How would you feel if you worked really hard to get a promotion–putting in the overtime, attending the right after-work social events, ensuring all of your work had that extra layer of polish?
And then, when the time came to get that promotion what if you were thanked for all your efforts and told that without your hard work, management wouldn’t have been able to give that promotion to this other person who hasn’t done the work, but looks a lot like you and is clearly more qualified because they can accomplish tasks you are not even allowed to try.
There are games that use cut scenes to do exactly this.
This is a terrible design choice, as far as I’m concerned. There is no reason to solve game design issues using interstitials. Period. If you’re not providing your wow moments through gameplay, your design is flawed and the project needs to be reworked from the ground up to let the player take part in creating the moments you’re looking to provide.
Thoughts?
It’s because games are still stuck on giving players only a handful of mechanics. This leads to a restricted scope of available player actions. Most narratives are interesting enough to require their characters to go through a huge range of actions, so at some point, a cinematic is used because the game doesn’t have the required mechanics.
I think it’s time games reduce their content scope so that more mechanics can be implemented in a contextual way (not with more buttons!).
What’s happening with Batman, I think, is that they aren’t using a mechanical skill set that supports the player being Batman and thus telling a story that supports Batman-type actions. Mechanics should support and interact with the narrative — if that’s your focus, you’ll find that the big moments of the game can be solved with those mechanics.
I don’t think is solved by adding more mechanics, but by exploring the ones we have more completely. And we need to think creatively about how we exploit them so that they can be used to tell the story.
But aren’t they making interactive films?
[5 minute cutscene explaining the interaction of film in videogames from Dragon's Lair onwards]
It’s lazy right? But yeah, there are some cases for cutscenes – when actors are not necessarily the player (RTS, TBS and other strategy games), and some story or low-level action needs explaining.
For the first person/third person ones though, yeah, totally.
Not much reason to have them, or at least make them static and uninterruptable.
* via Twitter
I guess I’m one of the few game designers who doesn’t mind cutscenes, especially if the alternative is Half-Life 2 style in-game dialogue (Hey Alex! I’m jumping up and down on your head and you’re just talking like I’m not! Woooooiiee!) or quicktime events (do I even need to make a joke about why those are horrible?)
Cut scenes are good transition material, ending one sequence of events (the previous level) and setting up another (the next level.) It gives the player a break, lets them stretch their fingers off the controllers without the worry of being horribly killed. It allows the player to focus on what’s happening and why they’re about to go storm the castle, as opposed to foraging in the crates around you for ammo while another character is talking, maybe even too far away to hear. Moreover as long as they’re kept to a reasonable length most players don’t really mind them.
Obviously everything in moderation, but really, cutscenes are just another narrative tool. Just because games are interactive doesn’t mean you have to be able to interact 100% of the time. I’ve heard very little moaning about static, non-interactive menus and credit sequences, for instance!
I’m not talking about all cut scenes, but specifically the use of cut scenes to invalidate (or trump) the gameplay verbs you allow your player to access.
If your game doesn’t have dialog trees, then go ahead and place conversations in cut scenes. If you need to show the player something happening elsewhere, or something they shouldn’t be able to control, then go ahead and place it in a cut scene.
But if you need the player to take an action that is thematically consistent with the provided gameplay verbs, but that gameplay doesn’t allow, you should rethink the need to have them take that action. And while we’re at it, you shouldn’t be using cut scenes to show them doing things well within the capability of the gameplay verbs either.
Cut scenes may have their place, but they are too often used to bully the player, or rob them of control. It’s inexcusable and lazy. It’s the players’ stories that matter, not the development teams.
And if the game menus weren’t interactive, you’d hear a lot of complaints from players who couldn’t start your game.
Ah, then I agree with you.
And if hitting “Start” in a menu equates to interactivity, then cutscenes are fully interactive for having a “Skip” button.
The problem, I think, comes with how to give the user the correct control. In Batman, since you brought it up, a lot of control is given to the player right from the opening. After the cutscene drops drives us through Gotham (not part of the game, so no connected mechanics) it hands batman over to the player while the Joker is delivered to the custody of the Asylum.
Yes, cutscenes appear again in a few places but they do so for two reasons:
1) There is no contextual way to give players control.
2) Pacing for the scene is critical, and success was ensured by the players previous actions
To elucidate, I may have to mention so possibly spoilerish moments.
I think the first case rears it’s head after beating Titan Ivy. By this time the control and gadgetry given to the player has be fully explored. They player has been trained about what each of the buttons do (some mapped to verbs, some contextually mapped to gadget-verbs). But the scene dictates an escape via another system entirely. There is no context for calling up the Batwing and using it to escape. The player cannot be expected to learn something new immediately after a major boss battle without the possibility of failing and having to replay at least the escape sequence. It would be unfair to introduce something new at this point without means to allow the player to explore it. And shoehorning player mechanics into a situation like this too often leads to QTEs.
Which brings me to my second point, that sometimes action needs to be paced and cannot be left to the player because failure would be frustrating and counter intuitive to the character, story, or action taking place. After defeating Bane (the first major boss) the player should feel empowered, but the battle is the setup for the final tense encounter outside. Batman escapes and is able to goad Bane into charging off the pier. Yes, this sequence could have been in player control but why should that be necessary? The player already defeated Bane in the previous battle, forcing a second sequence of events to defeat him again would negate the hard won struggle the player already fought. I personally was glad that the game took the initiative to show how my previous (narrow) victory led Bane to be disoriented and enraged enough to take the bait and fall for good. Again, adding mechanics here would either lead to a less than satisfactory feeling of victory (or frustration, should things go poorly), or a return to QTEs for the cheap feeling of interaction (as opposed to participation).
I think that Batman actually has a section that shows a best of both worlds path through this kind of storytelling. When Batman enters Croc’s lair, he sets a simple trap (while not under player control, the game uses a familiar context and system to do it). Then there is a challenge sequence, but the resolution is left to the player. It is up to him to blow the trap and defeat the Croc. It felt good, setting off that explosive at just the right time after narrowly escaping the catacomb-like maze of sewers with Croc hot on my heels. And I was the one who made it happen.
Anyway, I’ve rambled on here a while. My point it this: If a game provides a limited and specific set of verbs and contexts for interaction then the story has three choices:
1) Stay within the limited bounds at all times so that the player always has control
2) Provide out of context moments of interaction that break the player’s model of the world and interface temporarily
3) Take control away in limited situations to provide external context and timing that fits with the player’s expectation of success.
1 is wonderful if you can manage it. 2 is annoying, and breaks immersion. 3, if done carefully, can work seamlessly.
Why not allow the player to defeat Bane without the second scene? It struck me as cheap to tell the player they couldn’t take down Bane on their own and do so in a cut scene. And, if you have to use the Batmobile solution to conform to the IP-holder’s demands, then you should have been able to summon the Batmobile earlier in the game, perhaps to deal with an environmental obstruction, or large groups of thugs.
Why not set a goal and allow the player to set the explosive trap for croc? As you point out, allowing the player to detonate the trap feels good. If they’d introduced the idea of some walls needing three charges and included that in later gameplay, how much more accomplished would the player feel then?
Maybe you could have even used a combination of these techniques to get around having your control removed for the final blow in the last moments of the game.
Another inappropriate use of cut scenes in Batman is the first approach to the Bat Cave. Why not set up the terrain differently and allow the player to glide down to it themselves?
The post-Ivy calling of the Bat plane I had no problem with–it wasn’t consistent with the core gameplay verbs.
In defense of the designer’s intention, I think the reason why they kept the post bane fight and post titan ivy scene to cutscenes was that the two interactions with the respective vehicles were one shot deals. Those two points were the only times in game that those actions were carried out. Now if you could have used the batmobile routinely to clear up enemies (something I hope is in BA 2) and then had that action taken away from you in a form of a cutscene I would have felt cheated.
The Bat cave dive I agree completely, as you had that ability available and could have done that yourself. If you want a good example of feeling cheated by cutscenes you should play Spiderman Web of Shadows. The game constantly uses QTEs to show Spiderman being Spiderman, but the actual controls aren’t that fluid (they’re good but not that good).
My feelings about cutscenes and QTEs seem to turn on fine distinctions, and from what I read on message boards, everybody has different tolerances to the point that the search for a universal set of rules seems dubious. I loved the knife fight in RE4. Others hated it. I thought the ridiculous cutscenes in DMC3 were fun. Others felt cheated. I thought the non-boss QTEs in God of War felt like busy work. Others thought they made the game.
Also I’m not sure I want to manually run over Bane with a car, knocking him into the water with a ton of steel and ceramics on top of him. It seems pretty fatal and not very Batman. In a cutscene, I am deprived of choice and therefore absolved of all blame.
I was going to write a big, long defense of cut scenes, but then Chris Pasley stole the words right out of my mouth and said it much better than I.
Cut scenes have grown to bother me less and less over the years. I think Uncharted 2 set the new high mark for them (previously held by MGS4). It’s a valid criticism that those sorts of games are basically movie, game, movie, but if the game mechanics are solid and the cut scenes are entertaining in and of themselves (like if I’d watch them even if they weren’t part of my game), then I’m okay with it. They can serve as a pep talk of sorts to get me all pumped up for the next gameplay sequence.
You make some good points about Batman, though I hadn’t really noticed any of these save the initial dive to the Batcave. Even that I was okay with as the player otherwise wouldn’t be able to see their destination, so the cut scene served as a tutorial for a similar section later where you have to glide around the island’s outskirts.
I’m curious, how would you design the conclusion to a boss fight? If a boss falls by just some regular blow, that’s a bit anticlimactic. But the only other ways that come to mind are cut scenes where your character pulls off some badass finisher, or the QTE equivalent of that. It may be old school, but I’m quite okay with a boss’ demise being held via cinematic.
Better boss fights? Well, I’d like to see better use of the environment, not to mention all those tools I had equipped on my belt.
That Joker ending was pretty weak, even without the cut scene taking control for the victory blow.
Agreed about the Joker/ending in general. I otherwise loved the game, but that bit left a sour aftertaste.
And I contend that ending, both the gameplay portion and the cut scene portion was completely emblematic of their treatment of the player throughout.
Most people I’ve spoken to agree that the game didn’t make them feel like Batman and I think that’s a shame.
Cutscenes, done well, set up the story and get the player intrigued and engaged – much like the DM setting the stage for the adventures. They are the “once upon a time”, “meanwhile in a far off land” and “and they lived happily ever after”.
It can go terribly wrong in both situations by being long winded or by taking control of the character. There’s nothing players hate more than when they don’t have control of their character – in any game.
That’s an awesome analogy, Bo.
I’m going to steal it. ;-})
That’s a solid analogy, though I’d argue that there are times when I like control being ripped away. It’s always a risky proposition to do so, but if the character says or does something that I feel is more clever than what I would have thought of, I can enjoy it. Allow me to make a bizarre food analogy…
I’ve always had sort of mixed reactions to those restaurants that allow the customers to make their own food. While there is a part of me that likes more control over the ingredients, I’ve always felt like a vast appeal of going out is to have people who know what they’re doing prepare food for me. Sometimes I just don’t trust myself to do a good job.
Now most game writers quite frankly aren’t very good, but there are exceptions. Tim Schafer comes to mind as someone who writes dialogue so well that even though he rips control away from the player to establish Manny and Raz as characters, I feel more attached to those lovable scamps than I would any character I could come up with. I’m not sure why this is exactly. Maybe a lifetime of being raised on passive media and growing to know and love characters that way. Maybe it’s just a self-doubt thing. I don’t know that I’d want to fully role-play, but would rather guide already established characters through their lives.
You, sir, are arguing against the wind. That is to say, you’re arguing where no argument is warranted.
Go read my next post to see where I’m heading with this. ;-})