Showing posts with label Cutscenes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cutscenes. Show all posts

Monday, 9 July 2018

Show Don't Tell

One thing I occasionally hear people complaining about when it comes to games is that they are becoming too cinematic at times.  Sure there are plenty of great cinematic games like The Last of Us Metal Gear Solid or modern Final Fantasy and while the use of cutscenes is a fine way to tell a games story, it's the ones that marry the two that really stick out as great experiences in my mind.

Take a Souls game for example, this is an absolutely amazing case of a game marrying game play and story telling in a really masterful way.  When it comes to these games there's usually a scene at the start and a scene at the end and everything in the middle is straight game play.  Very rarely will a Souls game interrupt play to show you a thing and when it does it's usually just creatures flying you off to the next area or something like that.  That doesn't mean however that the Souls games are devoid of story, the world is teeming with all sorts of details that tell you a story by showing you what's going on rather than telling you about it.  Instead of having a bombastic cutscene of monsters killing people, it has you run through the aftermath and letting you put the pieces together yourself.  For more detailed parts of the plot you have to look to item descriptions for the things you find in the world which is a sort of interesting take on the tired cliche of data logs.

Another great example of a game that does this is Fortnite.  You wouldn't expect there to be much of a plot in a battle royale like that and there isn't but the game does subtle things that show the player how the world is going to change.  While other games may make announcements on a news page like "NEW FEATURE!" Or "map changes coming for the next season, Fortnite drops subtle world changes that hint to how the island will change for the next season.  For example right before season 4 started a meteor appeared in the sky and a few hints were left around the map as to where it was going to strike.  It was the devs way of saying "we are reworking an area" using the game itself rather than just announcing it on an update page.  

There's nothing wrong with the classic cutscene, I would never want to see it go. However when a game does marry gameplay and story the experience becomes much much more memorable 

Monday, 16 June 2014

CGI Trailers Are Bullshit

With E3 just behind us the one thing that people are talking about are the new games and the trailers that came with them.  This is all well and good because some of the trailers featured at E3 2014 were actually pretty rad, but today I want to share one pet peeve of mine and that’s the CGI only trailer.

A great example of this is the upcoming game from From Software called Bloodborne.  Now from what I’ve heard, Bloodborne is gearing up to be pretty good as it sounds just like a souls game but with a slightly different setting.  However even though I’m looking forward to this title, the trailer that I saw during the Sony E3 press conference pissed me off to no end.  Check it out

I mean it’s not a bad trailer, it’s really well done at atmospheric and stuff like that but the reason why this and all other CGI trailers piss me off to no end is because there is no fucking gameplay.  When I buy a game it’s so that I can take it home and PLAY it and when I watch a trailer I want to get an idea of what the game PLAYS like.  You know what CGI trailers don’t show you? FUCKING GAMEPLAY.
 
As much as the video game industry seems to be in denial about it nowadays, video games are NOT movies.  I’m not going to buy or get hyped for a game based on how pretty you make its cutscenes.  What you are doing when you make a CGI only trailer is just wasting everyone’s time and hoping that you can generate hype or sales based on pretty pictures and flashing lights.


As much as the video game industry seems to be in denial about it nowadays, video games are NOT movies.  I’m not going to buy or get hyped for a game based on how pretty you make its cutscenes.  What you are doing when you make a CGI only trailer is just wasting everyone’s time and hoping that you can generate hype or sales based on pretty pictures and flashing lights.
 
Remember, the most important aspect of a video GAME is its GAMEPLAY.  Keep that in mind when building your trailers and stop wasting people’s time with this crap.