irrelevant83 said:
Many people wrongfully claimed this was too linear for an RPG. The game doesn't open up till you've played for 25 hours. First off, Final Fantasy has always been linear. Sometimes it's open, like in FF6, but that's usually after spending 20 hours in the linear part.
Yeah, they're linear, but they also create believable environments that're worth exploring. FF13 is corridor after corridor after corridor, with no attempt being made to make the environments interesting or create a tangible connection between you and the setting--which is something that the Final Fantasy games
exceeded at prior to this, making it an unforgivable sin of the game's design. Also, 25 hours worth of tooth-grindingly dull bullshit is a really hard sell to get to the so-called "kick ass" part.
As for the question regarding cutscenes...
Well, find an aspect of gaming--
any aspect of gaming--and you're going to find people who do well at them and people who do poorly at them. Cutscenes are great when they're sensibly paced and meted out, bookending decent chunks of content and providing emotional context and exposition. When they're
not sensible, it's a jarring, irritating inconsistency.
Aircross said:
*2 minutes of game play*
*enter new area*
*cut scene*
*2 minutes of game play*
*enter new area*
*cut scene*
*2 minutes of game play*
*enter new area*
*cut scene*
Like that. Anytime you're not side-questing or grinding in Kingdom Hearts 2, you're triggering a new pointless cutscene where the characters re-state shit we already know and speculate about things that don't matter. FF13 is ten times worse, with characters frequently stopping to debate the meaning of the quest the player has no input on, usually ending in an awkward stare-off before everybody just moves on. The plot doesn't actually advance and it happens frequently enough to be frustrating and disruptive, so it's a very dissatisfying experience. Shit, people joke about how FF13 should've just been a movie, but many of these scenes would have been frustrating, boorish, and disruptive in the theater too--not to mention the fact that they make the cinematography in
Attack of the Clones look like the work of Stanley Kubrick...
*SHOT* "We need to do what the Fal'Cie are telling us."
*REVERSE SHOT* "No we don't."
*SHOT* "Well you got me there."
*REVERSE SHOT* "Let's get going." *everyone leaves camera in this same shot, fade out*
Bad direction can do a lot to screw this stuff up. Bottom line, if you're going to have cutscenes they should at least be interesting to watch.
Aircross said:
Here's my Half Life 2 experience.
*12 hours of game play*
It was heaven! Control should never be taken away from the player.
I disagree with this point of view, mainly because I don't want every single game I play to be like Half-Life 2 any more than I want every game to be like Angry Birds. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all model for game design, and I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all model for storytelling either. I'd note that Valve doesn't either. There's simply what your project's goals are and what's appropriate to achieving those goals. Having a mute protagonist who bumbles through scripted events until someone tells him to "push the button" doesn't necessarily fit every single game.
While it works great for Half-Life, which is completely designed around this storytelling model and is essentially a non-stop running action scene, for some games--like Final Fantasy, or the Legend of Zelda, or Red Dead Redemption, or L.A. Noire, take your pick, there's lots of them--it isn't sufficient for representing most interactions necessary to fill out character development. If I were trying to make a game about being Han Solo, for instance, I'd wanna see wise-cracks and snappy dialogue between him and Chewie. 90% of production houses can't accomplish this on-budget incorporating all this crap into game systems; they have to pick and choose a handful of consistent things players can do ingame. So for those iconic scenes at a bar or escaping the Empire in a ship, when we don't have systems for eating or space flight (much as we might want them), we have a cutscene, rounding out the scope of things we see characters doing and breaking up the narrative monotony.
Know what cutscenes give us apart from that? Conciseness. I'm not kidding, the ability to cut away from one scene to a different scene is a key element of screenwriting and cinematography and a damn useful tool.
The Cutscene Version
Here's a for instance: Two detectives are heading over to a house to investigate a crime. We start with them in the station, getting the details from the Chief. CUT. They're in the car, discussing the case. They arrive in under a minute, because we skipped most of the driving. They start to get out. CUT. We're inside the house, they've already started questioning the witnesses.
Now here's that same for instance unfolded without use of traditional cinematic technique:
The Non-Cutscene Version
The detectives are at the station, getting the details. They get up from their desk, go downstairs, then outside, into the parking lot, then get in a car and start it up, then they drive to the scene. In-between talking about the case there's a lot of mention of useless tidbits and probably a lot of awkward silence. They drive for about 30 minutes to get there, and we're with them that whole time. Then, they arrive. They get out of the car, stand up, walk to the front door, knock, introduce themselves for the fourth time in the entire show, the witnesses we were already told about by the police chief introduce themselves, there's a few minutes of the detectives telling them to remain calm and saying they aren't accusing them of anything, going through the whole routine of saying that the more information they give the better they'll be equipped to figure out who committed the crime, blah blah blah blah blah, and finally we start questioning the witnesses.
WOW. Look at all that rubbish! See how much bullshit we avoided by using a little cinematic trimming? That's a power that traditional cinematic techniques give us in games. We can skip crap that ain't useful or interesting and get players into action in different places with less unnecessary padding. It frees us of obligations to make content we aren't interested in and gives players the benefit of context. When they're not used well, boy oh boy does it show, but as some have pointed out, scripted events like the ones used in Half-Life can be invasive as well. Crysis 2 in particular stands out.
