Cutscene Incompetence

[Jenny Mcduckerson]

God of War 2, Kratos decides to turn away from a giant statue he'd just beaten, gloating to the people watching and leaving us watching as it slowly falls on his head. Now, I know Kratos isn't that bright, but even he wouldn't be that stupid to just let something crush him.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

In Xenosaga episode III, the robotic android party member fights a very powerful enemy that she is having trouble with. Realizing that she cannot win, she tells the rest of the party that she will distract the enemy for as long as possible while they get away.

Instead they all just...stand there. No, they don't even try to help her, they stand there. They stand around and just worry about the android as she gets her ass kicked for a good 3 minutes. Granted, later on in the game when the rematch happens, they actually try and help fight off the enemy, but it was so aggravating watching that. The characters had never been displayed as complete morons with a lack of listening skills before (least I can remember. Its been a long time since I played). If the super blue haired super robot android who is canonically(? I think? I always assumed so anyway) the strongest out of all the party members tells you to run away, the first thing you should do is completely ignore her. Yup.

The rest of the game was pretty good, but I couldn't help but scream at the characters for doing nothing.

I remember that. I was very upset watching KOS-MOS get thrashed while Shion and the others just stood there. "Do something! Come on chaos, you're a GOD! Snap your finger or something!"

Hm. I'm not sure. I know there have been a lot of times where a cutscene pulls a move that breaks the gameplay, but I can't think of any. How about the intro to Dirge of Cerberus? Vincent jumps out of a window and one-shots a helicopter. Then, in the game, the same model helicopter shows up in the chapter later,and he runs around for several minutes during hte boss fight, widdling down its health. So...why can't I just one-shot the chopper like he did a few minutes ago?

 

[Souplex]

Any major cutscene/gameplay disconnect.
Character durability is a prominent problem. (gets shot countless times in-game, dies if shot in cutscene. Gets revived after death constantly, can't be revived if killed in cutscene.)

 

[C F]

Spoiler: Halo: Reach spoiler: Click to View

Kat's death.

She died due to a lone needle-rifle shot through the head from a suprise fly-by shooting.
To Bungie's credit, this is a more mild case, easily explained by the fact she doesn't like to keep her shields up outside of battle. In gameplay, a needle rifle is a precision weapon that can pull off a single headshot on an unshielded foe, so it fits.

Why don't I like it?
Because Noble Team has some of the most horrendous plot armor in gameplay, and it's hard to see Kat suddenly going out with the most normal of deaths when earlier in the game, on the vehicle level Tip of the Spear, she was likely shot, pounded, beaten, exploded, ran over, smashed by flying debris, flattened by super-heated plasma artillery, and has likely driven herself off cliffs. All of these will result in shield failure and a typical Spartan's (i.e. the player's) death, by the way.

Plus, it's fine to not have your shields on when you're sitting around the barracks, but at this point in the game, the entire city she's holed up in is enemy territory, the neighboring buildings are being reduced to molten slag from orbit, and the building she gets shot in was subject to a massive enemy assault that the player bailed her out of not minutes earlier. She and everybody else should rightly be paranoid, fearing for their safety, and wondering how they're going to be getting out alive.
At this point, you shouldn't switch your energy shielding off, woman.

 

[pandorum]

Thankfully, cutscenes are far from the most important thing in XCOM. It's still very jarring though.

Maybe in the originals... The new one thinks that 10 seconds is far too long a time for a player to go without seeing another cutscene.

Because of his inexperience he does not tell the other fire support team to get close to the door to lay dawn covering fire. So they do not see the rocket trooper when the door malfunctions.

 

[Pebkio]

Once upon a time, there was a boy who wasn't cynical. Back when Windows 95 was the wave of the future and harddrives weren't made to a standard size and features curves and extensions that meant they would only fit in the most proprietary of towers.

FF7 had just been ported to the PC and this little boy thought it grand. It was on the second disk of his grand adventure that he ran into the biggest cutscene he'd ever witnessed. Cloud had just done something stupid, which made other stupid things happen. Then big monsters showed up and Tifa fainted. It was around this time that my this kid's computer took a cue from falling breasts and crashed.

So far so standard. Pigs wallow in their own filth and Windows 95 crashes every week. Except, this time, the crash was so spectacular that the computer wouldn't read the disk again, ever. Other machines could read the disk... and his computer could read other disks... it's just that this one disk and this one computer were never going to speak to each other again. Maybe in the entire minute it took to crash, the disk and the computer had to participate in cannibalism and now won't even look at each other out of shame.

Anyway, the kid had to wait a full year to get another copy before finishing.

---

That probably wasn't the point of the thread. Now cutscenes can take up to 8 hours. Speaking of which, Metal Gear Solid 4. If there is one solid way to ruin a game... it's to make it mostly an unplayable movie.

Oops... that also wasn't the point of the thread. You know what cutscene made me grimace the most: The end of Fallout 3. Well... the end of the non-dlc part. I played a good guy and made all the right choices to get Fawkes, that intelligent Meta-Human guy who carries around a lazer turret thing that never runs out of ammo.

So I get to the end, where you have to go into that highly irradiated room and enter a code... then die, and I have Fawkes with me. So I can either sacrifice myself, sacrifice Sarah, or sacrifice no one because Fawkes is immune. So I sacrifice no one, the end comes anyway, and Ron Pearlman chides me for not being courageously stupid. Yeah, only a TRUE hero would choose to die for no reason.

 

[Lazy]

Deus Ex: HR

Hello, enjoy the raw power of DX11 and now enjoy these horrible cutscenes with spastic gestures, no lip-sync and an overall feeling of outdatedeness.

A valid complaint, though not really the topic of this thread which is pointing out the moments of sudden stupidity/weakness suffered by video game characters during cutscenes.

Speaking of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it's a prime offender. It seems like anytime an FMV triggers, Adam's brain completely shuts off. Most egregious, I think, is when he has the CEO of Tai Yong Medical at his mercy and he lets himself get tricked and then pushed right past as she escapes into her panic room.

 

[Xpwn3ntial]

Spoiler: Halo: Reach spoiler: Click to View

Kat's death.

She died due to a lone needle-rifle shot through the head from a suprise fly-by shooting.
To Bungie's credit, this is a more mild case, easily explained by the fact she doesn't like to keep her shields up outside of battle. In gameplay, a needle rifle is a precision weapon that can pull off a single headshot on an unshielded foe, so it fits.

Why don't I like it?
Because Noble Team has some of the most horrendous plot armor in gameplay, and it's hard to see Kat suddenly going out with the most normal of deaths when earlier in the game, on the vehicle level Tip of the Spear, she was likely shot, pounded, beaten, exploded, ran over, smashed by flying debris, flattened by super-heated plasma artillery, and has likely driven herself off cliffs. All of these will result in shield failure and a typical Spartan's (i.e. the player's) death, by the way.

Plus, it's fine to not have your shields on when you're sitting around the barracks, but at this point in the game, the entire city she's holed up in is enemy territory, the neighboring buildings are being reduced to molten slag from orbit, and the building she gets shot in was subject to a massive enemy assault that the player bailed her out of not minutes earlier. She and everybody else should rightly be paranoid, fearing for their safety, and wondering how they're going to be getting out alive.
At this point, you shouldn't switch your energy shielding off, woman.

Whoah, whoah. There was a narrative reason for that? I thought it was just from the shockwave and radiation from the plasma cannons outside and she just got unlucky.

OT: Final Fantasy VII. Phoenix Downs. Use them, Cloud. You have plenty. On the off-chance you don't have any, then fine, that can be an alternate cutscene forever changing the narrative of the game. But as it stands, use a goddamn phoenix down.

 

[Drakmorg]

In the Mass Effect series, my Commander Shepard seems to have the very odd tendency of being able to pull assault rifles out of her ass, then promptly discarding them whenever cut-scenes are over in favor of weapons she is actually trained in the use of and actually carries around with her.
Also, in the later two games, she often seems to forget that she has the ability to teleport and slam into people with the force of a small car. Oh if only she would have remembered, so many problems would have been easily fixed (especially in Mass Effect 3).

In case it isn't glaringly obvious, I've only ever played Vanguard in those games.

 

[Janus Vesta]

Spoiler: Halo: Reach spoiler: Click to View

Kat's death.

She died due to a lone needle-rifle shot through the head from a suprise fly-by shooting.
To Bungie's credit, this is a more mild case, easily explained by the fact she doesn't like to keep her shields up outside of battle. In gameplay, a needle rifle is a precision weapon that can pull off a single headshot on an unshielded foe, so it fits.

Why don't I like it?
Because Noble Team has some of the most horrendous plot armor in gameplay, and it's hard to see Kat suddenly going out with the most normal of deaths when earlier in the game, on the vehicle level Tip of the Spear, she was likely shot, pounded, beaten, exploded, ran over, smashed by flying debris, flattened by super-heated plasma artillery, and has likely driven herself off cliffs. All of these will result in shield failure and a typical Spartan's (i.e. the player's) death, by the way.

Plus, it's fine to not have your shields on when you're sitting around the barracks, but at this point in the game, the entire city she's holed up in is enemy territory, the neighboring buildings are being reduced to molten slag from orbit, and the building she gets shot in was subject to a massive enemy assault that the player bailed her out of not minutes earlier. She and everybody else should rightly be paranoid, fearing for their safety, and wondering how they're going to be getting out alive.
At this point, you shouldn't switch your energy shielding off, woman.

She didn't switch her shield off, the orbital strike blew out all electronics, including Noble teams' shields.

 

[votemarvel]

Kai Leng. The concept of the character, the plot armor in his cutscenes, the sheer Konami-ness of his very existence. The nerve of those writers!

This is really annoying. I am kicking his arse and then when the cut-scene kicks in Shepard becomes an incompetent.

In the Mass Effect series, my Commander Shepard seems to have the very odd tendency of being able to pull assault rifles out of her ass, then promptly discarding them whenever cut-scenes are over in favor of weapons she is actually trained in the use of and actually carries around with her.
Also, in the later two games, she often seems to forget that she has the ability to teleport and slam into people with the force of a small car. Oh if only she would have remembered, so many problems would have been easily fixed (especially in Mass Effect 3).

In case it isn't glaringly obvious, I've only ever played Vanguard in those games.

This annoyed me in Lair of the Shadow Broker. My Shepard is an Adept and yet when crashing out of the window with the rogue spectre she fails to use any biotic ability.

The problem is, with the weapon issue as well for Shepard, they write the cut-scenes for a Soldier.

 

[C F]

She didn't switch her shield off, the orbital strike blew out all electronics, including Noble teams' shields.

The LEDs on their suits, the automated doors, various green display panels on the walls around Noble team, the elevators (and their control panels) in the back of the room, and the decorative lighting around the elevator tubes seem to be working just fine.

Their sole long-range radio link to Holland might've got fried, but that's no surprise considering it was hardly in working order before the blast, and required some jury-rigging to get it functional. Also, the fallout bunker door had to be closed by two marine attendees, but making it mechanically independent from the power systems may very well be part of its design considering all the possible scenarios it could have been conceived for.

Well anyway, believe what you want to believe; there's not much in the way of explanation in-game. The theory I subscribe to is sketchy enough, it's relying on supplemental material regarding Kat and her personality to piece together what happened.