08.14.07

I am the God of hypocrisy, and I bring you: Cutscenes

Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 12:42 by Jonas

I just spewed out another burst of bile about cutscenes over on the PDX forums, and while I mean every word of it, I can’t help but think about what a giant hypocrite it makes me.

First, allow me to clarify. Cutscenes can be great. They can serve as a wonderful reward for completing a certain mission, and they can (still) show sequences that are too special-case to show off in-engine. A good example of excellent use of CGI cutscenes is the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, where short cutscenes between planets show your ship taking off, jumping to hyperspace, and then entering another planet and landing there. KOTOR2 even has - in my slightly over-confident opinion - an exemplary example of how cutscenes can tie perfectly into the game as it combines bits of CGI to show the results of your actions in the previous gameplay segment.

The opposite example that I also bring up in the thread I linked to above is from Halo 2 where, after fighting your way through a shipful of boarding aliens to find the big bomb they brought on board, you are rewarded with a jaw-dropping cutscene where Master Chief pushes the bomb out an airlock and soars through space on it in what I can only assume to be an outrageously souped-up tribute to Dr. Strangelove (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). He then plants the bomb on an alien vessel and takes off back to his own ship again as the enemy ship explodes magnificently. Quite a reward, right? But throughout this scene, the only thought going through my head was a resounding “WHY CAN’T I DO THAT!?” Why must they pull me out of the game and degrade me from player to audience? It’s like printing in large white letters on the screen: “ATTENTION: YOU ARE NOT THE MASTER CHIEF.”

I know some people love that cutscene. This is my opinion, and my opinion is that in-game cutscenes should avoid showing the protagonist doing something. Show him or her going somewhere, fine. Or standing around and looking at something. Show something happening to them that is out of their control anyway. But don’t pull me out of control to show my avatar doing something fantastic on its own, I will only feel cheated - robbed of the chance to do something like that myself.

In my post, I also mention another complaint about how many games use cutscenes, which is to tell the story they didn’t know how to put in their actual game. The Half-Life games are loved for a variety of reasons (although freedom of choice is rarely one of them), but the most significant reason why they are brilliant games that have already gone down in history as the Citizen Kane of video games (or something like that) is that Valve knows how to tell a story in a way that feels completely native and unique to computer games - by letting you experience it and piece it together yourself. You are never told what’s going on in the Half-Life games, they don’t even come with a manual, you’re simply dropped into the middle of a situation and left to figure out what’s going on by observing your surroundings and listening to bits of overheard conversation. When people talk directly to you, they mostly just tell you where to go and what to do next, so you really need to poke around to pick up clues about the game world. It may not be unique to the medium, but it feels so right, and they never pull you out of the game, not even during the most elaborate sequences.

But I think it’s time I get to the point. Why does this make me a hypocrite? Well… there are a few cutscenes in TNM that clearly defy most of the above. They pull you right out of the game and show your character doing something astonishing straight out of a late-80’s / early-90’s Hollywood action movie. The only thing I can say in their defense is that all of them are optional - they only appear if you make specific choices - and as such they can be said to simply show you the results of your own actions in the game, similar to the KOTOR example. Still, every time I see them I wish there were a way to make the player do these fantastic things instead of simply showing them (and then I get over it and clap my hands with joy over the fact that we pulled off such an impressive cutscene in a game as old and clunky as DX). It feels like the easy way out. But we’ve already spent ages setting up these cutscenes that (I’m not kidding) most players are going to miss at least on their first playthrough. Spending another 5 months enabling the player to actually do it him-/herself would be crazy.

There are more of these things in TNM - things that defy my own design edicts. Like the terrible jumping puzzles (YES! We have jumping puzzles! I’m sorry! I really am!). Or the old-fashioned, completely arbitrary GUI-based puzzles. Or the missions that are made up entirely of series of scripted sequences. Or that timed maze that ends one of our longer missions. Or the fact that some of the most linear maps we have were designed by me, on a piece of paper no less, before being assigned for a level designer to craft in 3D. Some of these regrets will probably make it into the post-mortem. Most of it will hopefully be stashed away at the back of my mind, forever a black spot on my conscience. And the next game will adhere better to my philosophies, I hope.

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