Cutscene as a reward, not as a storytelling device

Do you agree with this? Is this a good argument against the direction of cinematic games and kojimer flicks?

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No.

????

Does this man looks trust worthy to you?

I dont see why not tbh.

He knows less about game design than most of the people who play his games casually.

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This is now Todd thread.

Looks like autism truly speaks

Ignoring the fact that this opinion is from David Cage v0.4, no. Cutscenes are a tool to tell a story and direct gameplay, saying that they can't be uses this way or that way is retardedly ignorant and limiting.


Twins?

I want Tod-sama to cum in me

Why do you think so? What's your opinion on his take in this particular subject about the purpose of cutscene in game design?


The point is, cutscenes are the best tool to tell a story, but it's not good if you do it by interrupting the gameplay. It's the best when cutscene is also a tool for downtime.

Cute doggo. But Todd is cuter.

What's your take on this?

This is almost verbatim a quote stolen from one of the developers of Final Fantasy, 9 in particular, if memory serves.

Have you bought copies of Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition already, user-kun?

Cutscenes are purely storytelling. I'm only ever rewarded in games with more game, be it a new upgrade, a more challenging level, or an area to explore. If you're taking control away as a reward, that means the gameplay is shit.
Giving the player a break is fine, but this can be done in-game, like with bonus stages in arcade games, a small amount of backtracking, or an easy level after a hard boss.
And I'm not 100% against stories in games, since a well-done situation can give you a reason to keep on going, and a deeper connection to the game. Cutscenes are at least better than scripted events and walking sections. Just as long as they're skippable

I want to brutally throat fuck him

But can you climb mountains in kojima games?

How do you call this? When you take certain frames of a video where a person looks silly and retarded?

I dislike if cutscenes interfere with the core gameplay of the world, I'd like to move around myself. HL, despite being a shitgame still had the right idea on this.

Depends on the game but for the most part, I agree wholeheartedly.

Cutscenes should come before and after major gameplay segments. They should not be interspersed within a gameplay segment, breaking up the action.

As an example, I toss up Valkyria Chronicles.
For the most part, you get a cutscene before the fight, and a cutscene after the fight.
Everything that happens in a mission happens without distractions. Cutscenes that do play are done to serve as a notification that enemy reinforcements (usually) have arrived.

Compare this to something like Metal Gear Solid V, where cutscenes are thrown about with high frequency mid-mission, constantly taking control away from the player and ruining the pacing of the gameplay.

FUCK YES DADDY

Autism

"will you show me?"

...

Good, you did well my boy! But did you also subscribed to TES Online and preordered Prey?

TES:O is buy to play now, no longer subscription based.

i hate to admit it, but i agree with him if it's not a story heavy game, most of the "greatest games" have very little cutscenes.

Holy shit this the end of the industry ESA forced Todd and every one who's not a failure goon into proping up social justice this E3 ia gonna be the worst.

I don't know, HL and HL2 technically have no cutscenes. There are times when you're locked into an area and forced to move here, move there, and do meaningless boring things. There are even times when you're just forced to stand around and hear someone talking. I think this is a design flaw, there's nothing interesting about this. In this regard Todd isn't without sin as well, for example the opening of Skyrim.

They're not cutscenes, and they should've been.

Unfortunately for you user, Todd-sama hates gays. He's a secret Holla Forumsack in fact.

That kinda makes me excited to make fun of it with Holla Forums. It's gonna be so goddamn terrible and cringey.

Unlike Todd, Kojima has so little emotions on his face. Truly the master of hiding his full power level.

It is a cutscene though, it's a story telling sequence mid game. I guess Deus Ex would be a better comparison because you can just skip it and listen to it at your own pace.

yes todd, you can and in the way people expect when they hear the word climbing

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You're onto something.

On top of that, after that gay club shooting, where everyone was wearing the gay pin, he was the only dude not wearing at e3 or wtv presentation it was last year where everyone else in bethesda was wearing it.

Stop bullying her (male).

lel

My respect for Todd just skyrocketed.

How was he allowed to do that?

"See that cock? You can suck it!"
"Did you rike it?"

That's how the games I grew up playing did it, so yeah, that's the way I like it. The old PS1 RPGs and horror games did it this way and it was lovely. The rendered FMVs really were a reward back then. Nowadays FMVs are no longer a reward but seem to be the whole point of the "game", with the actual play as secondary. Absolutely disgusting.

"i'll just wear it under my badass leather jacket, damn i should holding a beer instead of this mic"

Fourty seconds in, we're in agreement. The rest strikes me as bullshit for one reason. Whoever writes for the MGS games is a shit tier moron, solely because you're having fun and then the game is paused and you're forced to sit through amazingly awkward dialog that could have had the revelation summed up in one or two lines and the rest of details given to you as you play it. Simply speaking the way of how the writing is given to you is fucking godawful because it subscribes to this modern thinking of "the audience is a dipshit who needs his hand held at every turn and everything explained to him and nothing up to interpretation."
There's no mystery and barely any joy in watching any of the cutscenes, with the exceptions being ones where the delivery is great.

Todd Howard said this?

Call me fucking impressed.

Yep, this definitely was a PSX thing.

I feel like Death Stranding experience for me will be on youtube, since i wait for it like for a good movie, rather than a game.

Kojima is a big fan of Hollywood, after all.

todd must be slightly retarded. that is the opposite of what should happen. cutscenes and dialog build tension and give meaning to what you are doing.

Exactly. And it stinks because Kojipro is actually really capable of putting out great gameplay that doesn't feel generic at all, and they're capable of creating amazing feats of TECHNOLOGY but all of that seems to take a back seat to the cutscenes.
Well, at least until Ground Zeroes. I don't know about TPP yet.

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Tekkens FMVs are Gods gift to Man

cutscenes are a nice payoff where you can establish a new scenario and give the player time to rest. a necessity except in low intensity games.

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You mean like Quantum Break, that rewards short light gameplay sections with half-hour episodes of a TV show, fam? Naw, FMVs to feel rewarding have to be something that impressive in themselves and show things which cannot be shown through gameplay - neither of which has been true for games for awhile now.

I do think some of the best endings, though, and just giving the player a cute Japanese song to listen to while the credits roll and a thank-you for playing. Maybe give the player some way to interact with the credits such as the on-rails shooting minigame of Smash Brothers Melee or Chibi-Miku smacking/jumping on the credits list in Project Diva 1/2nd.

WHAT DID
HE
MEAN BY THIS?

I like his emphasis on experience, but I really can't agree with his idea on how an entertainment medium needs to be applicable in real life or should have a message at all. I think it is selfish to ask players to hear and be in agreement with your politics. It's not a propaganda tool, it's a toy. What entertainment should convey is nothing but entertainment and emotion, not ideas.


Maybe it can give an outline of what you are and what your doing, but it would be more fun if players could find and interpret the rest of the meanings through gameplay. And tension, tension should stay within the gameplay to become more effective.


I remember how exciting the comic sessions of Max Payne 1 were. I can't believe this is the same Sam Lake from Max Payne.

Partially. There are lots of ways to do downtime. Cut scenes are one possible method, although they can also be used to achieve the opposite effect: amping the player up or creating tension, especially before a fight.
I don't think cut scenes should be the only way, or even the primary way, of giving the player downtime, mostly because cut scenes aren't self-directed. That is, the player doesn't get to choose how long they last. But if you have, say, platforming or exploration sections in an action game, the player can go through them at the pace he chooses, which lets him spend as much or as little time in the "low-energy" area as he wants before moving on to the "high-energy" meat.

I think that games can have information in them, but it should be left up to the player to interpret what's correct.

Kojima never said nukes are bad, just have you all the info on them, and explained the political ramifications. Never took a side though.

I agree that politics should be left out of movies/games/books etc.

Holy shit!
So a sperg is running the industry into the ground?

I'm all for raising an issue or having a message. It's just that I think that the previous comment of first and foremost having fun and being entertained is the main priority.

I don't think there's a word for it.

Why delete?

I can agree with that. Thing like motion capture improve the connection players have with the characters to the point where players can empathize with them. Games without some form of cutscenes often lack the detail of facial movements and minute mannerisms that greatly add to the narrative in a much more compact, compelling, and accessible fashion. They set the tone of the part of the game being played, which can change the players state of mind and therefore their responses.

Take Shadow of the Colossus as an example. Each death of a colossus and absorbing Dormin is supposed to be disturbing and make the player question whether they're doing the right thing, only to be reaffirmed by Mono's voice. With the end sequence where Dormin takes full control of the player or try to escape getting sucked into the pool, there's no point in fighting or resisting, but the player naturally fights and resist because that's what the cutscene set up for them. Now these two sequences have made it a much more powerful game, because by the end of it, the player, not Wander, is affirming their care for Mono even in futility. It's really a matter of properly balancing out cutscenes with gameplay in order to achieve a level of engagement.

No, they're just the easiest (conceptually).

You could have just said, "He's Japanese."

There it is

I didn't intend to post that vid, another time.

A lot of the story a player will be most perceptive of is something the player will conceptualize from what they experience playing the game, cutscenes are pure tell in an otherwise interactive medium if the cutscene is not conveying information or otherwise meaningfully breaking up gameplay then it just gets in the way and is useless bloat for hacks that couldn't make it in Hollywodd.

You don't need to delete your posts, redditfriend. Just roll with your mistakes.

That's Honne/Tatemae for you. Lying to your face is so ingrained into their culture, that they have a permanent poker face. Some of them even have to take classes to teach them how to emote properly when talking with foreigners.

SEMEN
DEMON
M
E
N

don't be so racist, japanese aren't horny tartars you fascist piggu-baka

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Literally the only reason I beat sonic adventure was because I wanted to see the hardcore autism of the next cutscene. If there wasn't shit like
I wouldn't have played that shit past the first level.

Imo gameplay is the best tool for the player to create a subjective story, not to understand the story that the dev intended. Maybe it's just due to personal preference of not being interrupted by anything including ideas during gameplay. The most effective way to tell a story is through cutscenes.

Swear on me mum I've seen him elsewhere.

When you google "Todd Howard Jewish" or "Is Todd Howard Jewish" the first and second results respectively are the Video Games section on Stormfront.

it's certainly not called an argument

I like cut scenes in theory.

One application I'd really like is a cut scene after completing the main story quest snaking through a zone in an MMO. It'd let you know you completed the area in order to advance, inform you of the significance of your actions, reiterate the greater story and reward you with something immaterial.

You can expect more WoW clone iteration and nothing else.
Enjoy, I guess

Two of the current biggest industry hack, each representing different cancer, one thread.

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I'm in the mood to stare at pretty scenery, what game?

go fuck yourself.

Cutscenes are when you can tell the people making the game wish they were in film instead, but were B listers. Why are you showing me fighting someone using moves and skills I don't even have in the game? Why not let me do any of the shit I'm doing in the cutscene instead? Why can't I walk around and control the camera the way I want to during dialogue?

just from a cursory glance I can tell you that's eso, I think it's the island off the coast of elsweyr but it might be hew's bane.

as far as MMOs go it was pretty good looking.

As far as I'm concerned the only game company that got cutscenes right was pre WoW Blizzard, where they were either interludes between typically hours of gametime, looked really damn good for the technical limitations of the time and kept the story progression, which was just between being interesting in its own right while also being a good framework for justifying the situations you found yourself in for each different level of the game.

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If you don't like cutscenes consider playing a Westwood game.

Westwood games has like pretty cool cutscenes, also helps that Joseph Kucan (Kane) also directed the scenes masterfully. Seriously, take a look at the scene where Kane executes Seth..that was an awesome entrance for a pretty cool character

Cut scenes should be used for game introductions, plot development that the current engine can't handle, and or end game credits/closing. Playstation and its shit loads of Rpg's did this perfectly.

I don't think that cutscenes belong in video games anymore. You have to know what a fucking cutscene is to understand why it matters. A cutscene is an interruption of the gameplay in which the game feels the need to show us something outside of the agency of our character, such as a distant off reaction to a switch we pull. Should we see that reaction? No, there shouldn't really be a reactionary video to show us what pulling a switch does, I understand that a lot of people are too fucking retarded to interpolate that "pushing a button here does something elsewhere," but that doesn't mean we should dumb things down for every low hanging fruit to get it.

Cutscenes are only relevant in old games, really, games where we didn't have the ability to animate things properly and real-time rendering was a difficult process. People don't really do FMVs and cutscenes anymore unless they're either too lazy, and or too stupid to figure out how to animate something.

A great way to showcase what I mean by "something happens because we did something" versus "something happens so we must show it" is Metroid II vs Metroid Prime. In Metroid II when you kill a certain number of Metroids it triggers lower areas of the game to unlock via an Earthquake caused by the Metroid Queen violently reacting to your slaying of her children. The game tells you "hey, something just happened." Then it's up to you the player to figure out what the fuck happened.

In Metroid Prime, by comparison, we were into the "retarded Jimmy Neutron watchers" generation of kids where they needed to have their hand held, so they showed every single thing that ever takes place. You kill a boss, you see a door unlock in a cutscene. You hit a switch, you see something happen as a reaction. You could say "well the technology evolving means we can now show that" but that's bullshit because we used to have that happen in Final Fantasy VII with FMVs to showcase something happening. We used FMVs because it wasn't possible to real-time render thing.

Now you can real-time render thing, you can deform the models, you can mutate them, you can morph them, you can do all kinds of things with shaders and animations and .. there's no fucking reason for a cutscene. If you do something, then tell the player the outcome later on in expositional dialogue (that doesn't take control away from the player) [like Jarl Balgruf talking to the player about the greybeards in Skyrimjob], or let the player fucking figure it out.

Cutscenes are a bygone era technique that were used to answer a problem, that problem being "low resolution polygonal models and primitive animation ability don't convey this well, we should prerender FMV cutscenes to show off what's going on."

We don't need that anymore. The Half-Life franchise is a great example of how you don't need cutscenes to convey exposition and dialogue. Gordon Freeman could move around and interact with the environment in almost every situation while characters spoke and expressed dialogue, and the only time control was taken away was in cases where it made actual sense to do so, or at the beginning or ending of the game.

Gordon gets shocked by a pair of Combine Soldiers, Alyx comes to his rescue and revives him, Gordon can't move until she helps him up because his muscles are spasming from being shocked. He doesn't have his protective suit, so it only took one shock.

The only other time in Half-Life 2 when you can't control Gordon is either when you're frozen in stasis by the G-Man before the game begins, you're frozen in stasis by the G-Man after the game ends, or you're being held by the harness being transferred from inside the lower citadel to Breen's office inside the upper citadel.

The game doesn't take control away from the player to show the attack helicopter swoop in to attack you, or show some cinematic sequence of the attack helicopter crashing into the dam or whatever.

It's a perfect example of how we don't need cutscenes to perform the function that cutscenes used to be used for.

And no, I don't think that we should be taking away player agency to show them "cinematic cool shit" like that, there's no need for cutscenes anymore. The only time the player should ever lose control is if it's for a specific scene in which it makes absolute sense, or it's at the beginning or ending of the game. Dark Souls III is another great example, the only time the player loses control of their actions is watching the ending or the player using a bonfire/item for a brief animation and/or loading screen.

You can even walk away while people are talking to you. You can interrupt them. You can kill them during their dialogue. The game never stops you from doing anything.

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forgive me if i'm misunderstanding something

isn't that basically how cut scenes work already? they're "earned" because you need to make it to that point in the game to see it

That shit doesn't fly when writing for any other medium, it's a mark of bad writing or an utterly egotistical writer when trying to force a story (or story element) to be perceived a certain way when your audience simply does not perceive it to be that way no matter how hard you try. Show don't tell, and cutscene is pure tell while gameplay is showing in a video game.

FUCK, I WANT TO FUCK, I WANT TO MARRY, I WANT TO HAVE CHILDREN, I WANT TO MAKE A FAMILY, AND I AM NOT GETTING ANYWHERE! I AM FUCKING ANGRY AT THIS WORLD AND THE ONLY THING I CAN BLAME FOR ALL THIS IS JEWS! I AM DEAD AS A HUMAN BEING, AND MY SPIRIT WANTS VENGEANCE

you can fuck my boipucci

And to think there are people on this board that don't like the guy…

It doesn't mean that you should omit the "tell" in this case, you're arguing that movies are all "tell" and no show, as if every single fucking cutscene is MGS tier info-dump. You can make a good story by telling AND showing, "show, don't tell" is a phrase used in movies in order to prevent movies from becoming info-dumps.

You're basically demonizing ALL cutscenes, when the plain fact is that cutscenes are a tool and used right they can be very effective, not just in how they take control away from the player (which was used in Bioshock to illustrate a point the villian made), but also to show interactions that plain cannot be done through gameplay.

It's a tool, that's all it is. Throwing it away is like throwing away the color red for a painting. Don't be a faggot absolutist. Use it when you have to or even if you want to, don't fall for this bullshit propaganda.

Todd as a person is pretty based. But not as a gamedev. He's good at lying and making people believe his lies. Good riddance he doesn't work as political news reporter, he would be a terrible propaganda weapon.

if you're that much emotionally invested in videogames you need to seek help

Day of the rope soon, friend.
Please oh God, let it come soon.

I think you're very autistic and you're trying to destroy a tool because you haven't seen good examples. You need to expand your horizons and you need to stop being a whiny, nitpicky bitch like those game reviewer fucks. Shit like that ruins any sort of fun you can ever have.

Honestly, if you want to change how people do things, you will fail. Go make your own game to start a trend instead of posting walls of text like a tumblerette who cries when it doesn't get it's way.

I feel you.

This thread is fucking boring, let's talk about something else.


Does anyone think it would be a viable job to just kill NEETs like this that will die alone anyway?

I don't mean showing up hitman style and popping them in the head, i mean assisted suicide.
Like, i show up, i play vidya with them for a week or so, buy them a prostitute if they need it, fuck them myself if they're into that, and then at the end of the week i let them lie in bed, give them anesthetic to make them sleep and then some more until they die in their sleep.

Does anyone think this could be an actual job that could, in theory, work out?
I've been seeing hundreds of Holla Forumsirgins and other misc NEETs that spend 40+ years of their life essentially withering away into nothingness, why not give them a little bit of happyness and companionship and then let them end it peacefully, while also getting paid doing it?
I get paid, they get dead, everyone is happy in the end.

Trying too hard to fit in, but don't worry, Todd will pay you anyway.

Woah, nigger, off yourself before you start a suicide business, that's jewry.


I'm arguing FOR cutscenes, and todd argued against them. So if anything i'm the counterpoint, and you just fucked yourself, I didn't even need to step in.

It would be a viable job to just kill NEETs in general - they contribute nothing, leech off their families, and steal taxpayer money through social insurance fraud (muh autismbux).

I wouldn't pay for that. But I'm also not a NEET, just alienated and despondent at the state of the world.

Marathon did approach this from an interesting angle. Marathon tells its story through text terminals rather than cutscenes, so you read two or three screens of text explaining your mission or giving you access to some lore, letting you read it at your own pace. And because Marathon's lore is pretty good and interesting, you feel compelled to read more terminals. So what Bungie did, is place hidden terminals in secrets, rewarding exploration with more tidbits about the world or characters. Sometimes you'd also find a hidden joke terminal as well.

That's also another reason why i'm thinking it could be endorsed by the state itself.
I'm doing society a favor and at the same time making them happy for the first time in their life.

Considering it's just about making someone happy for one last week, you could REALLY go all in with it.
Buy them new hardware, whatever they're into.
If they're traps give them nice clothes to dress up into.
If they're straight but look like shit pay a make over for them so for the first time in their life they actually look decent and presentable, give them good clothes so they can go out and really feel better about themselves.

Hell it's just one week, what's some money spent on a single guy for one week compared to how much they've been leeching off society for decades?
(after the NEET is dead you repackage and sanitize clothes, hardware etc, so you can recycle it from person to person if multiple NEETs want the same thing).
The more i think about it, the more i'm starting to realize this can actually work out.

dehumanize yourself and prepare for the bloodshed.

Sometimes I wonder if Todd legitimately wants to make a good game but he just can't break his own limits

for an H-game? yes

all of these things make me fucking depressed
now more than ever i think fictional, over the top impossible shit that wasn't suppose to be possible are way more able to exist than anything that used to be the norm

He's way in over his head and shouldn't have been given that position to start with. He's not a brilliant guy and he probably has to know this.

About cutscenes, sure. But i play videogames to play videogames. Not to watch movies.

no
it's illegal and people already provide the service for free

This is the phrase I've been looking for. You just compiled all my fucking thoughts into a single sentence. Thank you, user. Now, I shall write.

user don't kill yourself
make something of yourself

Yeah bro, go trust bethesda and EA again. They sure won't twist it and fuck your shit up again.

Looks trustworthy to me.

Thinking about it, Skyrim didn't have too many cutscenes that took control away, if I recall.
Just a bunch of scripted scenes you could walk away from and still swing weapons in.

Todd said this shit? Do you understand what just happened?
DO YOU FAGGOTS UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS SHIT MEANS?
TODD FUCKING HOWARD THE LIAR IS SOMEHOW THE BEST WESTERN DEVELOPER IN THE INDUSTRY

Pretty sure he's more normal than you are.

But that's exactly what Kojima does

Someone should blow her up with a pressure cooker

Holy fuck, this is beyond millenial tier crybaby.

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Good work outing yourself as a fucking shill trying to stir shit to screencap and use as proof of thread.

Brian, go to sleep. You need to be rested for your Congressional race!

Todd Flanders is right. Praise Jesus.

My bad. That's an "it".
Blow it up with a pressure cooker.

That's definitely one way to handle things. You can use any element, including cutscenes, however you like so long as you do it with discipline and consideration.

Kek

Hey shill

Shocking.

Really makes you think.

I thought the internet ruined xer life. Why would you return to it? That's like being friends with your own rapist.

Zoey Quinn is also in the project, so no.

NO YOU FUCKING DON'T. YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TROUBLESOME IS TO RAISE A FAMILY. STICK TO 2D AND VIDYA. ENJOY YOUR FUCKING LIFE WHILE YOU CAN. FAGGOT

Yes.

This is one of the things that made the story progression in Warcraft 3 so great.
First you'd get an introduction that would connect to the previous missions and set the stage for the current one. When you completed all of the main objectives, you'd get one as a conclusion at the end. Sometimes there would be a scene in the middle of a mission although very rarely and only about 4 or 5 times through the whole game would you get a map that was a cutscene in its entirety.
All of these were well done, short and to the point.

Dragon's Dogma also handled it very well.


Why is it more important who is saying something rather than what they are saying?

That thing is just attention whoring and trying to make money off it. Remember that some deluded idiots actually went and bought Revolution 60.
See here: steamspy .com/app/350200


Is pic related also in the project?

Tits or gtfo

On the right:
>not innocent-looking girl who is actually innocent and would gladly throw her innocence away the first occasion that comes along aka only lacking opportunity wannabe slut

Not all games are like that, dude. That's a lot of text for something you specifically prefer. Cutscenes have their place in the "middle of gameplay" if that's the kind of story they want to tell. How boring would it be if all games tried to be "immersive" and let you do what you want whenever, story be damned? The writing becomes diluted, and you start relying on "emergent narrative" and "environmental storytelling" as a crutch for being shit writers, then don't even do those two things well. The finished product becomes a big mass of nothing because you wanted to be able to teabag an NPC while they're talking to you. Player freedom and uninterrupted control isn't the be-all and end-all.

this is pretty wrong, plenty of the greatest games have numerous cutscenes too.

That's not how a MMO is supposed to work, Jim. What you described is a single player game with coop.

But that's how MGS games typically functioned.
Of course MGS cutscenes are legendarily long but they're often contained in larger segments placed at the ends of similarly long segments of gameplay. They're also rarely ever required to know what to do and mostly just exist to contextualize everything and entertain, with manual codec calls being more useful to get your objectives when they aren't self-evident.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Personally I prefer how Kid Icarus did it, where dialogue just plays out alongside the gameplay for most of the level, and then there's usually a very short cutscene before and after the boss, or in the level itself in some cases.

Cutscenes shouldn't exist, they take away the only feature vidya has over other media (player control).

Has there been any cutscenes where the player is in control of his own character for the moment that he's there?

The player could control the character within the framed scene, and interact with other character by movement, touch, and other acts. For me, I'd like to see a version where anyone talking to you would interrupt to ask if you're feeling alright. Something more interactive and amusing.

People who think Half Life and Half Life 2 are a good example of in-game cutscenes are morons.

Half the cutscenes involve you being locked in a room with 2-4 other people you may or may not give a shit about, and you're forced to listen to them prattle on about the storyline you may or may not care about for anywhere between 5-10 minutes while you either turn and look at whoever's speaking every now and then, or just jump around the room trying to land on people's heads or picking up a book and smacking the characters with it until the damned scene ends.

At least in actual cutscenes, CGI cutscenes and the like, you get pretty visuals to look at while the game forces you to stop playing so it can remind you that you're supposed to be taking the characters and the story seriously.

Sounds like you're describing a cross between Half-Life 2's scripted exposition moments and Resident Evil's tank controls.

Neat. Maybe I'll play both to find out more.

This. In cutscenes, there's at least something to appreciate like cinematography and image composition. There's no such thing when you can randomly walk and look around the room you're merely stuck in. Both the art direction and the player's interactivity are subdued, so you might as well choose between one or the other, instead of trying to do both at once. But even more importantly, you can at least fucking skip cutscenes, and play the game at YOUR own pace.

As far MGS goes, there hasn't been a cutscene-heavy game in the series since 2008 (MGS4). I'm pretty sure Peace Walker just had most of its cutscenes both in the beginning and end of each level, and the average experience with MGSV is 95% gameplay, with only the hospital sequence being that sort of unskippable walkie-talkie scene that Naughty Dog loves so much. Hell, I think I read somewhere that Kojima himself said he wanted to change the way he tells stories in games, so he'll probably do away with excessive cutscenes in the future. Now, whether or not that means more Half-Life or Naughty Dog type of bullshit remains to be seen.

MGSV was him misreading fan feedback and doing the exact opposite of MGS4. He took away most of the cutscenes and put it into cassette tapes. You are supposed to hear those while playing the game, that way you can get the story without having to stop gameplay.

It surely backfired because we ended up with a bunch of gameplay with zero substance since the whole story was separated from it and put on another format.

Really, I find stupid for people to think games shouldn't have cutscenes at all. Not all games are light on narrative like Dark Souls, so what works on one game won't work on another, it's the same argument agaisn't "open world games". The open world boom we had recently is due to people thinking all games would be improved if added open world, which we learned it's not true, sometimes it's the exact opposite.

The secret here is to avoid excess. Games shouldn't have hours upon hours of unskipabble cutscenes but also shouldn't have the story completely separated from gameplay. Gameplay always comes first and the story should be built around it (like in the old MGS games), not the other way around (Like Naughty Dog and these "Cinematic" games try to do)

Oh shit, I love Fallout 4 now!

That webm is 100% concentrated cuteness.

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He just wanted a friend, user.

its like past devs of other games have said. the finished product you see for any game is nothing but a series of compromises that were made during development

With the fucking enemy? Also the ending wasn't implying they were just "friends".

But ghosts are cute and spooky.

What are some alternative narrative techniques that can be employed and reveal just as much as the story, but not cutscenes? Something like the Portal and Half-Life games, where you always can interact? A graphic novel-like approach similar to Gravity Rush but optional?

He probably did this as a cost-cutting measure. It's much easier just to record the voice actors giving the necessary exposition and have it as a cassette tape, rather than going through the trouble of having to storyboard, stage and render full cutscenes.

One really has to look at MGSV through the lense of unfinished game to understand the choices Kojima made within the final product itself.

Wanting to fuck a ghost ain't no race traitorin'
It's good ol' necrophilia, son, nothing wrong with some dead pussy

Environments. You can't do as much with them as you can in cut scenes, but they can be effective.
Imagine any game with a hub that you return to between missions. There are people there you regularly talk to, maybe vendors too, people who will tell you more about the game's world.
After one mission, you come back, and there's blood everywhere. Corpses of people. People you know, and used to talk to. The evidence of their struggle is around: broken glass, bloody knives, maybe an arm outstretched toward an alarm panel.
The reality of that kind of thing would hit home much more deeply than a cut scene would, assuming the player is invested in the game's world and characters. My example is a drastic one, probably the most drastic you can do, but environments can be made to convey other emotions, especially if they're places you've seen before and the changes are noticeable.
For all the jankiness it had, Human Revolution's end-game twist where normal human NPCs became mindless and zombie-like was an example of this, though it changed AI behavior rather than environments.
You probably can't tell a story based on those kinds of changes alone, but they're one tool you have in your storytelling kit.

But listening to tapes during gameplay in MGSV doesn't work because either Miller or Ocelot is calling to you every other minute, meaning that you'd always have rewind the casettes constantly.

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A lot of it was put into cassette tapes because of time and cost-cutting, but the idea of revealing most of the story through tapes instead of cutscenes was his.

It's also shit because it's meant to liven up all the otherwise boring bits of padding in the game where you're forced to traverse the barren "open world" levels until you get access to fast travel.

good idea in principle, but it doesn't work. furi has long unskippable cutscenes in between boss fights; they're not long enough to act as a cooling-off period and they're too long to be enjoyable. there's no middle ground; the cutscene is either too short to work, or so long that it becomes boring. either way it's lose-lose.

also sage for fuck todd, toddposting is cancer and so are you


he looks short and dishonest

Only if the cutscenes are actually fun or interesting to watch. Seeing Dante pull CUHRAZY bullshit at the beginning and ends of the levels in DMC3/4 was really cool and gave me a minute to relax. You could definitely make the player care a little about the story or world they're in and use cutscenes to give them a taste of things you can't necessarily do in-game.

Also, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect has some goddamn hilarious writing and cutscenes.

I think the point was to listen to them on the ACC or at Mother Base. They always give you tapes for completing missions and tell you to listen to them when you're on the ACC.

Yes, but the question here is not whether or not it was his idea but when it was his idea. During very early stages of development or when Konami started obstructing him and he feared he might not have the time or the budget to put a lot of cassette tape material into the actual game's story?

I think Peace Walker's good to look at as a model for what Kojima wanted out of MGSV. In Peace Walker, all the plot important stuff is there in the game's cutscenes and the cassette tapes are reserved for more in depth explanations of some of the game's cutscenes and funny asides like Big Boss believing in Santa, or Miller perving on Cecile

Yeah sure, I feel let down when old games victory screens were just a 'congratulations, you won' or whatever variation. An ending cinematic is always appreciated.

No cutscenes. The player should be tensed up from start to finish.

When games don't have downtime, players will seek downtime by turning off the game, or pausing it for extended periods. Most of the time it's better to just incorporate player-directed downtime into the game itself.

Doing gods work, user.

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Nigga what?

He says it rather strangely, but it isn't necessarily inaccurate. Consider the only times you get a cut-scene in Morrowind - the opening video at the beginning that primes you for going into the game, and the closing video at its conclusion after the story is finally over. You've gotten through the hard part, and now you can just relax. It would be a bit more meaningful if the game actually had any degree of difficulty to it, but what can you do?


So yeah, this is perfectly right. I think cut-scenes need to be used carefully though. In an open-world game having more than a few at specific points gets a bit silly. The moments in Skyrim where you just suddenly have control taken away are absolutely stupid, in direct contrast to the well-positioned movies in Morrowind and Oblivion (though both of those games did also have "be frozen" moments, and they were stupid there as well). On the other hand, games with "chapters" and the like can easily be bookended, like Valkyria Chronicles. It all varies.

Show, don't tell is a phrase used in all mediums to avoid whatever is considered to be the "tell" in excess beyond a bare fucking minimum when you could show it instead. For a game if you can show what you want through gameplay then do it and not stop everything for a useless cutscene just to tell a story you could've done without the cutscene. Many, many, many cutscenes I've seen could be simply boiled down to " they could've done this in the actual game just as effectively or even better" or "why did they waste time with this cutscene when they could've made it into a sweet level or bossfight" or "did I really need a cutscene for that?". MGS tier infodumping is just Kojima tier autism, where my primary complaint is that there is way too many cutscenes and not enough gameplay.

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I know that feel user, we will get there one day.
The day after the day of the rope, that is.

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