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IT'S TIME TO CUT OUT THE CUTSCENES

18/3/2019

24 Comments

 
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So, I was playing Far Cry New Dawn, and a non-player character died. This was a significant death. It marked the end of one chapter of the story. There was a funeral. Other characters were all sad and that. 

And I didn't have a clue who the dead guy was.

More pertinently, I didn't care. In fact, I just got annoyed that they were telling me that this was a major turning point in the game, rather than giving me what I needed to feel it. 

Contrast this with Red Dead Redemption 2. In that, when a certain character died, I felt genuine sadness. Likewise that bit in The Last of Us, when Joel (spoilers) gets impaled on a bit of rebar. In both those cases I didn't want anything bad to happen to those characters. It was a shock, and I was shocked that I was shocked, because I'm so used to not caring what happens to video game characters.  

In New Dawn, the dead character's deadness was preceded by him being tortured. Clearly, the creators of the game felt this would heighten the tragedy when he was then shot in the face. Indeed, my character was so enraged by this, that he turned into a sort of Incredible Hulk, and started punching the dead characters' murderers. All out of my control, of course. 

But... I didn't know who he was, I didn't know a thing about him, I didn't understand why it was being treated as a major turning point in the story. I felt nothing, other than a bit of confusion, and impatience, because I wanted to get back to the gameplay.

And I'll tell you why this is: cut-scenes. All of Far Cry New Dawn's storytelling is done via cutscenes, and the examples above, both good and bad, have finally gotten to the core of why I've disliked cutscenes ever since they started becoming a thing.
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EXTENDERS
What both Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last of Us have in common is that their storytelling extends into the gameplay; there's no jarring shift from one to another. 

Yes, there are cutscenes, but they're kept to a minimum, because they understand that one of the prime rules of cinema is Show Don't Tell. Cutscenes, in an interactive medium, are the equivalent of exposition. They're not part of the game - they're apart from it. In the case of games, it should always.be Play Don't Tell. 

I never quite escape the feeling that cutscenes exist more for the developers to live out their movie directing fantasies than to benefit the player. What they represent for me, is game creators not doing their job properly - and mark an utter failure to use the medium properly.

If you want players to feel something when a character dies, you've got to give them a reason to care about that character. They have to know that character. Red Dead Redemption 2 cleverly builds relationships between your protagonist and the NPCs by forcing you on long horseback rides, where the characters chat between themselves.

Similarly in The Last Of Us, Joel and Ellie never stop talking to one another, even in the midst of tense action. We see the bond grow between them, we see how much they care about one another - and through that we start to care, without even realising... until something terrible happens.

In Far Cry 2, you get a lot of - admittedly brief - expositional cut-scenes, but the characters are treated mostly as macguffins. Even your team-mates, who can be assigned to help you out on missions, are little more than extensions of your weapons wheel. When they die, it's an inconvenience, not a plot point - not helped by the fact that their mid-mission chatter is the same dozen or so lines repeated ad infinitum. 
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EMBED WITH MY CHARACTER
Though it feels primitive by the standards of The Last of Us and Red Dead, Half-Life 2 was the first game where characters and character was embedded into the action of the game, without breaking away from it for cutscenes. Even then, 15 years ago, I felt it was the future of video game storytelling. I cared about Dog and Alyx, because I was being given the opportunity to spend time with them. 

And then, following Half-Life 2, almost the entire games industry ignored it, as if to say "We're never going to be able to do that", went cut-scene mad, and here we are 15 years later, and Red Dead Redemption 2 and Half-Life 2 are the exception, rather than the rule.

Bioshock is another of the few games since Half-Life 2 to successfully combine story and game. Indeed, its creator Ken Levine's view on cutscenes echo my own: "You know what kind of gamer I am? When we come to a cinematic, I jump it. I go 'I'm not watching a movie, f*** you'. I want a game. You can selectively take control away from the gamer for a few seconds but don't render him inactive."

Him? Bit sexist, Ken.

I know I've ranted about this before, but cut-scenes - unless they're brief, unless they're setting the scene for atmosphere - have no place in a video game, unless they're used as an establishing shot,. Least of all if they're not backed up by the characters in those cut-scenes then interacting with you during the actual gameplay.

Cinema and video games are two completely different things. One's passive, the other is interactive, and when telling a story they each need a completely different approach. It's lazy to break from gameplay for a cut-scene; work harder to figure out how to give the player what information they need within the body of the gameplay. Trust me; even idiots who don't consciously know why they're feeling a thing will like you more for it. 

It's so rare that a cut-scene will ever engage me. During most of them, I'll grab my phone, or turn to my laptop, only half-engaged. Or, when it's available, I'll skip it. 

This, surely, if you've gone to the effort of writing a story, isn't what you want is it? If I want to switch off and watch a film, then that's what I do. When it comes to playing a game, I'm engaging a different part of my brain, and I want to stay busy. 
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BALANCE
I'm not advocating that games should do away with story. On the contrary, my favourite games balance story and emotion with action - in the way that the best movies do. 

I bang on a lot about Marvel, but they get that; the best of their stories take the time to build a relationship between the audience and the characters. The action sequences have emotional stakes, which given them a reason to exist beyond eye-candy. They move the story on. 

It's why I was so disappointed with Captain Marvel, because it felt like the first of their films - which, yes, I know some are better than others - to drop the ball on that. The character was essentially a vacuum, due to the fragmented nature of the origin story, and it was hard to connect with her. Consequently, the action sequences felt - ironically - like clips from video games. I wasn't invested in them; there were no emotional stakes, no risk to the character's journey...

You can say the same for Star Wars; the best battles in those movies are driven by vengeance, usually over the death of a mentor. The lightsaber fight at the end The Phantom Menace just sort of exists... and only has an emotional element once Qui-Gon Jinn gets killed. And then he's promptly cut in half and kicked down a drain. 

Video games, which are frequently primarily an action-based medium, could learn a lesson from this. I mean, I'm not saying all games need to do it... but if you are going to insist on having a story, give the player the opportunity to connect with it. Embed it in the action, and keep cut-scenes to a minimum, otherwise it ends up feeling like an exercise in self-indulgence on the part of the creators. 
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24 Comments
CaptainBinky
18/3/2019 09:43:03 am

Cutscenes used to be a reward since they generally offered the best graphics in the game, were brief moments of cinematics when the rest of the game was entirely top-down, side-on, or limited by 100 triangle characters and pre-rendered backgrounds, and were a brief reprise from whatever you were playing. Case in point would be something like Flashback which to remove the cutscenes would be to remove half of what makes the game cool.

Nowadays, graphics fidelity is high enough that the quality of realtime art is good enough that all of this can be achieved with in-game visuals. So something like RDR2 can take control of the *camera* away from you and show off the landscape, have its moments of pre-scripted dialogue, and not feel like a cutscene. And it can do that without taking camera controls away too. The bese 'cinematic' in the game was the ride towards the confrontation at the plantation. I'm still controlling the horse, but the camera is being directed.

RDR2 demonstrates what modern cutscenes really ought to be like and what can be done provided you spend more money on development than any other game in history ;) But hopefully it will serve as future inspiration.

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CaptainBinky
18/3/2019 09:47:04 am

I meant to write "respite" and not "reprise", and also "best" not "bese" :D I'll just use this handy edit butto-- oh. :D

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EggyRoo
19/3/2019 07:28:50 am

I read the article above and was about to post the same thing- long gone are the days when a cut scene was a reward for the game you’d been battling through. The first Tomb Raider was a rare mix of total immersion through superb gameplay yet the cut scenes, although completely non-interactive, continued to progress the story and ramp up the tension without making you feel like you’ve been momentarily dumped back in your living room to sit infront of a tellybox.

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Birch Vand
18/3/2019 09:47:39 am

Totally agree with this; I don't mind a bit of a cut scene, but as you say, just a quick one that integrates into the game, or do all the story telling through the game engine or within the action itself. Steven Poole wrote one of my favourite books about video games, Trigger Happy, and he wrote that cut scenes are like being forced, half way through a great game of table tennis, to read a chapter of a second rate science fiction novel. That's what needs to be avoided.

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RichardM
18/3/2019 09:56:33 am

Yeah... For me, they worked well in C&C and Warcraft because they provided a different perspective to the gameplay and, as somebody above said, they were a reward for progressing through the game. I mostly skip ‘em nowadays - often don’t care about flat characters and boring dialogue - and of course the plot suffers, but in my limited gaming time I wanna play the game. I like the HL2 way as well, but being trapped in a room while a play unfolds around you feels a bit dated now too. Do it like that, but make it optional and just let you wander off if you get bored. Would be a masterful piece of design to incorporate that into gameplay, characters getting narked at you for not listening and stuff.

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Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
18/3/2019 12:12:05 pm

I am pretty sure there are games where characters get mad because you skip their exposition or walk away. I can’t think of which ones.

Half Life 2 was indeed like a play where Gordon has just wandered onto the stage during the middle of a scene. The rest all move around reading their lines and Gordon is struggling to figure out, based on where they’re looking, which spot he should stand on to see the two of them and the thing they’re talking about.

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ApologeticORION
7/7/2020 12:11:44 am

Cartman in South Park's Fractured But Whole does it lol. In the very beginning of the game he's explaining the story to you, and if you press "x" to skip he'll call you a dick for interrupting. If you keep doing it he'll call you out for skipping cutscenes and call you an asshole. It's great!

Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9BpdFTtcsA

Geebs
18/3/2019 10:22:30 am

The problem isn’t cutscenes, it’s modern UbiSoft cutscenes. The closest they ever get to characterisation is that one person says “fuck” slightly more than another. The entire AssCreed series is the same, exacerbated further by the fact that you’ve totally lost the thread of the plot because it’s an open world game and you’ve just spent the last two hours screwing around.

All of which is sad, because I’ve just started playing Splinter Cell Blacklist, and damn me if UbiSoft can’t make a good, well paced stealth game if they just drop all of the open world crap.

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Sean McErlean
18/3/2019 10:37:02 am

The girlfriend reviews YouTube channel had a good take on this for DMC5; she pointed out that the cutscenes were used a respite from the frantic gameplay and were used to help pace the game. That's probably an effective way to use them too, if story is harder to fit into your gameplay mechanics.

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Danno
18/3/2019 11:01:29 am

Shadow of War and Final Fantasy 15 both have all of the things you mention, for good and bad. Characters talk to each other during missions and seem to grow, other characters seem to only show up in cut scenes and are talked about a lot and you're expected to care when something awful happens to them, but it's difficult. Then occasionally you'll get an epic wodge of story and it's clearly the producers wanting to leave their mark on the mythos, but as good as they are, they don't connect into the plot all that well, and if they weren't in the game, it wouldn't actually matter.

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Taucher
18/3/2019 11:15:39 am

I agree. I really enjoyed the gameplay of the Metal Gear Solid games but skipped all the cutscenes so now, years later, I have no idea what Sexy Snake (see, I cant even remember his name!) was doing or why.

The very worst cut scenes I can remember were in the Call of Duty games when a cut scene would have a moment where you had to quickly press 'X' and then 'Y' (and so on) to stop your character from getting punched in the face. So you had to concentrate during the cut scenes to prepare for this, even though I was indifferent to my character being punched in the face.

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mr do
18/3/2019 11:18:26 am

Far Cry 5's repetitive, constant, badly written and po-faced cutscenes put me right off the game and I ended up selling it when I was only halfway through. Also far cry devs - please give it a rest with the bloody hallucination sections, they're just tedious now.

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HdE
18/3/2019 11:23:55 am

Great read, Biffo!

I wouldn't say I 100% agree with your stance on cut-scenes, though. I'm currently half-way through my third play-through of Horizon Zero Dawn, which does occasionally like to go "Look at me! I'd make a bloody good movie or TV show, wouldn't I? Here's a three minute cut scene to prove it!" But then, it DOES help that I think the story in that game is really, really good. It feels like something I'm happy to kick back and enjoy however the game wants to package it for me.

I DO however, very much agree with the assertion I've seen you make several times before that games should not try to be movies. Some developers seem to go all in on that idea, and when they do, the end result always feels muddled to me.

I recently suffered through Fullbright's Tacoma - an indie game that seems to get inexplicably good reviews in spite of being shockingly light in terms of player interactivity. It's something I want to feature on my YouTube channel in the not too distant, because I think it serves as a great example of how easily a commitment to storytelling in the wrong way can derail a game.

Don;t get me wrong, here - I love how story has become a major component in modern video games. But so many folks seem to think they should be telling a story to the detriment of actually building fun, enjoyable games these days. It's weird.

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Daph
18/3/2019 11:26:27 am

Totally agree with you ... But I'm not feeling to well .. So it could be that too x

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Grembot
18/3/2019 11:37:19 am

Here’s my hot take...on Captain Marvel. The emotional connection was there for me, she was cocksure and magnetic from the get go and I was all like “radical” then the stuff happens and her emotional journey ties in with the story happenings and I was all like “bummer”. I did think it was a bit effectsy at the end, I’d have been happy with a small ending but I understand why that wouldn’t be on brand.

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Dan Whitehead
18/3/2019 11:42:06 am

"Indeed, my character was so enraged by this, that he turned into a sort of Incredible Hulk, and started punching the dead characters' murderers. All out of my control, of course."

This is my biggest beef with cutscenes - that they're too often used to show the player character doing something really cool or exciting, rather than letting the player actually do it. It's even worse when it comes at the end of a game - I think it was one of the Darkness games that takes you right up to the big explosive finale, and then makes you sit back and watch the action scene climax rather than making it happen. Utterly awful idea.

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Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
18/3/2019 12:03:35 pm

Far Cry 5’s were terrible for this.

The only characters I knew were the three from the trailers: the little blonde piece who owned the bar, the shotgunny pastor, and the plane guy. Imagine my shock when they were just slightly more expanded mission givers for just one section of the game, and you soon moved on without them just as you were starting to care.

I only ever remembered the joke ones - Sharky Boshaw and Hurk Jr and the Ruined Cougar who flies helicopters (into hills and trees, mind - don’t use her for transport) and of course, Sheriff Hulk Hogan.

But I only remembered them! I only had any real opinions of the Seed family. And this was where it got super bad. After growing to hate these fuckers, you finally hunt them down, have an epic battle... and then watch a cutscene where they just kinda prattle on for a bit, then sit down and die quietly in their sleep. With Faith you don’t even get to smack her corpse around afterwards (still not sure she was even real).

Ubisoft almost seem to recognize this now and that the story is just there to tie together you shooting cultists and running over deer with side by sides.

I stopped playing Metal Gear Solid 2 when I met the ex-cop bomb disposal guy and he immediately launched into an emotional diatribe about his tortured past. I think people liked MGS: V better just because the cutscenes were rare enough to be a treat (unless you really like cheesy audio logs)

We all know New Gritty Lara Croft (and her “layer of puppy fat”) grunting and screaming and getting impaled, blasting 50 men to shreds in game and then anguishing over killing one in a cutscene.

Against my better judgement I started playing Arse Effect: Andromeda and found, to my surprise, I at least recognize the characters and understand some of their motivations. Some are paper thin, I can’t understand how anyone is meant to like Peebee (she’s Fallout 4’s Piper - blue space lesbian edition) but at least there’s something to them beyond a “hey, I heard there’s a Prepper stash over by the old Johnson place”.

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Col. Asdasd
18/3/2019 01:43:00 pm

This is a bit of a curve ball, but the first game I played that felt cinematic was Stafox 64 (Lylat Wars to give its proper name).

Its story and dialogue is cheesy, Saturday-matine fare, but the broad strokes make it easy to follow what everybody's fighting over and the personalities of each character.

Notably, it's a game stuffed full of cinematic set-pieces in which you actually get to DO almost all of the cool stuff: weaving and blasting through asteroid fields, steadily dismantling a military train as the conductor dumps its cargo in your path, defending an allied city from a independence day-style UFO, navigating the corridors of an self-destructing enemy base... every level has something that could be the climax of a decent sci-fi B-movie. Handsome and well-shot (for the time) cutscenes book end the beginning and end of each mission, as well as the game, but they're usually just cutaways to help set the scene or frame an even bigger explosion.

It probably helps that as a rail shooter the developers had effective control of the camera at all times. It let them build a lot of really cool moments into the level design. Throw in an absolutely classic Kenji Kodo soundtrack and voice acting which sounded more fitting in 1997 than most games manage in 2019 and you have a game for that really showed a young medium what a cinematic gaming could be.

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RichardM
18/3/2019 06:03:03 pm

Hear, hear. Lylat Wars is BRILLIANT. One of my absolute all-time favourites. Cinematic is the word: the rising panic and confusion in some of the levels (Secotr X, I think, stands out in my head?) is really well done.

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Bilstar
18/3/2019 02:35:29 pm

I did that same Far Cry bit yesterday and I didn't know who he was either! Dark haired chap, quite short, as you say meets an unfortunate end underground sitting in a chair.

Baffled me too.

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Floop
18/3/2019 02:36:16 pm

Another ubi sandbox, ghost recon wildlands does the anticlimax thing.
Overall its pretty light on cutscenes, but when you finally confront the big bad El Sueno, its cutscene time, and CIA boss lady sucks the fun stuff away from you.

One thing worse than unskippable cutscenes is unskippable startup movies (dev logos, Nvidia/AMD play it our way Type shit)
Batman arkham city is one notorious examle, over 60 seconds of bollocks before you can start the game.

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gordon bennett
18/3/2019 02:45:03 pm

I think cutscenes when they were first introduced to narrative games with Maniac Mansion and Zak McCracken worked as well as they did because the characters in the cutscenes weren't the ones under your control. They showed you what was happening in the world and provided useful backstory but never once robbed the player of agency.

Somewhere along the way that was lost, and cutscenes became a lazy way to force the player down the designer's chosen path. That's when they went from enhancing the game to detracting from it.

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Robobob
18/3/2019 09:07:03 pm

The only thing worse than a cutscene is one of those entirely unskippable "this goes on for 20 minutes" cutscenes. I'll just sit here patiently, right? Make a cup of tea? Go for a poo, maybe?

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Pete Davison link
19/3/2019 11:21:57 am

How storytelling is handled in game -- and when it works well -- varies enormously on the expectations the game sets from the outset.

I agree that in action-centric games like Far Cry and the like it's important for the player to remain immersed in the situation, and as such the Half-Life 2 approach is probably ideal.

However, the game I'm currently playing, Death end re;Quest, follows the pattern many modern Japanese games do, which is to unfold as a visual novel punctuated by interactive sequences. (For those unfamiliar, "visual novel" refers to stories told in a semi-abstract, non-literal manner through a combination of text, voice acting, music and static 2D artwork, and are typically very character- and dialogue-centric.)

This is not an approach that appeals to everyone because it involves a lot of reading and a lot of "hands-off" time, but it's an effective approach for the thoughtfully paced story the game is telling, and engages the imagination by not simply showing everything in a cutscene. It also allows the player to take control when something major happens -- typically a battle, or the necessity to explore a particular area.

As with anything in gaming, one size certainly doesn't fit all. It's all about setting expectations -- and occasionally delighting the audience by subverting them!

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