Poll: To Skip or To Pause

[shadyh8er]

Skip, definitely.

Unskippable cutscenes kill replay value *glares at God of War 3.*

 

[scorptatious]

Both.

Pausing for when real life rears it's ugly head.

Skipping for multiple playthroughs of a game.

 

[karcentric]

Skip all the way. Don't need the back story every time I play a game over.

 

[skywolfblue]

Skip.

Sure why not have both, but if I had to choose one...

I've rarely ever needed to pause a cutscene, if I have to go do something else and miss it I can always reload the last checkpoint in a pinch. But having skip is absolutely imperative, cinematics can go from awesome to absolutely annoying in the space of a single reload, die several times and have to re-watch the same cutscene is aweful.

 

[Voulan]

Both, absolutely. I always get nervous pressing start during a cutscene, in case it skips and I end up missing sections of the story, when all I wanted to do was quickly grab a drink to enjoy the cutscene with.

 

[Kodlak]

I like the FF system, press 'start' to pause and then 'back' to skip, got you coming and going.

 

[joshuaayt]

I prefer both. Press start to pause, then "Press X to skip".

Honestly, no matter how great a cutscene is, once I've seen it a few times, I've seen it. Now, if I'm replaying the game for the story then I'll rewatch it, but I don't want to have to sit through content I've seen 50 times already.

 

[butternut]

I'll be going with the both crowd here. If I want to watch the cutscene but something else require my attention then pausing is nice. If I've already seen the cutscene, be it from playing the game before or dying and restarting the area, then a skip button is also nice.

 

[zehydra]

Skipping is important because replay value is important.

However, if we're talking about a game that relies heavily on cutscenes to tell the story (which is a bad idea anyway), you would want to have an option which would maybe make a skip option available after a couple seconds, just so the viewer has a chance to be "hooked in" so to speak.

 

[Valdus]

Both. Very rarely do I actually care about cutscenes (since 99% of game stories just come across as pure crap to me anyway).

I shouldn't have to have the crap shoved down my throat - if I watch a movie on my DVD player and get to a scene that bugs me I can fastforward...why can't I do the same for bad cutscenes in a game?

On the other hand, if it's some sort of story exposition I can actually stand, why should I miss out because of a need to pause the game? If I need to choose between something that needs doing right away and a game cutscene the cutscene is not going to win.

 

[chadachada123]

Absolutely needs both.

One thing about skipping is that I will sometimes accidentally press a button and the cutscene will skip. Which sucks ass. I like games that require several presses or at least a specific button in order to skip, because it prevents accidental skips. If I'm sitting here hammering away at XYAB, it's pretty clear, game, that I want to skip.

The only thing worse than this is being forced to watch a cutscene over and over again. Even if I've yet to see it, there's no way to know that I haven't seen this same cutscene many times at a friend's house.

As far as pausing goes, shit, sometimes we need to take a piss break, man.

 

[King of Asgaard]

Surely having both is the best option.
Take a game like Kingdom Hearts 2.
You can pause the cutscenes, and then skip them if you so desire.

 

[crazyarms33]

have you ever dealt with this?

dreadfully annoying:


that is almost 2 and a half minutes long, not to mention getting back to it, such a pain in the ass playing it on a harder mode. all your doing is being a pain in the ass if you can't skip it after seeing it once.

I died SOOOOOOOOOOO many times there. I memorized that effing scene. I loathed not being able to skip it! Thanks for bringing up all of my repressed rage

OT: Both. Make me watch it once. After that if I'm replaying the game or I die, don't make me sit through it again unless I want to.

 

[lithiumvocals]

Both are important, but I feel that skippable cutscenes are slightly more so. I don't want to hear Sora wax eloquent about the power of friendship every fucking time I retry a boss battle(first game only).

 

[purplecactus]

Both, I'd say. I'll patiently sit through every single cut scene first time round, though if the need to take a toilet break hits particularly hard a pause option is so much better than waiting to get back to game play and then pausing. And on subsequent play-throughs, I tend to skip the majority of them unless I really liked them first time round.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Both, while I have seen more games with a skip button but I would use pause more. Unlike some I do watch the cutscene during the first playthrough no matter how long it is however sometime the cutscene happen right when I'm going to have lunch/ dinner so having a pause button would be useful.

 

[Razentsu]

There's no reason not to have both. But if I were forced to choose, I would prefer being able to skip cutscenes. I'm pretty strategic with how I schedule gaming sessions; situations in which I would want to pause a cutscene are very rare.