaign has two (pre-rendered) cinematic videos: one at the beginning and one at the end. During the game there are video sequences for briefings and story development. They are rendered on the fly, by the game engine, and the transition back and forth between playing and watching is quite smooth.
Also, you feel like you're participating in the store more (in WC3). I think it's the interspersed videos showing your characters (well, units) playing out the zero-choice points in the story. By having it shown rather than told, you experience the story more cohesively (the individual "story points" have more and stronger connections). It might also be that the story is "narrower": it doesn't skip over too many events (so the "story points" are closer together). It might also just be a better written story, not sure.
I think Starcraft has a good story with an interesting theme: the struggle of control vs. freedom and rebellion against governmental, familial (Kerrigan "vs." sibling cerebrates and a parental Overmind) and religious authority.
But Warcraft III beats it on execution, on how the story is told.
Am I the only one who could care less about cinematics in video games?
Any time I am playing a game and a cut scene occurs, all it does is remove me from the game play, and I just find the "skip" button as quickly as possible.
When I am playing a game, I want it to be interactive. I want control, I want to act as the character. Cut scenes and cinematics totally detract from that - they take me out to a third person view they act like the "third wall" still exists, when in the rest of the game, it does not exist.
At the end of it - if I wanted to watch a film, that is what I would be doing, not playing a video game.
I wish all of these cut scenes and cinematics were just add-ons later or dropped; imagine how much quicker a game could be released if so much time and money was not invested in this.