Skipping cutscenes in games
polycounter lvl 10
I would like to hear some insight from devs of polycount. Is there any design\logic reasons why many games don't let players skip cutscenes and sometimes even credits? What is the logic behind that and why do you even bother? If it were up to me, I'd let the player to skip absolutely everything, from cutscenes to entire levels.
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I know a lot of JRPGs would be a lot less memorable if they didn't include the incredible cutscenes that they have, but the same can't be said of other games that don't put a huge emphasis on cutscenes.
As for credits, I'd imagine the devs would want everybody to know who made the game. I'm sure the average gamer doesn't give a shit because the average gamer thinks making games is easy, but it seems like nothing more than a "respect" kind of thing. Plus, some games like to reward you for sitting through the credits by putting some kind of final dialogue or a tease to a possible continuation at the end.
The only time I've ever found cutscenes to be intrusive is if there's a long unskippable cutscene before a tough boss battle. If I end up losing the fight, then I have to sit through the long ass cutscene again which will just make everything more frustrating. Ideally I think games should force you through a cutscene once, but any time after seeing it at least once you should be able to skip it. That allows it to be non-intrusive to players while also letting devs' work actually get seen.
For me games are all about options and choices. I feel like I should be able to skip everything I want. Frankly, in this situation, feeling of the developer aren't my concern.
Sometimes games are just too much work to get through and many times I really want to skip a portion to see the ending. Right now I have to use YouTube for that, gladly you can skip anything you want when you watch a video.
If there is a game store that lets you pay in respect, though, I'm happy to be corrected.
Sorry for the poor choice of words. What I meant is that after buying the game I owe nothing to the developer.
I have seen some games where the cutsceness were replaced with ingame model act the parts out while players can still run around in the mean time. Or check inventory. Though most games have crappy ingame animation that makes it looks bad.
Unskippable cut scenes are inexcusable, IMO. Never do that. I have X minutes to play your game today, don't waste it having characters blah-blah at me.
I'm reasonably certain I have terrible memories of watching a particular cutscene prior to a boss fight a bazillion times in Kingdom Hearts. Watch it once so you know what's going on, sure, but after that? Make it skippable.
Aside from the occasional sneaky use of these techniques -- covering loads, faking an ending, etc., I agree that the choice should be given to the player. I've always considered the pre-boss forced cutscenes to be especially brutal and I remember Kingdom Hearts' problem with that too. I will admit that it made me be more careful in those fights, but it's extra punishment for failure and I can't say I'm a fan of that. The only similar thing that I like less are the forcibly "interactive" cutscenes. "Push A! Too bad, you missed the exact millisecond we intended. Now start the whole 10 minute conversation again!"
PyrZern: I can see your argument there and will concede that it can act as a sign of respect, primarily if the purchaser is making the conscious/deliberate choice to purchase rather than pirate. I stand corrected.
My guess is they don't let you skip them because they are an important part of the game. I think metal gear solid even tells you this when you try to skip one
Quoted for truth. Not always though, they can be done right, and effectively (Last of Us), or they can be the bane of the player experience (Metal Gear Solid 4).
Video games are meant to be INTERACTIVE experiences. It takes people out of the experience most of the time when you force someone to WATCH something rather than play it. Adding in even a little interactivity, like looking around, is better than a 4 min character dialogue exchange that you have to put down your controller for. It's not a reward, it's fundamentally breaking the core experience.
Want a game that was story driven that did it right? Dishonored. 99.9% interactive, .1% skippable cutscenes. Most of the story is told DURING ACTUAL GAMEPLAY.
Well in that case; I have traded 10 PS3 games in respect to buy 1 new game to pay my respect to the developers. We dont do that anymore, because we pay our massive respects to Gabe Newell on steam only. :B
On the serious note. Personally; Despite the review of any new game that was released in past few months, I really like watching the cinematics and overall how the entire storyline sets in some games, it is better to skip the cut scenes and cinematics in the others.
I thoroughly played the Thief to find anything that throws one off the game and just go like (what the fuck!!!!,) but I couldnt because everything sets in just right, the cutscenes, the storyline missions, the cinematics game mechanics were great.
I skip the cutscenes in D3 and SC2 everytime because I already know how these games are going to end.
They are used when your game or the player cant support the needs for a flawless game experience.
A example for bad cutscenes are takedown because its silly to loose control and immersion of your character . A good example are maybe the "warp animation" in EvE for loading screens.
The same with maybe a traffic accident. You hear a big bang and looking out of the window. As animation its okay because your game dont support the controls. Its better than bunnyhopping in the windowframe.
Sometimes you NEED the player to be looking in a certain direction so they don't miss something, for example. We tried to accomplish most of this in Gears with the "Hold Y" events that were optional but if you held Y, we'd turn your camera for you. But sometimes that isn't enough and you need to take over to tell the story.
And that's fine.
But after the first time, let me skip it.
But most of the time when key characters are talking to Corvo the game takes control away from them. Every time you interact with an NPC that is important to your objective/sidequest control is removed from the player (except in instances where you're supposed to assassinate someone because the player needs to be able to do that). Every time you meet the outsider control is taken away. Hell every time you're in Samuels boat you're basically just stuck there listening to him talk at you.
There's not a whole lot of those scenes mind you but that's mainly because of the kind of game it is, it's a stealth game. It logically makes sense to explain a lot of the story through eavsedropping on conversations the player isn't involved in. And they do this in a very typical way, usually by blocking off the players path with two hostiles that he can't pass so he's forced to sit there and wait for their conversation to finish. And just incase the player wanders away and misses it, the game chronicles what was said in summary in the players notes.
Corvo is also a silent protagonist so his involvement in the story is really limited. And as I pointed out when the game does need Corvo to interact with a character directly control is usually removed from the player.
Interactive cutscenes get even more difficult when you're trying to make a scene with any emotional impact because it's very possible the player is just wandering around the room distracted by other things or looking for loot. Lemme ask you this, do you remember if they took control away from the player when Corvo reunites with Emily? I'll give you two guesses.
Interactive cutscenes are not right for every game or scene, sometimes you need a cinematic camera to tell the story you want because when you start letting the player decide what they're going to focus on to it really limits what kinds of scenes you can do and how you can do them.
I understand when some cut scene is sued to mask out data streaming. But there should be indicator when streaming is done, so I can skip rest of it.
Sometimes I watch them. Especially the high quality offline renders. They actually feel like reward for doing something.
But when game throw in my face in-engine made cut scenes every god damn 10 minutes, that is just ridiculous.
I do. If we are talking about RPG of course. I read faster, than those scenes progress, and I despise when game is taking control from me.
Removing cutscenes is not the same thing as stripping out the narrative. See Dark Souls.
Itamz, character stats and good combat. What else would you want from RPG on PC ?
No thats the failure. In the "perfect" game you dont need cutscenes because every action is possible. You can hug the partner or slap them in the face the game has for every action a answer and the player has the controller to make his actions true. Cutscenes are a expression of the technical and complexity limitations.
A good Cutscene is for avoid this limitation like a cutscene for loading purposes or complex story/animation content. A bad one is like a takedown for little eyecandy.
I think that psychology is part of it. There are ways to get that exposition in there without explicitly interrupting the game to shove a cut scene in.
I have no problem with cut scenes when they're pay off for finishing a boss fight or if it's maybe a quick pan through the area to give you a look at the big picture before dropping you in the level. But if you're relying on cut scenes to tell the story to the exclusion or near exclusion of all else? Count me out. If I wanted a passive experience, I'd watch a movie.
I think many games use cutscenes as a way to set up the premise or resolution for a level or the game itself. Some are used as transitions and they might even have a technical reason behind them. I think they make sense in the context of serving the game, as long as they're made with that purpose in mind. If long cutscenes are used to make the narrative more like a movie then I think the game is missing the point a bit. Although that still sells so...
Sometimes cutscenes are used as rewards, or at least they used to be used that way. When the Final Fantasies started doing cutscenes they were always over-the-top and full of cg craziness and they were like the cherry on top of your sundae after you'd finished some major part of the game. You got to kick back and watch something crazy happen and you knew you made it past that part. They punctuated the experience and there was almost this sense of progression with them, like each was a milestone event.
I'm personally not a huge fan of cutscenes in general, but I think it's more that I don't like how they're so frequently used poorly for their respective games. They shift the focus of the experience away from being interactive and away from being a good game with mechanics you'd engage on their own merit. Many modern games use cutscenes to make the games and their narratives more like movies and it sort of makes you worried that there's a lack of trust in the media to be satisfying without emulating something more traditional. A narrative will happen regardless of if you're telling the player something directly. If anything I think that's part of what's so great about games.
I don't get this 'pay your respect to the developer' crap. If the developer doesn't respect you as a player foremost, who cares.
Games can't handle every single possibility smoothly. They aren't reality simulators. That sort of endless complexity is, essentially, unshippable. You'd never get it tested within your current lifetime.
I guess I take exception to the language of "failure". I accept this may be a language/culture thing.
In many good JRPGs, you can basically write a 6 page paper solely about the main character of the game. Can you do that for your character in Dark Souls?
Games are amazing because they can be appealing for such a large amount of reasons. A good game contains good gameplay, an interesting and engaging story, a high quality soundtrack, an enjoyable atmosphere, and an appealing art style, along with some other things.
Not every person cares about all of those things though. Personally, I'll gladly accept an amazing story, art style, atmosphere, and soundtrack in exchange for shitty gameplay. Bioshock:Infinite was very repetitive and poorly balanced, but every other aspect of the game was incredible which is why many people truly loved the game.
Beyond:Two Souls and Heavy Rain are also great examples because both of those games are 80% cutscenes with very minimal interaction. They are no less "games" than anything else simply because the definition of a game is anything that takes user input and has an end goal.
I've yet to see a game that can tell a story with incredibly detailed characters that I will end up caring about without the use of cutscenes. Many games put a heavy focus on gameplay, but then almost all of the serious character development occurs during cutscenes (The Last of Us, for example.)
Thats why i called it a "perfect" game. Its unrealistic, game developer have not the technical, money and time for the perfect game and the playe rnot the "perfect" controller for a immersive experience.
Sure you can if you just invest the time into it. Dark Souls is one of rather few games where people actually role play their character. When I make a new DS character I usually have some theme or idea about what guy this is in mind, and as I progress I'll "discover" more and more about him/her. By the end of a play through I could probably write a few solid pages about the character, just like I could with my rps in DnD back in middle school when I was intp pen and paper. I've seen other people do the same to varying degrees, so it seems like a popular approach to the game.
Not saying every game should be like this but it's a good example of a game with rich lore and story that has almost no cutscenes. I love linear and cutscene heavy games like the persona series just as much.
You could still probably write 6 pages about the main character in Dark Souls, and I say this without having played more than an hour of the game (didn't like it very much but then again I didn't like the first one either). Playing out a game serves as its own narrative, you have highs and lows of your playing experience as things happen and you react and engage. Even in a game like tetris, each unique experience has a sequence of events and a progression, starting slow and simple, maybe you make a major mistake and redeem yourself or maybe you keep up consistently until you get a series of of the same type of block in a row and it throws you off, and then the speed picks up and you're frantically trying to keep up and you're at the climax, maybe there are multiple minor climaxes and close calls before the final climax, maybe there's a sense of futility or maybe you're fighting until the very end and it falls apart all at once.
At first this might seem like a stretch, but if you look at the structure of a good story it's really all about conflict and resolution and consequences and reactions. Tetris is a very simple example of an isolated conflict, but in something more complex like Dark Souls you have many events and choices that persist, you have consequences to your decisions. Your experience, the particular events of how you're playing and each turn you take, each win and loss, creates a complex story with many little stories and circumstances within it. It's part of why "let's plays" are so successful. When you watch someone play a game you're watching their story play out. Even something that you wouldn't think of as narrative heavy like Minecraft is actually full of narrative and each of those narratives is unique, personal and spontaneous.
As far as a game with a character that you care about without the use of cutscenese, I'm sure there are plenty of MMO players who would say they care about their characters, not just as investments but also for all of the history that becomes a part of them. Your character has a history, a real history, and they're with you over the years building up and joining guilds and experiencing the world with you, and while I'm not sure everyone imagines their characters as fully fleshed out, they have some real meaning behind them and so do their companions, past and present.
I love a good opening cinematic, as long as you can skip it after the first time. Or the Blizzard style 4 throughout the game. I hate in game cutscenes, being pulled out of gameplay is never fun. The in game half-life 2 ones are nice, but it's annoying when replaying the game. I skip all the dialog in Skyrim, everything feels like filler and the animations really kill any immersion.
It's a hard issue to address. You don't want to pull them out of the gameplay, but you don't know if the character will be in the right place at the right time, looking the right direction. You want to get the story and key information across, but you want people to be able to replay the game without getting bored and frustrated. I don't like the idea of having an on screen skip button, I feel like it would be better to allow the player to either run past, or interact with the scene before being told to, to speed up the interaction. If the game is paced well, it shouldn't be an issue.
What we're working on now is a bit different in that it's gonna be used to mask the level loads and thus it'll probably be unskipable. You'd be pulled out of the game and obviously nobody wants to look at a "loading" screen, right? Now if you had to endure that stuff anyway, what would you prefer - pre-rendered ingame stuff as seen in the Last of Us, some motion graphics, or CGI?
And of course CGI could allow us to do stuff that's not possible with in-engine tools - more detail or more scale...
I prefer the narrative style of Dark Souls and Half-Life. Playing the game explains the narrative and you just have short discussions with NPCs you meet along in your travels.
I believe it very largely depends on how they are executed and their relativity to the game experience.
Cutscenes in Final Fantasy games have always been very rich in story and I never skipped them... however in D3 they make me feel stupid because they retell me what I have already heard 100 times (ROS is vastly improved).
As someone with great interest in CG art I find great appreciation in the hard work and labor that went into creating a CGI cutscene but put into context most of the time it's a bother to me. I can handle a nice intro but any more than that and the devs really have to work hard to make the cutscene worthwhile as a payoff.
I think part of the problem for me is that cutscenes usually are used to show spectacle, it's meant to awe us with effects like some hollywood action movie. I think I would be much more receptive to it if they instead were used in scenes focusing on characters, emotion and dialogue - but even then why not just do it in engine and keep the look consistent? I guess I don't see much of a place for CGI cutscenes in games, I hate saying it because I admire the work and skill that goes into making cutscenes but in the end it has to serve the experience and in that context the disconnect it introduces lessens the experience.
tutorials are the worst. I've quit games just because of mandatory tutorials.
Freeman, as a character, is about as deep as a puddle.