I couldn't find a better title. Seriously. The other titles had so many expletives I think I might have been kicked off the internet for that alone. The current one still captures my heartfelt feelings though.
Raise your hand, who played a game where your main motivation was to see the next cut scene, because the rest of the game wasn't all too impressive to play? I'd be coughing in the back now and trying to say Final Fantasy 8 at the same time. Not saying the game is bad. It's just, if you pull away the cut scenes, there is fairly little substance left in ways of story. It's a very grindy game (nothing wrong with that if you're into that) in a very strange world.
Cut scenes have been used by game developers to shiny over some not so stellar other things. Many other things. They also have been used to make the feeling more movie like. Boy what a big pile of [massive amount of expletives deleted, imagine about half an hour worth of bile here].
More samples, like recent ones? MMO samples? Well there are plenty.
Let's start with single player: Crysis 2. I love the guys at Crytek for their innovation, their strive for great technology and games. They are some of the friendliest people I have encountered in the industry and I use their technology which is a piece of art in code. Far Cray was amazing, Crysis was also fantastic in it's own right. Crysis 2 has the feeling of "meh" all over it. Stunning visuals and a couple of nice ideas over all, but apart from a few shortcomings in the AI, weapon balance and a couple of level scripting issues, there is one gigantic downfall: The cut scenes. Spoiler alert if you keep on reading. At the beginning you see someone in a nano suit tearing up the place. Might be Prophet or you, but it's not exactly clear. Now you sit there watching all that awesome stuff, most of which, you can't actually do, or get to do, period. I don't want to watch a video of someone owning the level. I want to do it myself. If your character is watching a video, in game, forced or otherwise, that's an entirely different affair and fine. But taking away your action and making you watch something that doesn't allow you to do what you want, play the game, is very frustrating. Then comes the walkway scene. You sneak up behind a guy and then the game takes over. You see something approach that blows up the walkway, you grab a guard and use him as a cushion to break the fall, some more stuff ensues and the level is done. The three letters WTF come to mind. Wouldn't it have been much cooler if you had to sneak up to the guard, grab the guard and then the script kicks in, with the guard grabbing you and the explosion from the walkway pushes you both out the window? You would be in control of your character and feel like something awesome just happened while you tried to take down that guard. Instead you feel like you have been designated to the "watch what we can do" seat. When the game let's you move again, you feel rather out of place.
Honorable mention, Bullet storm does this worse and all the time. Not only in cut scenes, but for climbing and other activities, where they accomplished making a hair raising activity like dangling over a mile of fresh air, or kicking down a door, a tedious and boring task. The accompanied mini movies and sometimes button press games make it worse.
One of the worst and most known offenders is probably World of Warcraft. Watch the intro movie of the original World of Warcraft or any other promo material. Mainly it's the pre-rendered high resolution stuff. Compare a dwarf from the intro to one how they appear in the game. What astonishes me the most is that nobody has sued a game company yet for false advertisement, as Blizzard is not the only one guilty of that. When I see that intro movie, that's the game I wanna play. Then I get into the game and it makes my 1996 copy of Master of Orion 2 look good in comparison.
The cut scenes do two terrible things, summed up.
They create a wrong expectation. You want that good looking fantastic thing where you throw houses around and blast away your enemies so they fly for miles in very tiny bloody bits. What you get is a boom that sounds like someone trying to imitate a beat box, and a couple of scripted destruction. Oh and the poly count is about 0.01 per cent of what you seen in the movie of course. I expected awesomeness pure. I got "meh".
Second, they pull you out of the world. Be it a space marine shooting aliens, a warrior in a leotard with his sword or a modern gangsta with his Tec9, when you sit back and watch a movie, you turn from active, into passive. I watched people play games with cut scenes and what happened? They put the controller down, let go of the mouse and keyboard, and watched. And then got annoyed when the controller vibrated while it rested on the coffee table. Congratulations industry, you just managed to turn an interactive medium into a passive one. You also managed to piss people off in the same move.
This second one is huge in MMOs. This pulling out of the world can be a breaker for many. If you can engross yourself in the virtual world, they will stay for hours. If I put down the controls every 10 minutes, I don't feel so attached to it really.
In story telling you can hear over and over again: Show, don't tell. In short it means that one character sees another character frown, which shows his displeasure, instead of the writer saying that the other character is displeased. Translated for games, it means that you should be able to see that frown, not have a text tell you "Character is displeased".
Classic example here is Portal, where you get stories and everything else from conversations and things you find in the world. In the second portal you get cut scenes that are either at the very beginning, or the very end (co-op mode) while everything else is part of the game engine. Half Life is pretty much entirely made up of none cut scenes. Even the great finales and destruction, including the intros are made inside the engine with almost always full control over the character.
Another nice sample I would like to proffer is Battlefield. Those guys have actually stepped down a little and made videos (still over the top and rarely reflecting reality) entirely in the game engine. Now when I say rarely reflecting reality, the things you see are entirely possible, however highly unlikely to happen in a this cool coordinated way. And you likely are watching it out of a shitty perspective of near death through some scope or another. Hundred times better than the WoW intro though.
What does this mean for MMOs? Don't let the user lose control of the character, ever. If you have to feed something, do it front loaded, before the game (EVE does it on character creation for example) where there is some important background given (OK, that's not so much in EVE, but at least you can skip it). In those front loaded things, keep it sweet and to the point, don't tease game play, cram information. Better yet, let the user find it on their own, if they are interested, they will find it if you hint enough at the beginning, inside the game. Never, ever, during the game, should the user lose control of their character to see him/herself move about on rails to some unseen directors whims.
No, dialog options don't make it better.
No comments:
Post a Comment