ITT: Discuss cut-scenes... necessary or a cop out?

*Warning* -- Extremely passionate personal opinion incoming -- *Warning*

Cutscenes are a crutch modern developers continue to fall back on again __and__ again.

They either are too stupid, or unwilling, or too afraid to let go of the antiquated story telling techniques of the silver screen.

Deus Ex showed us a glimpse into what this new video-game specific type of story-telling could be like over a decade ago. Yet hardly has a game picked up and carried the work that was begun there.

I'm not saying it's going to be easy... at first. It's going to require a paradigm shift in how to tell a story, and hard work to develop the means to implement it. Think of the transition between theater and movies. For a long time movies couldn't get away from stage thinking. It took Orson Welles to shift into organic dialogue, and it took Steven Spielberg to shift away from the "proscenium arch".

YET THESE WERE STEPS NECESSARY FOR THE MEDIUM TO DEVELOP AND MATURE INTO ITS OWN POTENTIAL.

The same shift is required in the movement from movies to video games.

The virtue of video games is interactivity.

An organic narrative developing from the interaction of the player with the world provided him along the lines of a consistent framework of information pathways and many interacting simple game mechanics is necessary to take the next step towards maturing the video game medium towards it's full potentials.

I agree with you 100% mate.
I play video games to interact with another world, not watch a movie where I occasionaly get to move around.
Deus Ex remains my favorite game of all time in that regard.

The new Deus Ex Human Revolution had way too many cutscenes, in my earnest opinion, not to mention a terribly contrived 3rd person takedown and cover system.

Although luckily it looks like Arkane is keeping focused on creating a true first person experience, not a gimmicky hybrid.

In many respects Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls takes a similar approach. However, I only played Oblivion once but there were a few cutscenes in that one weren't there?

I find cutscenes are a very welcome change of pace in videogames.

Metal Gear was great for it's cutscenes. Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire were (but these are practically playable movies). Every GTA breathes through it's cutscenes.
Unlike those, I really don't like games which have "cutscenes" while the player stays in character, like Half Life or Call of Duty.

Really?

That's interesting. So you like it when the video game turns into a movie?

But you don't like it when the video game keeps you in first person but takes away control. I can understand that.

I think the best way to use movies in relation to video games are as imaginative primers.

But I think that using movies to tell stories in video games is weak, especially when video games have the capabilities to tell much more engaging and effective stories through consistent game-play interaction.

It's a false dilemma to suggest cutscenes are either necessary or a cop-out. They are simply a tool to create an effect, but there are other tools of course. Having more interactivity just for the sake of being a hallmark of the medium does not serve anything. I don't like playing interactive-movie games, but if some people do then so what? They are not somehow less worthy of being games. This is no different than anyone saying that films should be realistic and documentary-like because of the visual fidelity offered by films, or that novels should always be fantastical and have elaborate imagery because they allow the reader imagine for themselves.

Yeah, I understand what you are saying. And I agree, to an extent. Developers do have many tools to use in video game development given the multimedia nature of the medium.

But consider movies. You aren't going to see movies take breaks from action every half an hour so that they can have the audience read a few pages of text advancing the story. What would you say of a movie that did that?

That's because they use the medium to tell the story.

All I'm saying is that video games should do the same. Use the medium to tell the story. Video-games utilizing cut-scenes are like movies utilizing a chapter of a novel.

I actually think they are. If people like watching movies in their games, or being dragged along through a succession of story cutscenes interspersed with shallow 'gameplay', well ... I guess they're well catered for nowadays. But I will absolutely judge those creations as lesser games.

That's not an argument against cross-medium techniques though, text rarely works because it slows down the pace of the film.


Oh please. Wing Commander III just came out on gog.com and is one of the most famous examples of FMV-heavy games in history. Try playing that and tell me the gameplay is shallow, I will laugh heartily.

I will say the pre-rendered cutscenes in Human Revolution are rather poor, and serve more to highlight how terrible the game looks in-engine.

Wing Commander 3 compared to what? If you compare it to Elite, for example, then yes it's shallow. Or even compared to Privateer it's shallow. I have good memories of WC3 and 4, but FMV games are pretty much a joke nowadays; they were abandoned for good reason.

I'm not arguing against cross-medium techniques. I'm saying that utilizing the medium to tell the story is superior to relying on old techniques of a different medium.

Are you always this emphatic? Between the thread post and your reply to the Making Grandma proud thread I get the feeling you have some anger issues. Now while I find cutscenes annoying in choice driven gamed like Deus Ex and Elder Scrolls they still have a place in character driven games because they speak to why that character is doing what he's doing. Otherwise I feel like I'm constantly trying to wrestle the character into the mindset I want and out of the mindset the cutscenes give them.

It really depends if cutsenes ruin a game or not for me Uncharted series for instances is allowed to do cutscenes in my opinion because they are short and entertaining but games like Gears of War for instance..meh.

Since I happily suspect Dishonored to be influenced by Dark Messiah, I find your criticism towards cutscenes well placed. But since you′re able to make saves just after each cutscene(recommended) you shouldn′t have to suffer from that very much. As I remember, those cutscenes allso served the story rather well first time I played through Dark Messiah..

I found Dark Messiah woefully inadequate in plot, narrative, and delivery. The only good thing about that game was the game-play mechanics. As far as Arkane goes, Arx Fatalis was their far superior game.

Great topic OP, you make your point very nicely. However, I think cutscenes are great when they are appropriately timed and paced. Some one mentioned MGS4 and that's a great example of a game where the cutscenes are intelligently placed and were long enough to get you really invested inthe characters, but not so long (or poorly done) that you were tapping your fingers and rolling their eyes half way through. FF13's cutscenes were too long for how much depth and development they provided, and there were far too many.

In a game like Skyrim, cutscenes should be short and kept to a minimum if included at all. YOU are the character. It makes sense in game like MGS4, Mass Effect, Uncharted, or even FF whatever to have parts where you're just watching. You are playing the characters roles to a certain extent, but you're also learning THIER story. In Skyrim, the story is of you.

So there's my take. FF13 was too much, Skyrim should have almost none, and MGS4 has a nice balance. God of War 3 also comes to mind. Many parts of that game could have easily ended up an non-interactive cutscenes but instead they were part of the gameplay. I don't think cutscnese should be done away with entirely (depending on the game) but what GoW3 did was a sizeable step in the right direction.

So! For Dishonored: option to skip gameplay cutscenes as well as cinematic cutscenes! You approve?

*adding to Orcus' wishlist topic*

It depends on the intensity, wether I like a "video game turn into a movie", or not.
Every (3D) GTA tells a nice story and presents it very well in the cutscenes. But the gameplay is merely a reason to get you to the next cutscene. When the gameplay is good, I can live with that. Saint's Row did this even a tad better, because the gameplay was so batshit crazy.

But taking away control in first person is the worst, yes. This really annoyed me in Dark Messiah.

Good movies alternate between intense action and relaxed situations. You could've broken The Lord of the Ring down into the battles and made it a 2-hour fight-scene. But instead you have 3 movies with both battles and other, slower paced scenes. The counterpart to this would be svcker Punch, where one action scene is followed by a slightly lesser action scene is followed by the next massive action scene.

That's not really what I meant. Pacing is important in any medium. I was talking about taking breaks from actual film so that movie watchers can read a chapter from a book.

The story of a game is there to provide context for the player's actions (excluding emergent story, which is a different beast), so if that can be done artfully with cutscenes, I don't see a problem. Thief is a great example of this. The cutscenes string the narrative together from one setpiece to the next and give us a reason to complete our objectives, and they do it supplementally in a way that couldn't have been handled within the game.

There are tradeoffs to making a story-driven game without cutscenes (as you can see in the Half-Life games) and which direction to go is just a judgement call that comes with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. Doing away with cutscenes means you have to make a lot of gameplay and narrative concessions to serve that choice, and sometimes that's not the best use of developmental resources.

The trick is to make sure the cutscenes don't undermine or contradict what the gameplay is doing. Human Revolution made that mistake and suffered for it. Adam Jensen never should have killed someone or made a decision that also could have been made inside the game in a cutscene, because the game supposedly revolved around choice. Since Dishonored is also about choice, they would have to handle the content of cutscenes in such a way that it serves the gameplay.

I guess what I'm rambling toward here is that cutscenes can be perfectly valid if they're done well.

I agree with RC. I understand the merits of not having cutscenes (half-life), but think about Thief. Those cutscenes helped tell the story to perfection, and I can't think of a game, Deus Ex included, that tells a better story (in an immersive way) than Thief: TDP.

it depends entirely on the game. but even in immersive sims it is neccesary to have a few cutscenes. most importantly the intro and ending. if developers wanted players to experience a great story some cutscenes have to take control. the only other way is trapping the player like in system shock 2 when shodan reveals herself to you. you can still move etc but you are forced to experience it, and that is how it should be. cutscenes should only be skippable on your second playthrough of a game. well unless the story is crap lol. but yes the storytelling techniques of the true FP/RPG/IS games are great for sure. mostly dialogue and a few cutscenes. then optional story like audio logs side quests and books etc. really clever and keeps you in the game.

but just imagine red dead redemption without those cutscenes! so im sure we can all agree that cutscenes should be the primary storytelling method of some games, and for immersive sims it should be just for important plot parts like the intro etc. i think the cutscenes in arx are a perfect example. maybe im not seeing the full picture here i dunno

think its about time i played thief properly. i owe it to them to experience their hard work after giving me ss2 and influencing dx1 arx etc. just never been a fan of stealth-only games and it has no rpg gameplay elements like attributes!!!

oops never read this first. worded better than i ever could too.

You won't regret it.