Cutscenes Are Gaming's "Failure State," Says THQ Exec

[Rayne870]

so, how does he plan to do cut scenes where the player's character isn't present for the events taking place? Doesn't that make stories very limited because for the sake of immersion the player shouldn't be leaving the character they are controlling by this logic. That and I really don't have a problem with sitting through conversation between characters or super cool combat events and such.

 

[Evil Tim]

I'm 100% in support of mute protagonists. A good chunk of Gordon Freeman's appeal is that he is mute.

Yeah, because who would want to play as an actual person when they could play a moving gun with no role in or influence over the plotline?

 

[ntw3001]

I like this guy, because I don't like cutscenes. I guess the point that they can be used as a break to improve pacing is an okay one, but I don't really agree. Games have ways of easing tension without making the player put the controller down and sit back with their arms folded for two minutes of 'quiet time'.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

Plenty of videogames try to tell stories that have no business being in a videogame in the first place; if you require huge blocks of spoken exposition to tell the storyline, write a book. It wouldn't be considered acceptable for a movie to repeatedly resort to written text dumps to tell the story, would it?

You raise a really interesting point. Should games realize when their stories are becoming too obscure or complicated for the medium? Is there a way to tell a complicated story simply? I would point to Shadow of the Colossus as an example of how deep, resonant storytelling can work with minimal flow-breaking or cutscene nonsense.

Again, this brings me back to Capcom. What you said about the player character being too "lame" to defeat a boss perfectly described almost every major boss encounter in virtually every recent Capcom game I have played. The first thing you're treated to upon booting up Devil May Cry 4 is an extremely long cutscene and tutorial in which Dante and a Dante look-alike slap each other around. Then you win, but not really, because despite not being the hero anymore, Dante is still to awesome to be beaten up by player characters.

Also, anyone claiming cutscenes are some kind of automatic detraction from a game hasn't played Enslaved. Various other mishandled elements may bring the experience down, but the cutscenes shine.

Enslaved? The best example you can find of that is Silpheed: The Lost Planet, where the cutscenes raise a fairly routine shooter to one where you actually want to find out what's going to happen next. This is largely because the cutscenes are of a totally different scale to the game's action; it's not just you doing things you should be doing in actual gameplay.

Huh. I played that game and hated it because of the bland gameplay. But I see what you're saying. Sometimes a cutscene is most useful when it features something that just couldn't or shouldn't happen in gameplay. For example, if a game is going to be crappy anywhere, it might as well pack all its crappiness into the cutscenes, like Painkiller did.

A good example is "radio the base" interactions. Gears of War has an absolutely TERRIBLE in-game system where Marcus slows his walk to a ridiculous snail's pace whenever he phones the mother ship, and invisible walls make a sudden appearance, fencing you in. Since I basically can't move, there's no excuse for this dialogue happening during "gameplay." Marcus might as well get the same information from the whiny support characters during one of the many shakeycam-abusing cutscenes. If I'm going to be playing a game, I should be playing it. This goes back to FEAR 2's text logs. If I have to actively stop playing the game in order to look at or read something relating to the story, that smacks of lazy, hack design.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

I'm 100% in support of mute protagonists. A good chunk of Gordon Freeman's appeal is that he is mute.

Yeah, because who would want to play as an actual person when they could play a moving gun with no role in or influence over the plotline?

Exactly. Outside of Crono from Chrono Trigger, who is characterized somewhat well through his actions despite being mute (or perhaps "textless" is a more apt description, since everyone was mute on the SNES), I've never understood the "blank slate" protagonist way of thinking. Surely it's more enjoyable to play as a character with an emotional investment in completing the main objective, right? Someone who reacts with believable emotions when confronted with challenges? I dunno.

Does anyone really think Silent Hill 2, Final Fantasy Tactics or Xenogears would have been improved by "mute" player characters? In my opinion, part of what makes the stories in those games good (100% of what makes SH2's story good), are the emotional responses of the main characters. Freeman (like almost every mute protagonist) basically has no character arc, motivation or purpose. He just is, and everyone else seems to impose their ideals onto him (which he never objects to). Maybe that's the point. Maybe it's Valve's "Would you kindly."

I feel like Bioware has pulled off cutscenes pretty well, Mass Effect sort of gave you a way to control the cutscene and develop your character further...
Also, I dont remember THQ making an incredible amount of games.
The last one I remember was the game based on the Spongebob movie...yeah, exactly...

Eh, I don't know. The cutscenes always seemed to go on way longer than they should, and like all Bioware RPGs the game let you choose the same dialogue option more than once, which in a tripe-A title feels lazy and very "game-like." Most of the information people give you in ME isn't so important that the player NEEDS to hear it again if they weren't paying attention the first time, so they might as well remove the option. Many times I found myself trying to skip dialogue and accidentally triggering another section of the conversation because of the wheel menu.

Bioware has some good writers, but they really need editors. Mass Effect's actual game is way shorter than it has any right to be (if you remove the obnoxious, repetitive spaceship side missions that are all the same 2-3 things repeated ad nauseum), and maybe cutting back on all that fancy Bioware mouth-opening technology (in other words, hire editors) would have let them put a few more good levels (like Feros) into the game.

Some might say Bioware is indicative of everything that is wrong with the current direction storytelling is taking in gameplay.

 

[Byere]

Video game storytelling techniques need improvement?

Well then, as a gamer practically my whole life and a lover of RPG games, I guess this one person's opinion makes my life and many others lives totally inert and pointless, huh?

Screw you, Danny Bilson. Many MANY games have brilliant cutscenes and tell the story by using them. Admitted, there are games that use them far too often or have them go on for too long (MGS and the FF series in many cases), but that rarely detracts from the story itself. The gameplay maybe a bit, but after having played many RPGs and haven't read/listened/watched/played through so many stories through these and many other genres of games, I feel that they work far more effectively than say a cutscene in (as previously pointed out) Fallout 3 where you're looking through your character's eyes and during a scene you can look around (ignoring what's going on) and in some cases even wander away from such a scene.
At least in movie cutscenes you have to pay attention to it if you want to know the story.

 

[Evil Tim]

Again, this brings me back to Capcom. What you said about the player character being too "lame" to defeat a boss perfectly described almost every major boss encounter in virtually every recent Capcom game I have played.

Yeah, though the original Devil May Cry got it more right than the later ones; off-hand, I think every after-boss cutscene was the boss dying, not cutscene-Dante finishing them off with moves he can't do in game. It was better that way.

A good example is "radio the base" interactions. Gears of War has an absolutely TERRIBLE in-game system where Marcus slows his walk to a ridiculous snail's pace whenever he phones the mother ship, and invisible walls make a sudden appearance, fencing you in. Since I basically can't move, there's no excuse for this dialogue happening during "gameplay."

You know what's missing that would explain what those scenes are actually there for? The word "LOADING." UT3 engine games in particular have a nasty tendency to need either doors that take a long time and / or a minigame to open or unskippable exposition to cover loading the next area.

 

[Evil Tim]

What? Half-Life practically pioneered story telling without the use of cut scenes and it does a damned good job of it, too.

Yeah, instead of taking you outside the game to tell you things, it locked you in a room with nothing to do and told you things.

The main difference was the inability to skip the latter type and the token ability to move the camera around.

 

[McAster]

Half-Life was good at having a world tell you things, but it was also stuck with "do nothing and watch" more then I cared for at the start. Which isn't bad as an idea except when it's too often and too frequent. I tend to get tired and bored of it, wanting to experience a game rather then just experience someone observing. Likewise a movie where you are occasionally interrupted by game play does nothing to make me want to keep the game in my system.
The problem with the former is that it's just the illusion that you actually get to do something and could just as easily be a cut scene for all the impact that we do. Luckily Bioware managed to deal with that potential in Mass Effect by having people talk as you walked around normally (ignoring the lift) or with a dialogue wheel/punch reporter. The problem with the later is, well, I don't want to play a movie, I want to watch a movie. Couldn't stand FMV games back in the day.

Video games are a wonderful medium, but they are games. To play. I don't want to have to deal with the extreme of either and as a rule, I tend to prefer the Less Is More idea such as Metroid Prime. Few here and there in a minimalist role to highlight something important, but the rest and in-depth section is for us to discover on our own [scanning].

However I will say I enjoyed Final Fantasy X. It had cut scenes and it had moments where you were Tidus walking around and moving through the crowd in place of just watching more CGI. It hit a nice balance for me, I got story and felt what the world was like as they intended without abusing either.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

I like cutscenes.

Sometimes I don't want to be continuously playing a game, sometimes I want a break where I can sit back and ejoy it as my characters advance the story. The only alternative I can think of is to have missions where you have to walk from point a to point b, no way of skipping it, and while you're walking characters talk about themselves.

The one thing I really hate is Half Life, especially when people try to say 'it doesn't have any cutscenes. I does have cutscenes, it just lets you run around, completely unable to skip, while the characters waffle on about pointless shit I don't care about. And what about that bit where you get locked into a restraining cage thing and carted around to listen to Breen whining at you? You're not able to move, all you can do is watch scripted events unfold. If that's not a cutscene, I don't know what is.

 

[Evil Tim]

Because they can pretend it's their hand on the grip of the gun. That's why.

In other words, they totally fail to immerse themselves in the fiction of the game and reduce the main character to the status of a hole in the world to stick your face into. Brilliant.

Also if you think Freeman has no role in or influence over the plotline you've no idea what a plotline actually is.

The plot happens to him, never because of him. He makes no decisions, has no input in any conversation, and no real control of his fate. The irony of the term "last free man" is Gordon is a prisoner of narrative, stuck with a single fate only death can spare him from.

 

[Hitman Dread]

Besides, the argument of cutscenes being "movie interuptions" doesn't really work. If we accept that, then games without voice acting are constantly being interupted by books, games with voice acting are being interupted by plays, and any moment where there's no movement--you're being interupted by a picture.

The difference is far, FAR greater than that.
Most movies have acting a storyline in them, but these are considered part of the medium because they do not break or violate the medium itself. Even if you have music, you are still in a passive visual experience. When a game has a cutscene, it is stepping outside of it's medium all together. These segments are not games. It BREAKS AWAY from the game and say "okay, now experience this."

Games with text also don't borrow from Novels. No, words themselves do not belong solely to Literature, and were not crafted within novels themselves. Let's take The Elder Scrolls as an example. A HUGE amount of the story and lore of the game is not conveyed through odd and prepositional dialogue stating things that the characters themselves should already know, but through the choice of being able to read books. It gives the player the option to pursue the knowledge, if he so choses. Cutscenes are not like this. They can never be turned into an active experience and are completely separate from the game itself.

That line of thinking doesn't make any sense when applied to other mediums...if it were true, than the purest game experience would be one without any text, voice acting, music, cutscenes, or the ability to stop moving.

Stop moving? Not sure what the hell you are talking about there but if you chose to stop moving you've made a decision which is what games are about.
Any rate, yes, this can be applied to other mediums with ease. What if you went to the movie theather, and they required you to read a few chapters of a book before the movie began? What if a painting asked you to watch a film before viewing it? When movies first got started, they were not considered an art form but a craft. Why? Because it borrowed so heavily from other mediums that it was reliant on other mediums to get it's point across. You would read the story, then watch the story play out, typically in ways more suited for plays than for movies themselves. Eventually they overcame this, found ways (even in the silent movie era) to tell stories through mostly visual means.

Take the album art away and it does nothing to the music. Remove cutscenes, and many games will suddenly not make sense because large gaps of their stories are missing.

The video game equivalent of album art is cover art, not cutscenes.

What if that album art was needed in order to convey the concept or story of the album itself?

Here are two albums that become very different beast and almost out of context when the album art and all things relating to it are removed. Gorillaz is no longer a satire of forumlated pop bands of the early 2000s, and the many metamophres of Bat For Lashes's Two Suns album would be completely lost.

Now, if you remove cutscenes AND REPLACE THEM WITH GAME DESIGN THAT TELLS A STORY, nothing is lost at all. If a game NEEDS it's cutscenes for more than anything

Bilson is full of shit. I get that he doesn't like cutscenes, but this doesn't make cutscenes bad. What is it with devs nowadays and this obsession with player control, full voiceover, 1st person "immersion" and all these other elements which are strictly subjective yet they raise them up as pillars of innovation.

Everyone who is making post like this:
He is not talking about LIKE or DISLIKE. He is talking about artistic failure. When a artist has to go outside of his art to get his work to convey what he wants, he as well as his medium has failed, except in the case of multimedia art.

Now, people have brought up cutscenes that they like, but they have not in any case here brought up cut scenes that were NECESSARY to remove the player from control of their character. Allow me to provide a game that uses cutscenes in a way that was NECISSARY to convey the idea, and was not born out of inability.

http://distractionware.com/blog/?p=759
Now I don't want to spoil anything about this game, but when you lose control of your charecter, there is a reason other than "I can't figure out how to convey this through gameplay, so I'm going to have a movie now." No, instead the idea IS conveyed through the cut scenes themselves, by the act of having cut scenes. This is an example of how cutscenes can be used as a part of gameplay itself, not as a reward FOR gameplay.

 

[Evil Tim]

I find myself getting immersed into games with protagonists that don't say anything at all than I ever have games with talkative ones. I never thought it was my hand on the gun when I played through BC2, for example. But in HL2? It's my hand on that gun. It feels like I'm actually in the game, not just sitting there clicking on things. That's entirely because Gordon doesn't say a word.

Then you're not immersed. You haven't been asked to believe you're anyone but yourself in the game; immersion would be if you accepted your role as someone other than yourself. You're not being asked to believe anything you didn't believe already, and thus you have no need to suspend your disbelief. It's like saying the best way to avoid people realising they're not wet anymore is to never let them get wet to begin with.

So you think every game ever made should have a moral choice system?

No, I don't. But I think every game should avoid having long conversations where the player character is in the room and yet has nothing to do either in the conversation or out of it. I didn't buy this game so I could feel like a wallflower at a party.

They're nice but sometimes we need a game where there's one path through the story.

What we don't need is a game where we clearly have no input over the scenes that create that path. Why, for example, do I have to listen to long, tedious expository dialog about a teleporter if it's not going to tell me anything about my guy or even involve him?

Besides, it's a known fact in the Half Life canon that Freeman is under Gman's thumb.

Please don't confuse excuses with justifications.

 

[Chazz16]

cutscenes to me are really misleading. i really don't care if a cutscene is good it's really about the game play.some people try to cover up bad gameplay with good cutscences.for instances Dc univers online.the cutscene graphics were great but they used cutscene graphics from 2011 to cover up bad gameplay that feels like it was made in 2005

 

[beema]

Hasn't Yahtzee been saying this same exact thing forever on here?

I don't really mind cutscenes. For me, the only time they really take you out of the experience is when the idiot developers put a checkpoint right BEFORE a cutscene, and if you die afterward you have to keep reloading and watching/skipping that same cutscene over and over.

 

[A Curious Fellow]

Keep your opinion out of the news report please. I don't care what you have to say. Give me the facts, that's your job. Don't finish up a good news report with

Perhaps the best compromise is a mixture of both, a game that does have cutscenes, but keeps them short and few in number, keeping most of the story in-game.

because when you do that, you cheapen the whole post. Your personal opinion has no place in a news story.

 

[Evil Tim]

I guess your version of immersion is different than mine, then. I feel immersed in a game when I don't realize I'm playing a game at all, when that's my hand on that gun, my HEV suit getting charged, etc etc. That's why I love the Half Life games so much, as well as the Fallout games, as in them it's incredibly easy for me to become the protagonist instead of sit there and control him remotely. If I want to control something remotely I have a three hundred dollar rally car on my dresser.

You have little choice but to immerse yourself in the role of you because you are you; it's rather hard for a gun on wheels to act in a way you wouldn't. However, it's equally hard for a gun on wheels to form a convincing part of the world they find themselves in, and that's the problem with Gordon; other people act as if he's a person, even though he's just you with a gun attached to the vicinity of your right shoulder. I find it's hugely un-immersive; why can't I ask someone how the world got this way? Why doesn't Gordon talk to Alyx, even when she waits for a reply from him? For that matter, why don't I know why Gordon never speaks? He's me, I'd think I'd know why I refused to or couldn't speak.

This is one of the principal problems with the silent protagonist; they're not an everyman, they're a nobody. This works if they're in a narrative which is largely physical (Gordon in HL1 answers by doing; for example, when asked if he's prepared to use the Gluon Gun, he answers by picking it up) but when you try to have a more complex narrative but keep the player a cipher, there's a weird disconnect between who everyone else is and who you are. An excellent example is in Modern Warfare 2; look at how chatty characters are when you're not them; why aren't they like that when you are?

Another issue is being asked to care about what happens to your nobody, and for this we turn to spoilering the recent Medal of Honour: just how was I supposed to care when

Spoiler

Rabbit died

When I had a hard time even remembering which one he was, let alone anything about him? I could only remember that the one who hung around with the guy from ZZ Top was Deuce, and that was all I could remember about him. Sure, it's tricky to write a convincing everyman and worse when you write a character who's annoying or an idiot (see respectively Havoc from Command and Conquer Renegade and Shane Carpenter from Haze) , but that doesn't justify claiming writing a nobody is better.

Fair enough but even Half Life avoids that to an extent. You still have to do things during the exposition, even if those things are menial. Like plugging a socket in, or picking up your armor.

A key problem is what you do is often totally useless; for example, at the start of Episode 2 there's a long section where The Alyx Vance Show is playing out in one part of the room and all I can do is screw around with a garden gnome. Um, great.

Giving him control over the story would go 100% against established canon in that universe.

Why establish such a canon in the first place, though? Why set up a situation where the player has no impact on the scenarios they find themselves in, not even having the character have any part in the creation of those scenarios? You're every bit the scientist Eli Vance is, so why does Gordon never suggest anything himself? You're held up as a hero to the revolution, but your heroism largely consists of doing things they're too stupid or useless to do themselves and so tell you to do. It doesn't exactly convince you of the validity of Gordon's heroism or knowledge when he's never seen to apply either thing.

 

[Logan Westbrook]

Keep your opinion out of the news report please. I don't care what you have to say. Give me the facts, that's your job. Don't finish up a good news report with

Perhaps the best compromise is a mixture of both, a game that does have cutscenes, but keeps them short and few in number, keeping most of the story in-game.

because when you do that, you cheapen the whole post. Your personal opinion has no place in a news story.

Different sites handle news in different ways. Here at the Escapist, you'll find that we often add our own points of view to a story, as well as supplying the facts. I'm genuinely sorry if it's not to your taste, but we're unlikely to stop in the foreseeable future.

I like how you made an article to present his opinion and then just pissed all over it with the last paragraph.

Err, not really. The last paragraph really just provides some context for what he was saying, and then presents one possible solution to the problem he describes.

 

[Optimystic]

I wonder what he thinks of titles where the cutscene IS the game, like Heavy Rain?

@ Logan: I personally enjoy the little sign-offs at the end that show what the contributor thinks of the story, especially the ones in the form of a question (like SmurfberryGate [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/107815-Apple-Gives-Capcom-a-Smurfberry-Crunch])

 

[Gralian]

QTEs are the attempt of marrying interaction with cinema. Unfortunately, it didn't work out so well. I think cinema should just be left as cinema. The player doesn't need to be involved ALL the time. It's not like we all have short attention spans. Those that do probably wouldn't objectively care a great deal about the story in the first place, either. I suppose in time we'll come across a better way of interacting in place of cinema to take over from the QTE, but perhaps in the next generation of consoles. Ever played games that don't make use of QTEs and features a vocal protagonist? It comes off as incredibly awkward and downright laughable. I'm thinking primarily of that one scene in Bulletstorm where you find a girl and after a brief dialogue she yells "Don't follow me, or i will kill your dicks!". Your character's forced walk movement yet freedom for the player to actually move and shouting back at the woman feels incredibly peculiar and out of place. The player is unable to take the situation seriously, and while the whole game in itself is not to be taken seriously, cinematic and expositional plot moments are. It's what i call extremely bad storytelling and narrative conveyance. In game cinema is there for a reason; to constrain the player's viewpoint to plot driven and cinematic set pieces.