Poll: Why are Devs trying to turn games into movies?

[Casual Shinji]

There is this rather unsettling mentality among the gaming community about the "Pure Gaming" and anything that doesn't adhere to this must be sneered at and quite possibly even annihilated. Because for some reason I'm not aware of there's just not enough room for everyone.

On the contrary, there is this rather unsettling mentality among mobile platform gamers and proponents of cinematic experiences that anyone who points out the significant deficiencies in their preferred titles should be labeled as a Call of DudeBro with Dorito-stained fingers. Because for some reason I'm not aware of, it's OK to shit on shooters but not Candy Crush.

I really have no clear view on the mobile platform community, but yes, the 'You just want CoD' retort tends to get used quite often by a lot of gamers who consider themselves more intelectual. Same as the 'You just want Baysplosions' in movies, which reared its ugly head when the latest Godzilla was released, and got criticized for being boring.

The difference being those reactions are just people going 'Nuh-uh, you're stupid'. This anti-cinematics mentality just comes across as uncomfortably fascist. 'Only OUR way is the TRUE gaming!' Though I reckon this is just paranoia of people thinking their games are going to be taken away by the evil cinematics.

 

[Smooth Operator]

It is inevitable that every kind of game will be made at some point, so demanding that they don't get made is really pointless. The only thing that makes sense is to call shit for what it is, and I don't mean "Is game/ Isn't game", I mean a very clear and specific description of the content. Then people can very easily pick out what is or is not for them.

But as long as you keep playing this tug of war nonsense people will just keep muddying the water so you aren't sure what you buy until you already did it.

 

[SquallTheBlade]

If you are going to call it a game, make the gameplay interesting and fun.
If you can't do that and want to focus on the story call it something else. A interactive movie or a VN for example.
This isn't a hard concept to grasp.

Also you should criticize a work for what it is or what it is trying to be. Let's take an example. Telltales The Walking Dead. Is it a good game? Hell no. But I consider it more like a VN than a game. With that in mind it's awesome. I love it!

But what about The Order? For what I've heard it's trying to be a game, right? Well it fails miserably at that. You really should call it a interactive movie and criticize it with that in mind.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

Because when you're a AAA publisher, you apparently don't listen to what the actual developers or the gamers want, instead you listen to what the marketing division wants. And what the marketing team wants is lots of shiny, pre-rendered cutscenes.

 

[CaitSeith]

Because some of them are frustrated movie makers. It's a lot easier for them to make cutscenes to look good by using tested and proven movie standards. When they say games look better at 30fps, they mean they couldn't make the cutscenes look the way they wanted at 60fps (unless it's a excuse to hide technical problems, isn't it Ubisoft?).

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

I wouldn't mind it so much if the people trying to prop up this up weren't so terrible at writing stories. It's odd at how every designer as of late gushes about their beloved writing and then they have, at best, merely managed to be adequate. THIS is the best they can do for narrative in gaming? I think these guys need an intervention otherwise they're never going to get the hint.

Furthermore, good stories and story-telling in gaming is nothing new. It's like we have all these writers trying to tell a revisionist history in which gaming didn't start telling stories until the most recent generation. And it's insulting. Seriously, we've had great narratives for decades. Monkey Island, Wing Commander, Ultima, System Shock, Final Fantasy, Saga Frontier, Breath of Fire, Deus Ex, Ogre Battle, Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Odin Sphere, Persona, Valkyrie Profile, Metal Gear Solid, Parasite Eve, Chrono Trigger, Silent Hill, Skies of Arcadia, Panzer Dragoon, Dragon Force, Shining Force III, and tons of others. Not only are good stories nothing new for gaming, the ones I just listed are miles away better than 90% of all the tripe the next wannabe auteur makes in order to try and prove that games are in dire need of narrative evolution.

Ultimately, this is what the current obsession devs have with pushing narrative reminds me of: the 90s FMV Adventure Game craze. Y'know, the ones where they showed off CDs' ability to have full video and cram as many named actors as they could and having them recite awful scripts while having terrible gameplay? This cinematic craze is almost exactly like that except there's less Hollywood talent willing to embarrass themselves.

 

[BarryMcCociner]

As much as I hate to say it: Graphics sell games. Even if a game plays like crap, people will still go out and buy it because it looks nice. The Order 1886 proved this perfectly: People don't care about resolution or FPS as long as what is on their screen looks nice.

Maybe it's because most people don't immediately notice a bad framerate unless it dips below 30, and I remember a certain study that said some people with poor eyesight can't notice a dip below 24. Shiny graphics get reviewers talking, get them praising the looks, it's really just contributing to the hype machine, because a lot of people simply don't notice framerate. Especially if they've only ever played on consoles with games locked at 30.

I stand by what I've said through the great framerate debate, if you're trying to sell me a turn based game at 30 we'll have no issue, framerate has little effect here. If you're trying to sell me a spectacle fighter or an FPS and it can't clock at least 60, I'm taking my money elsewhere unless I hear of a mod that can boost that shit. An FPS at 30 is borderline unplayable.

 

[Lunar Templar]

Yes, they have.

If they wanna make movies then they should go make movies. I don't buy a video game to play it for 4 hours while 12 hours of cut-scene run.

 

[gigastar]

Since playing games at framerates as low as 30fps gives me eyestrain, they can take thier 'cinematic' crap and shove it where the sun shineth not.

 

[varunastra]

Because Cinematic cutscenes look pretty in commercials and on magazine covers so those types of games are getting lots of mainstream attention. And I guess we have a lot of frustrated 'storytellers' in game design now

 

[Diablo1099_v1legacy]

I have to admit, I'd say it would be easier to make your own "Blockbuster" with code then to try and pass a script into Hollywood.
Then again, I'd say the main driving force behind turning games into movies would be from AAA Publishers, I remember Jim once saying that a ton of the big gaming CEOs got their positions from other non-gaming industries like retail.
Add in with the fact that we had about nearly a century to master the art of selling a movie and barely half the time to do the same with video-games and I can see more then a few shareholders thinking that it would be better to make CGI-movies with a $60 admission price.

It's not always a bad thing, Rockstar Games has a good blend between movie feeling and gameplay in a bunch of their titles, Max Payne 3 and Red Dead Redemption comes to mind.
Either way tho, the Devs will make whatever gets them their next meal, just like people in the movie business.

 

[kenu12345]

This question basically boils down to your preferences, does it not? Say what you want, but video games can be in a vast amount of categories and just cause one leans more towards the cinematic side doesn't mean its any less of a game. I love Telltale Games even though they are heavily story focused, and I would never not call them games cause thats what they are. People have different preferences. Whoopie doo

 

[Aerith]

My best guess is that it's easier to program. Just look at The Order: 1886. Design-wise, that thing is an absolute beauty. But, that's probably because it's so tightly designed that it might as well have been on rails.

 

[Gladion]

The problem starts with your question: you're lumping every single game designer and every single game together like there was some sort of cutscene-virus in every game that gets spread over time and reduces the amount of what many people who believe they are the only ones who know what game design is call "gameplay". The idea is that having a lot of cutscenes in a game automatically disqualifies it from being enjoyable and even worse, it betrays the medium itself. It completely ignores the potential cutscenes and linear game design have as tools for video games in general.

Note that the discussion is never about why a game used cutscenes badly, how they could have improved them to better fit the game design or how they could have added powerful moments to a game's narrative or make a point in accordance with its gameplay (e.g. in the middle of Bioshock). The discussion is always about the quantity, not quality of cutscenes, and revolves around the question of why game studios do not know that this is not what games are supposed to do and that they should be making everything playable. Additionally, everything that cannot be sensibly made interactive should be removed from games altogether, because that's not what games are about. So it seems dialogue and sex are things that have no room in games because that is for when I passively watch a movie as I droolingly let the images run through my eyeballs (yeah, reading and film watching aren't really passive, either).

And I'm the first (well, maybe the second) to criticize game studios of designing for the screen instead of for the player; what I consider wrong, though, is the dismissal of non-interactive elements in games as inherently bad and the true opposition of what games should be.