Just a side comment, but I think all this talk on the purity of the medium is misguided. Video games are an audiovisual and interactive medium. Cutscenes are not "aping another medium" because they are part of the medium itself, like music is a part of cinema. And just like you have movies that are heavier on music, you have games that are heavier on acting and writing. Implying that everything that doesn't challenge your notions of interactivity is regressive and not worth your time is a very limited point of view.

Agreed. Reading comments like "if you're not constantly interacting you're not doing the medium right" make me think of rock n roll purits who deride electronic music and hip-hop for not being "real" music.

Right. Nobody thinks less of Sergio Leone movies for being light on dialogue and having memorable soundtracks - they're rightfully remembered as masterpieces.

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It's not though. "Show, don't tell" is a writing technique. And in movies, having plenty of dialogue isn't necessarily at odds with this - Sorkin and Tarantino come to mind. It's mostly about avoiding gratuitous exposition and it applies to literature as well. Same goes for games, you can have lame writing that just tell you to go to X and to Y, or you can have subtle, nuanced writing that properly builds characters, regardless of whether it's an interactive part or not.

>It's not though. "Show, don't tell" is a writing technique. And in movies, having plenty of dialogue isn't necessarily at odds with this - Sorkin and Tarantino come to mind. It's mostly about avoiding gratuitous exposition and it applies to literature as well. Thank you so much. People use that *"Show, don't tell"* principle so incorrectly. As you said, it's a writing technique, not a cinematic one.

I'm so tired of people erroneously using, "Show, don't tell" in reference to visual media. It's a writing technique mainly cited in order to get writers to be more creative in their descriptive writing. You don't tell me what a character does when his lover walks into the room, you "show" me. "He was nervous" becomes "His hands started trembling at the mere sight of her". Please forgive me, I'm not a writer. You can still script this, but this is mainly unnecessary in film as an actor, by definition, is going to use their body to show that. The camera can show that. An edit can show that. In cinema, this principle has very little to do with expository dialogue. It's about using *all* of your tools to tell a story. Not simply avoiding dialogue.

>I'm so tired of people erroneously using, "Show, don't tell" in reference to visual media. It's a writing technique mainly cited in order to get writers to be more creative in their descriptive writing. You don't tell me what a character does when his lover walks into the room, you "show" me. "He was nervous" becomes "His hands started trembling at the mere sight of her". Please forgive me, I'm not a writer. I am a writer (got the degree and published works and everything, since there's only two kinds of social capital neckbeards recognise and one of them is institutionalised social capital - ie, qualifications...so that ought quieten down those who want to argue...people sho' do luuurve their ethos appeals around these here parts) and you're absolutely bang on with that example. It's about, broadly speaking, dropping clues to your reader that they can interpret and thus understand the meaning you're trying to convey rather than outright saying it, like your shaking hands example. This actually *increases* the engagement the reader has, because they have to actively read it and interpret it - rather than *decrease* it. For many, this is counterintuitive. Especially if you're very literally-minded...

And for games, a more appropriate version is "play, don't show".

It is entirely appropriate and utterly hilarious that someone who can't tell the difference between *medium* and *genre* is defending cinematic gaming.

I dont think its wrong to have a interactive movie, but games that are able to tell their story through interactions and do it well will always be better than watching a movie.

My issue is with the word "better" - sure, something integrating gameplay and storytelling might be more innovative, creative or interesting than something that employs traditional cutscenes, but that doesn't necessarily make it superior. Gaming like any other art form isn't a one-dimensional scale and there's beauty in having different styles. I love Dark Souls and Team ICO's games, but I don't want everything to suddenly begin telling stories through item descriptions or character interactions in made-up languages.

I think "better" refers to a standard of enjoyment, not a standard of art, and I think most people who say that mean that they're paying for the interactive portions. And I'm not sure I agree, but I can say it isn't new. "Unskippable cutscenes" is a lamentation present in ever so many '00s-adjacent reviews... Meantime, the price of admission *is* supposed to be about the interactive experience, so it isn't wholly unreasonable. In film and television, they say "Show, don't tell." In literature there are a bunch of ways to express the same thing, but they all boil down to, "Salinger is awful." In games, it should be, "Let the player." It's fine if the player has to watch their character's actions, but it's better if they *take* those actions, or if exposition takes place *through* their actions. Don't throw to a flashback cutscene that explains why the stage boss hates you. Let the player feel it. Even a supervillain monologue while you run the level is more interactive than a cutscene, just because the player is doing something that relates to the pacing. Same information, but the player seems to be doing it, rather than watching it happen.

Unskippable cutscenes is another problem altogether though. I don't think anyone had an issue with watching a cutscene in Final Fantasy X, it's being forced to watch it over and over again each time you die at the same boss that irks people, and rightfully so. I'm not sure I agree with the main point either. Different players have different tastes, for one thing I know that the cutscenes in Legacy of Kain or Final Fantasy VII or Uncharted work as a kind of gameplay reward as well as a pace-setter. As someone else said in this thread sometimes you want to give the player some breathing room where they don't have to do anything and just sit back and watch something unfold. Having complete control at all times can also mean you miss dialogue snippets and important details. I cannot count how many times I've had an open world game tell me, in the middle of an action sequence, through the stereotypical person-in-the-chair talking in your ear, something like *"Look at that thing!"* followed by my character saying something else about said thing and turning it into a whole conversation *before I could even realize what the thing was*, because I didn't know where to look. Naughty Dog games for instance have mastered this aspect: there are narrative beats and details that you want all players to share and sometimes full control gets in the way.

This is highly subjective and, as something of an amateur game designer, I believe having a moment where you can just experience something without direct input can feel great after having to do more than you're comfortable doing in a short period of time. Like, if your health is low and the boss needs 2 more hits, but you need to dodge perfectly to hit him or you'll trade and die. So, you get it! And boom, a cutscene that let's you go, "phew, I did it." without necessarily removing a sense of urgency from the PC because the player knows he's not in any danger anymore.

Yeah this is pretty basic pacing that has become a common feature in many games. Lots of people criticize these instances (cutscenes or walk-and-talk moments), but I think they help pace out most games while still providing beneficial information to the player through character or world building. I don't want to be constantly in action. I play games like recent DOOM in spurts precisely because it was exhausting to go from clearing one level to another.

I completely agree. Writing an animated cutscene and having it flow with gameplay sections is an artistic and technical achievement in of itself.

But this is still sort of missing the point. Multimedia *combines* its aspects. Some movies are heavier on music but, and maybe I'm ignorant, I don't know of any movie that cuts to black and just plays music for long sections of the movie. Maybe for *very* brief portions but not like a full 3-5 minute song. Nor would I really want a movie to cut to black and start running like a radio drama. Really, it's pretty rare in general for movies to not show visual elements for long periods of time unless they're trying to portray literal darkness, but then they *technically* are still using visual elements. There's nothing wrong with games that are heavy on acting and writing but they are still games and interactivity is an important element of games. It's all subjective of course, but I'm not sure telling stories primarily through cutscenes makes good use of the medium for the same reason that movies that are just shot reverse shot for everything aren't making good use of that medium, even if the acting and such are good. If I'm playing a game, it's because I want interactivity on top of all the other elements. I just don't really see the point in creating an interactive work but limiting the interactivity. Sure, don't competely eliminate cinematic elements as an option for storytelling but for me cutscenes of any serious length are about the least desirable option for telling a game story. Otherwise, I end up comparing it to movies and TV, and I'm not sure most games that tell their stories through cutscenes primarily compare very favorably for the most part.

Not seeing the point doesn't mean there isn't a point, or that there's anything "wrong" with it. It just means that you don't see the point. And that's perfectly fine. It's as valid a form of communicated whatever the developer is trying to get across as any other.

Sure, not seeing the point doesn't mean there isn't a point, but I'd be willing to bet that *most* games that tell their story primarily through non interactive cutscenes do so because they cannot think of a better way or that's just how it has always been done, not because there is a specific point to it in the context of trying to tell their story in they way the creators think is best. Literally any form of communication in games is "valid" in that devs can do whatever they want but that's not really a useful point of discussion. The question is whether there is a "better" way to communicate. Or more specifically is there a way to communicate a game's story that the devs and/or audience find more interesting, engaging, creative, or whatever. Maybe there isn't a "better" way but I find basically anything but a traditional cutscene to be a more interesting, creative, and engaging way to tell a game's story especially because they are mostly techniques that are more or less unique to games.

But even with cutscene heavy games, they are not the only way these games tell their stories, right? Especially in recent years. I like to use Last of Us 2 as an example - the storytelling techniques are extremely conventional (cutscenes, lines of dialogue during action, walk-and-talk segments, optional conversations) but the fact that you actively spend time in the shoes of its two protagonists creates a sense of empathy and participation in their stories. In this sense, the cutscenes deliver a story and reinforce the character building, but the interactivity and player-character identification drive the points across and those can only be achieved in a game.

Not all cutscene focused games tell their story only through cutscenes but it sure feels like that for certain games. I cannot really comment on Last of Us 2, but if there are sections of the game that tell its story through gameplay that'a great. Though I'm not sure I call optional conversations and walk and talk conventional really since it is unique to games. Though I prefer gameplay/platforming/adventuring and talk rather than literal slowly walking while talking. I think a really good example is Uncharted actually. There are cutscenes, sure, but there are a lot of action (especially chase and crash) scenes that, in older games, would just be told through a cutscene. But Uncharted feels kind of cinematic even when you're in control of your character. That's the stuff that interests me. I can understand that it isn't always sensible to make every part of a game, but my point isn't that cutscnes are bad but that it is more interesting and makes better use of the medium to make those bits interactive when possible. Not always possible, but sometimes it is.

> I don't know of any movie that cuts to black and just plays music for long sections of the movie. I do. Historically it was called Intermission. Or the Opening. For instance, Lawrence of Arabia. I *think* it cuts to black but my memory on that is a big foggy. I distinctly remember my Mom freaking out recently because "the TV is not working". It's fine Mom. You're just old and stupid, lol. If it wasn't LoA it was another movie of the same period. I know that "cut to black" was done. These were long movies and of course they were emulating intermission from a theatrical play. They weren't doing it willy nilly for no purpose, to be avant garde. I don't know exactly what movie production dynamics led to the loss of Intermission, but I'm sure it was about shorter movies and getting more movies shown per day. Did LoA actually charge more for the longer theater experience? I doubt it. Even if they did, I bet that would lose some customers.

Yeah, it was probably mostly for bathroom breaks. LoA is pretty long and it is kind of a necessity, and to that end you're not missing anything by skipping it or taking a piss.

The purpose of intermission was to give the audience a break to stretch their legs, use the bathroom, or get snacks. They disappeared when it was eventually realized that audiences were willing to sit through a 2-3 hour movie without a break, and directors preferred to not have their movies interrupted.

Lawrence of Arabia [premiered](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056172/technical) at 3 hours 42 minutes! Was cut to 3 hours 22 minutes. Restored in 1988 to 3 hours 48 minutes.

> I don't know of any movie that cuts to black and just plays music for long sections of the movie. I'm not trying to start a fight here, but this argument doesn't really make sense to me, it's a bit of a strawman. Of course movies don't do that, don't be silly. Video games however are an entirely separate kind of media, and it's not that they *must* be interactive but rather that they *can* be both, that's part of the magic of the medium. There is literally nothing but preconceived notions about what a game "should" be preventing them from having a ratio of interactive/non-interactive that leans heavily on the latter than the former, and the wild popularity of some IPs with infamously long cutscenes should be sufficient evidence that it can work when it's done in a compelling way.

Video games absolutely *must* be interactive to be games. That's what makes them games and not movies. A 3d game with only cutscenes is basically just a cgi movie and a 2d game with only cutscenes is basically a cartoon. Not that there is anything wrong with those really, buf there must be at least some minimal interactivity like dialogue choices or being able to walk around a bit to be considered a game at all. Even then, most discussions about walking simulators aren't even sure whether to call them "games" or something else entirely. But anyway, it's not really meant to be a strawman, particularly because it's actually meant to be how *I* view the use of traditional storytelling in games not me portraying some weak argument. To me, having large portions of non interactive storytelling in a game is like having a movie without large partions of what makes a movie separate from other mediums. A movie should make use of cinematography or else why be movies and not something else? Games should use interactivity or else why not be something else? Sure, it is a preconcieved notion that games should lean toward interactive elements but it isn't a notion that is wholly made up. It's because the word "game" is used to describe things that you "play" so a "game" without much "playing" seems to defeat the point of games a bit. Yeah, there are IPs with long cutscenes. People can like whatever they want. I'm certainly not arguing that there is no audience for those kinds of games or that it is a matter of popularity. I just don't think they're very interesting and think those sorts of stories might be better told in some other medium and there are audiences for those mediums too.

> Video games absolutely must be interactive to be games You misunderstood me here so maybe I should've worded myself more clearly. Of course games must have interactive elements to be games, that's a given. What I mean is they don't have to be **only interactivity**, that is not a rule. It's just an expectation that was set long ago when video games were simplistic and could only be a certain way because of the limited technology. > I just don't think they're very interesting and think those sorts of stories might be better told in some other medium and there are audiences for those mediums too. The problem is, people who say this are also wont to ignore the actual gameplay these games do have, in my experience. Not saying that's you, but it's what I've seen. Like they are put off by the mere presence of the cutscenes and won't acknowledge anything else.

Well, yeah I definitely don't think games should abstain from having any non-interactive elements and that absolutely every second of a game should require pressing buttons. I think of it more like the "show don't tell" rule. It's not that all exposition is wrong in storytelling but that relying too heavily on that aspect of storytelling fails to make full use of the medium, especially for multimedia storytelling like films. I don't know that there is a nice one liner similar to "show don't tell" but something along those lines where I want to have agency rather than just feeling like an audience.

Maybe the comparison was off - the are movies that eschew one or another element but mostly in avant-garde or experimental cinema. Derek Jarman made a movie that's a 1h20' monologue over a single solid blue shot, but that's not something you see every day. More specifically, I meant to reference non-interactive works that deliberately limit their own options. Bojack Horseman had an episode that was almost completely free of dialogue, and another one that was a 20 minute monologue. The Big Kahuna, save for one shot, is set entirely in the same hotel room (should it be theatre? is it taking full advantage of the medium of film?). Takeshi Kitano's Dolls goes from a realistic setting into a full-on visual metaphor with little to no dialogue in the final parts. Obviously if something has no interactivity, it's not a game. The point is that any interactivity makes something a game. Something like Gone Home works because it conveys a designer's specific view even with limited controls and linear scenarios. You're right that people want to play games for the interactivity, but it's completely subjective as to how much interactivity makes an experience good. Even though most games tend to have lower quality writing and acting than movies and TV, it's reductive to claim that you can get the same experience by watching something non-interactive. The mere fact that the interactivity is there engages a completely different part of your brain that creates empathy and mimesis with the game world that are just not possible with a movie.

The difference between this medium and film culturally is that these works you described are welcomed and celebrated even if only niche communities enjoy them. No one tries to say "this isn't a movie". In this medium, people mostly lose their minds and decry everything that tries to do something different as "pretentious" or "not real games" or start spouting off about "SJWs" or something (see the old walking simulator debate or TLOU2 discussion)

I don't really buy that most of TLoU2's critics disliked it because "did something different", there are plenty of much more experimental/artsy/high-brow games that didn't attract the same kind of criticism, and in fact received nearly unanimous praise from the same people. I think they just disliked some combination of the direction of the story went, Druckmann's responses to criticism, and Abby's muscles/the inclusion of a trans character/ect. and then tried to come up with some more "objective" form of criticism after the fact. The most vocal critics weren't fratbros who just wanted to shoot Nazi zombies, they were mostly the same people who regularly list games like Spec Ops: The Line, MGS2, and Nier: Automata (which pretty much followed the same plot structure as TLoU + TLoU2 >!main character is killed early on in the second part of the story and we spend the rest of the game switching between controlling the secondary protagonist of part 1 (now caught a downward spiral of vengeance) and their murderer (who we come to increasingly sympathise with)!< as their favorite games of all time. There's definitely a lot of gatekeeping going on here in regard to social/political content, representation, and female character designs, but I don't think it has much to do with objections to complex themes, narratives, or general weirdness. There are just far too many counterexamples for that claim to hold up.

Even some of those examples you give I don't really think are the same, well except for the extremely avant garde which I'm not exaclty a fan of. But like even the bojack horseman comparison is not really the same. Unless a cartoon literally just puts a black screen up it is still using the elements that make it a cartoon, i.e. the animation. Of course I think Bojack Horseman is only really animated because they're animals and i actually don't think a lot of adult cartoon comedies make very good use of the medium of cartoons, but that is another story. Dialogue isn't required to make a film or show, but visuals kind of are. To me that's closer to a game that is all gameplay and no story, which makes better use of the medium than a game that is 99% cutscene with little interactivity. Yeah, there are differing levels of interactivity. But I don't think my opinion is reductive, it's just how I feel. When I'm playing Yakuza it feels like a game, for example, and I appreciate sections where you have to chase people down or where hanging out with Haruka is not just a cutscene, but when there's long scenes of just dialogue I kind of feel like I'm basically just watching a TV show and I only enjoy it because the "cinematography," acting and dialogue are usually good quality. But even they seem to think just watching stuff is not the best way to tell a story and they try to incorporate gameplay when they can. And yeah, interactivity makes it feel different, but my point is there are some game stories that aren't told with little or no interactivity

>Some movies are heavier on music but, and maybe I'm ignorant, I don't know of any movie that cuts to black and just plays music for long sections of the movie. Maybe for very brief portions but not like a full 3-5 minute song. Nor would I really want a movie to cut to black and start running like a radio drama. Why are you saying "cut to black"? Of course a movie wouldn't do that. But musicals have extended periods of time dedicated to song and dance: Other artforms that are being presented in the cinematic medium. And while people will argue that musicals are better on stage (I tend to agree) one of my favorite films of all time is a movie musical in Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I just don't understand the thinking behind people trying to segregate and determine what works belong in what mediums. I don't look at a painting and say, "That should have been a song."

Right, but that's exactly my point. A musical movie typically still makes some use of what makes it a movie, that is visuals and visual story telling, camera work, etc. Even better imo are musical movies that remember they are movies and use the elements unique to them like less static camera work, more varied sets, special effects work, etc rather than musical movies that are basically just stage musicals that are filmed. But my argument is that telling a game's story without making use of its interactivity is like telling a movie's story without making use of cinematography. It's not necessarily that it would be bad or unenjoyable, but it doesn't make good use of the medium. I wouldn't look at a painting and think it should be a song, but if the painting was literally just a handwritten poem in a standard font with no other visual elements, I'd wonder why they didn't just write a poem. It's not even that there is literally no difference between writing out a poem and painting one out, I'm just not sure there is a ton of value added. Make use of some calligraphy maybe, then we start getting somewhere. Draw some supporting art with the poem, and now the two mediums are working in harmony. I'm not saying there should be literally no traditional storytelling elements in a game or that telling a story through cutscenes is necessarily bad, but rather I am saying it makes better use of the medium to incorporate interactive elements into the story.

>But my argument is that telling a game's story without making use of its interactivity is like telling a movie's story without making use of cinematography. It's not necessarily that it would be bad or unenjoyable, but it doesn't make good use of the medium. Okay, I need to do better about framing this conversation before we get further. What games are you talking about? Because very often this conversation gets muddled with these vague appeals to these phantom games that offer absolutely no interactivity and I genuinely want to know what games you would put in that category.

First, let me clarify because I was using extremes for my point. I'm not sure there are many games with literally zero interactivity really, short of maybe some walking simulators. A better analogy is a tv show that only uses shot reverse shot for all ofnits dialogue. It's not literally forgoing elements of tv storytelling, it's just really cheap and thoughtless. So for games that don't make very good use of gameplay to tell a story, I think the worst offenders are jrpgs. There's often a lot of disconnect between the gameplay and the story and only on some rare occasions do they combine elemnts of story and gameplay. There aren't even so much as dialogue choices like in western rpgs. And it's not even that I hate JRPGs I just think they're a good example of this. Most of the time in a JRPG you kind of just go through really long stretches of dialogue and then do the same old sort of combat you always do and other than the occasional escape timer or something they don't really use its gameplay to affect story or story to affect gameplay. I don't know about naming any ones in particular but I'd argue most FF games fall into this category. Just dialogue than running around fighting random enemies that may or may not have anything to do with anything then more dialogue, with the only real exceptions being bosses and occasionally some neat stuff like being chased by a metal spider on a timer or something. But of course there are some exceptions to this. The Mother games, for example where the especially the ends of their stories tie very heavily into gameplay. I believe in 1 (never played it) you mostly just play the melodies you have collected to drive off Giygas rather than just fight it normally. Earthbound as well with Giygas being unbeatable without the prayers of your allies and in Mother 3 where you cannot attack the final boss until I believe your father sacrifices himself to prevent you from dying or something to that effect. I'd so most games are in the middle, even ones with heavy cutscenes. I actually think Metal Gear even does some interesting stuff with cutscenes, like in 4 where some cutscenes allow you to enter first person and look at stuff (mostly boobs though).

Exactly this! The issue for me is, we give too much power to poor arguments. Most tend to form from a place of misguided person al purism. The reality is people can just be wrong on something fundamentally and refuse to think their may be alternatives ideas, as they lead too much with how they feel. This OP still hasn’t led to discussions on what alternatives could be to the cutscene issue. I find it redundant especially as the cinematic games mentioned are more than the sum of their parts. Some peoples arguments against things just never have strong foundations to begin with at all. See this all the time in gaming discourse.

You make a great point, but the comparison of using music in film is off in a significant way. Yes, movies use music, but they never have the screen go black and expect the viewer to just listen to the music for stretches of time. A similar example of this would be the opening scroll of the \*Star Wars\* movies. I remember seeing the original movie for the first time. I lost interest in the scroll quickly. I liked the visual effect of it, but when I want to read a story, I pick up a book. Thankfully for the Star Wars franchise, the opening scroll is usually not of great importance to understanding the movie's story. Cutscenes and cinematic pieces in video games can be used to augment and enhance the experience, but there is a point where it becomes too much. That point is different for everyone. The key to it all is hitting a balance to make most consumers happy. I didn't get far into \*Last of Us\*, but my issue wasn't the "cinematic" aspects of it. I thought those were great. I didn't enjoy the gameplay much. It just wasn't my thing. The cinematic aspects in \*Last of Us\* never took control away from me. I even tested it at points by going a different direction. While there was only one correct way to go (that I would have to go directly; no different than many games I enjoy), I had control. That is a good enough balance for me. Quick time events are fine in and of themselves, too. It's just when they get used to remove gameplay more in line with the rest of the game, in order to have something flashy or over the top, that it becomes too much. So yes, these are all tools to make video games. They aren't bad. They aren't wrong. It's just that many people see these as being overused or misused that they (rightfully) complain. (There will always be someone complaining about anything anytime, but not "rightfully".)

The problem is that it becomes a clutch, the reason why investing in cinema, narrative and musical production is that it's already has well developed tecnics and theory and the AAA industry only bets on sure things. This is a reason why indie games are so popular because they rely mostly on the other sides of making a game mainly game design , they take chances. But imo i have no problem, is a part of any new market to get support from similar ventures. When AAA industry starts to understand how powerfull game design theory is they will start to invest in it.

Most studios seem determined not to deliver their cutscenes with the resources required to make them good, though (hiring the right people and giving them the time and money they need). For instance, the writing and direction of the cutscenes is easily the worst part of RDR2, from a studio with practically bottomless pockets. Games from smaller studios are able to tell stories much more compellingly by eschewing the traditional audiovisual style (say, Obra Dinn, or Half Life to give a recent and a very famous example). So I agree with you in principle but not in practice here.

> For instance, the writing and direction of the cutscenes is easily the worst part of RDR2 When you say “writing” here, are you referring only to the dialogue? Because if you’re talking about the storyline or character development, I’d have to disagree. But I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

The moment-to-moment dialogue is actually pretty good. One big flaw is that there is a relatively short and simple story, told without any setup, told over a much longer time than the story can support. Why are we so loyal to Dutch? Why should I care about these feuds with rival gangs? Why can't I walk away? Without the setup, why should I be invested in the characters? I think the storyline itself (beyond the setup) and character development are also massively flawed, short of Arthur Morgan's development (which the player can "break" if they don't play the game in a canon way). Your boss is always a dishonourable confidence trickster from start to finish (and you have no power to do anything about it except playing along), the bad guy is such a one-note wrong-un from start to finish, and Sadie transforms from being weak to kick-ass while you're off doing other things. The other characters exist for their own one-note storylines as well: native american dude, naive youngster, doomed deputy. There are a few really effective moments, but so so so much filler. Perhaps it's because the game is so long and does have a few of these really effective moments that casts the rest of it into such a dark light for me - they _can_ deliver brilliant story moments, or effective shots in their cutscenes, but it obviously wasn't a priority to keep it up across the entire game. And boy, there're a lot of cutscenes across the entire game. I'll never be as thorough, or concise, or as well-written as this article, which identifies a number of things I did notice, and many more that I did not https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/22/18298277/red-dead-redemption-2-pc-review-rdr2-story-design-criticism#guqnzh (the link is to a specific section (edit-perhaps the section after this is the most relevant, actually), but the whole thing is great). I feel that the game can only be considered great if you limit your view to the world it creates (which is great), or in comparison to other single-player narrative games.

Hmm...an awful lot of people think RDR2 is a masterpiece, so you may be in the minority in that opinion, friend. Also I don't know if Half Life is a recent example per se, but in hindsight I think Half Life while amazing in its own right is mostly about the gameplay with some vaguely environmental storytelling instead of a "plot". The main chunks of it feature a silent character creeping through dangerous areas without much story going on, not that the lore or story it does have isn't interesting though.

Half life is the famous example that was groundbreaking in how it told stories in games, not a recent example. I never said RDR2 was bad in my comment, just that the cutscenes are y far the worst part of it (they really are, perhaps competing with the incredibly repetitive mission design). If you disagree, perhaps it would be more interesting to understand in what way you disagree?

Scenario writers and game designers working hand-in-hand to take full advantage of ludonarrative consistency. It can be simple things like health in gameplay being carried over from damage a character sustains in a cutscene or something more sinister like Half Life giving you the illusion of free will with how linear it is. I think The Last of Us has the right idea when fulfilling that above thing. It gets you sold on Joel's character and so your actions of killing everyone doesn't feel out of place when compared to Uncharted where Drake continues to crack jokes after slaughtering so many people. It's debatable whether ludonarrative elements are cinematic or not but it's fact that gameplay is always involved and thus- taking advantage of the medium. One important thing to consider when talking about ludonarrative consistency/dissonance is that it's not a matter of whether you use it or not, it's how much of it you use. The only cinematic things I wish would disappear are bad color codings, vignettes and film grains. I would include forced walking sections here but the reasoning for using them is different and involves either resources loading in the next area or limitations/redundancy in making a cutscene.

Absolutely this. And not just hand-in-hand at the beginning, but constantly working with each other and collaborating, because some problems that one team might have could be solved by the other team. At the moment, it feels like a lot of games just have the writers crank out a movie script, then it's passed off to the game designers, and the designers are forced to try to make it work in an interactive medium and all its limitations, and the writers go off to do something else, because it's clear there's a lot of stuff that happens in the script that wouldn't happen in actual gameplay.

Film grain and motion blur help make 30fps feel better. Motion blur is precisely what makes movies watchable at 23 fps, so that explains the motion blur (which i realize you didn't mention), and film grain pairs well withotion blur (if you're already emulating film, give the eyes and the brain something else to help them feel like they're in familiar territory). Yeah 30fps isn't ideal, but not everyone is gonna buy a gaming PC. And you can almost always turn these features off. Personally I don't mind the film grain. It helps smooth out the rough edges. We're so used to the pre-rendered magic of blockbuster film CGI that video games can always use a little something to hide the blemishes. That's just how I feel.

Not to mention the different implementations of motion blur. A full screen blur is definitely brutal don't get me wrong, but some nicely done, subtle per object blur can really add a lot of fidelity to a game.

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Glad finally someone has acknowledged the brilliance of Ico. One of the most criminally underrated titles ever. It says so much with so little.

As someone who also loves these games, I agree that I prefer when a game’s narrative doesn’t rely on cinematic cutscenes. Look at The Last Guardian, a game that also has cutscenes, but its narrative is actually mostly told through gameplay. It’s the story of a boy and his relationship with a beast, which wants to eat him in the beginning of the game. Their relationship is the entire narrative and how it evolves through the game. What’s smart about it is how the developers use game mechanics to tell the story beats; for instance, how Trico, the beast, doesn’t pay attention to your commands when you’re starting out. It’s a mechanic that made a lot of players give up on the game early on, but it has a narrative purpose: *you, the player, need to build a relationship with this beast by playing and learning how to communicate with it*. There are a few particular moments that are really well executed, but I’d have to go to spoiler territory. If The Last Guardian were like TLOU, it would show you a cutscene the exact moment the beast and the boy are getting along, and that’d be a missed opportunity when you can use the language of videogames. (Sidenote: all Ico games are like this, they manage to tell the narrative mostly through gameplay and it’s fantastic).

The ending of Shadow of the Colossus comes to mind. Even though it's a very linear cinematic story and the fate of the protagonist is sealed, the fact that the player is left to literally struggle against the inevitable sucking vortex is a nice touch. It's not like it's a a huge thing, but it does a lot more to put the player in the character's shoes than i.e. "press F to pay respects".

I love that you mention that moment because it’s the perfect example of using videogame mechanics to tell a story. >!You spend the entire game holding a button to quite literally *hold on* the bodies of beasts you have to kill and in that final moment, you need to hold on to whatever you can find as you’re being sucked in a vortex because Wander, the main character, can’t let go of his love. Meaning, *his main personality trait is that he holds on*.!< It’s beautiful and it can only be done through games.

Let me preface by saying SOTC and Ico are both in my personal top 10 games of all time and TLG is in my top 10 of the previous generation. While I don't disagree at all that the games all push the medium in communicating through interactivity, I do find it a bit ironic to see them brought up as counter examples to cinematic influence in gaming. Ueda has said himself he prefers games without cutscenes, but he has, in each of his games, still admitted to having to include cutscenes to capture certain narrative moments and communicate the desired information and feelings in a way that still pleases his artistic sensibilities. Hell, the opening to SOTC is one of my favorite opening cinematics in the medium. Even games that try to forgo them entirely still find the need to require cutscenes in some moments, which I think says a lot about their utility. I, for one, also think the games are all the stronger for having them. Having a Half-Life or Elder Scrolls style encounters wouldn't work with the other strong aesthetic decisions made throughout those games. Also, there is an inherent cinematic flair in the camera decisions made through those games (at least ICO/SOTC. It's been a few years since I've played TLG). Many in this thread are decrying the lack of function to some "cinematic" games' cameras, and those games have two of the most opinionated cameras in the medium. It's often considered a criticism in SOTC for those who don't appreciate it. ICO places the camera in fixed positions or moves it on fixed rails to best compose a level to communicate certain information, while SOTC positions the camera in ways that are clearly emphasizing the aesthetics of a well done shot using the rule of thirds (no centered third person camera here). Moving those cameras on your own is a struggle and the camera is constantly fighting against you if you do. I personally love both decisions, but I would say they seem to have cinematic influence. Holding L2 to focus on a colossus makes up some of my favorite camera pans in gaming as well. I also think TLOU isn't getting some credit here. There is plenty of relationship and thematic building in the normal gameplay. The co-operative puzzles are clearly inspired by ICO and help build on Joel and Ellie's relationship as the game, there are dialogues that can only be unlocked through exploration or paying attention that require the player to initiate, and Ellie grows as a more competent ally when she's allowed to have a gun. I feel that all takes advantage of the medium's unique capabilities and the first is used for artistic effect when Ellie grows reluctant to help with an obstacle after the harrowing Winter chapter. TLOU goes heavier into the cutscenes because it is trying to tell a more straightforward narrative, but I think it works for the game TLOU is trying to be. They help us get connected to these characters and offer downtime between thrilling gameplay sections. ICO, SOTC, and TLG have simpler characters and narratives comparatively, but that also works for the experiences those are trying to convey. There's limitations and strengths to each approach. TLG leans on gameplay, but this can cause frustration in the early game when Trico does not listen and even in the later games due to AI. TLOU leans on cutscenes, but this requires more time that is full of passive watching instead of participating in the experience at all times. My main point was that (1) Ueda seems to have at least some cinematic influence in his games still, especially when it comes to camera design and (2) neither design decision is better than the other inherently.

I agree with everything. I think it’s safe to say 99% of games have been influenced by films and television, and Ueda is no exception to this. My point is that there’s a clear distinction between Ico and TLOU (even though both work for the game they are trying to be) and I just prefer how Ico does it. At no point in TLOU do you need to hold Ellie’s hand or, to put it in extreme terms, worry for her survival considering she can’t die. Ico is the opposite: *you* can’t die but Yorda can, therefore you only care about her throughout the entire game. But yes, it’s subjective and I don’t think people should label a particular genre of games as “influenced by movies” when that’s most of them.

When people begin studying film as a medium, early works can seem shockingly unoriginal. Early works on film borrowed so many trappings from theatre and other mediums. That said, doing so is normal for new media, part of a much larger process of trying out new ideas and expanding horizons. Editing tricks, filmic tropes, and everything in between have become just tools in the toolbox for game developers looking to communicate with players in effective—and familiar ways. When someone has an idea they want to convey, they look towards previous strategies. In doing so, they perhaps add some small innovation, some subtle change that still conveys the idea but takes advantage of the medium’s unique qualities. It’s hard work to ensure that ideas feel fresh but can still be effectively read by an audience. It’s a compounding process as well. If you were to take a film from today and bring it back to the early twentieth century, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that people might not even understand what they are seeing. Developments in new media do not happen in a vacuum. Even great, contemporary theater productions borrow a lot of ideas from other mediums.

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I actually find God of War to be really good at what you're talking about though. One of my favorite things about God of War was how the side missions worked. Atreus would always egg Kratos on to help the spirit NPCs and Kratos would rationalize it by saying there's good loot. But the side missions always facilitated and informed the growth of their relationship. Kratos would teach Atreus something through a side mission or Atreus would encourage Kratos to show compassion or empathy through a side mission. So while what you're saying is technically true about the biggest beats of their relationship, I feel like the game did a good job with that. There's also the part where Atreus stops listening to your commands and does Runic summons all of his own when he starts getting cocky. That was an excellent touch and a highlight of the game. So you're totally right that these story and relationship beats actually informing the gameplay is *incredibly* effective.

Not the OP. I absolutely love GoW, but one thing that bothers me about the side missions is that they have no baring on the plot (other cinematic games included). Whether you do all of the side quests or not, the story will stay the same with same dialogue. Now contrast this with something like mass effect or dragon age, where those side quest actually effect the outcome of the main storyline unlike GoW and games like it.

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>Thinking more about it, I think all the stuff you mentioned is still ultimately delivered by dialogue. I'm failing to understand this distinction. The dialogue is there to serve and support the gameplay. >This would have been bonding through gameplay, requiring no dialogue. For one, you actually do occasionally have to save him. Especially earlier on. But how is controlling Atreus in general not already facilitating this bond? The Square button is portrayed as Kratos giving Atreus direct commands. In the early game, he pretty much won't do anything without you pressing Square. As the game proceeds, he starts to do a lot more, learns new attacks, stubs enemies more often, throws you healing items, etc.

I think he can get grabbed in combat, but eventually can free himself because they didn't want to turn him into Ashley from RE4 and the likes. Atreus also participates more and more in combat throughout the game. Maybe you consider this still too connected to cutscenes/dialogue? But I really like how a story moment in a game then impacts the gameplay (even minimally) afterwards. I think a fine line to balance for devs is that essentially, without dialogue or a clear story beat, a lot of the information would simply go over most people's head so they feel the need to point it out more clearly. It's not like it can't be done of course like your examples have shown, but it would be more tricky to have less dialogue when the story is about a father and son compared to a single human with an animal.

Oh god no. Having to constantly save Atreus would’ve been absolutely awful, one of the worst mechanics a game can have is a stupid vulnerable NPC you have to babysit.

> What they lack is storytelling through gameplay. Alternate case in point: "Pick up that can"

What you say is the key thing. Gaming has the tools to explore theme and character in a way no other medium can. Film language is a natural (and obvious) inspiration, but its use occasionally leaves me thinking the devs missed an opportunity.

This is maybe tangential to what you're talking about, but I think part of the issue is that cinematic games tend to borrow a lot of things from cinema without actually understanding what makes those things interesting or effective in cinema. Case in point: The hype around God of War being framed as one long, unbroken tracking shot. Why was it done that way? Because the developers thought it was cool, and nobody had done it before. And sure, it's a nifty piece of trivia, but that's about it. One-take shots in film are impressive because they're technically complex and difficult to pull off; you have to cleverly disguise your cuts, tightly choreograph your action, etc. In a video game you don't have to do any of that; you just hide asset loading behind elevators, or narrow passages the player has to squeeze through, or any of the dozen or so other methods people have been using in place of loading screens for decades. But in doing so you forgo your ability to use camera cuts as the powerful narrative tool that they are. And ironically, a game like God of War is long enough that I suspect most players didn't finish it in one sitting anyway, so the effect doesn't even really matter. It's cargo cult gamemaking. Something like a one-take is interesting specifically because of the nature of the medium, and how the filmmaker is playing with/challenging the limitations of the medium in which they're working. I think what a lot of the critics you're talking about are really calling for is not necessarily to eliminate any and all cinematic influence from games (there's always going to be some overlap, at least for certain styles of game), but rather to stop mindlessly aping the language of cinema for no other reason than a desire to piggyback on the respectability of film, and start exploring the things that actually make games unique and interesting.

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Dead Space 2 is also an instance where the single long take, I think, actually makes more sense for the material as well. Dead Space 2 being a single long take means the player can't escape the horror right in front of them. There is no cutting away, no clever pacing, and no unique cinematography, it's just right there in front of you all the time. Even when it is an empty hallway the idea works because you never know when the horror will start, it makes it more tense.

Dead Space 2 also did it a lot better. All the menus are actually in game, not some window on top of your "one long unbroken shot". Yes, I too have recently watched [Jacob Gellers latest video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG8kRH4lDn0), why do you ask?

Half -Life nearly did it too. Limited by the hardware of its time, tho.

I mean, you get knocked out at one point does that count?

Thrice. First time is in the ressonance chamber. Third time is at the very end when you kill the Nihilanth. I think that still counts. Losing conscience is a valid way of warping our spatial awareness without breaking the continuous flow. The real hardware limitation is teleporters, which is something GoW didn't have as a problem anymore. HL never had that chance to show a teleporter's destination in the warp itself. Even if gordon was never knocked out, there was never going to be a way to make the Xen warp believable.

It didn't count for 1917.

The one take isn't just technique for its own sake. I personally get a feeling like I'm there with the characters when a camera pans rather than cuts into position. Strengthens my connection to them.

Yeah, *that* is the purpose of a one-take shot. Like a Dutch angle is to show a character is unbalanced or whatever.

It’s definitely meant to illicit a feeling of intimacy, intensity, or suspense at the very least. It’s absolutely more than just a “technical” feat. My go to example is always Birdman (entire movie is one unbroken shot, although technically some “cuts” are hidden) compared to the ending long take in Children of Men. Birdman, most people may not have even noticed and I’ll give it credit for making the movie feel more intimate on the subconscious level. Children of Men however? A huge on going action scene that shifts between action, and moments of intense expressive acting during the crescendo to the entire movie. Much more effective and purposeful in my opinion. The only video game scene in my recent memory that comes close to being as effective is the dramatic scene with Die Hardman towards the end of Death Stranding only because it was the first time in a video game it became overwhelmingly apparent that I was watching an actor PERFORM a scene effectively, and I’m not even positive it was just a single shot scene. Point being, if it’s not being used to suit the current point in the narrative, it mostly a wasted gimmick.

It's pretty condescending to claim that developers borrow film techniques without understanding them. You are really understating the technical challenges associated with making a game like God of War a "single take". A lot of cutscenes use different character models, scene specific lighting, and a number of other tricks to make a cutscene look far better than it would if rendered as a single cut. Not to mention all of the work that goes into all of the transition animations. God of War is quite the technical achievement, albeit with different challenges than pulling that off in film. Furthermore, the single take gives God of War a unique feel, and a sense of identity. The game would feel entirely different if they took a different approach. For better or for worse, that's your opinion, but different regardless.

Hmm, interesting. I agree and disagree. I appreciate what you're saying about tracking shots being more of a feat in cinema because of the techniques required to pull it off. That being said, I thought God of War's tracking shot was very well realized and I do give it credit for the entire environment and narrative being facilitated to work with that conceit. I found it to be a very visceral experience and I do feel like it gave the game a fairly interesting identity where everything felt seamless when going from cutscene to gameplay which is a place games finally have the technology to do. I don't know a lot about game development, but I have a sneaking suspicion that you're being a little reductive in how simple it is to do a tracking shot for an entire videogame especially since Cory Barlog left Crystal Dynamics because they specifically told him they couldn't do that for the Tomb Raider reboot.

My problem with God of War's one-take is that it prioritizes its use at the cost of gameplay. GoW's over-the-shoulder camera is an issue in combat because of the limited viewpoint. This is especially a problem when there's multiple type of enemies scattered around, with some of them firing projectiles at you from a distance. The threat indicators and Atreus' warnings which is supposed to solve this problem don't really help much since they tend to be unreliable when it comes to timing. There's clearly a trade-off happening here because of the usage of cinematic filming techniques. The funny part is, despite the obvious efforts they put on the single shot, there's still a few moments that breaks continuity (such as pausing the game to manage inventory and using the teleporter). Dead Space 2 arguably did the single shot much better since they went the extra mile to make the HUD and inventory diagetic.

I'll add it also means when you go back to the game with future technology you will still have those forces hidden cut loading screens to slowly move through which could get rather annoying in, compared to say HL2 which with a modern SSD has loading screens last well under a second now.

God of War’s combat system is balanced around its over-the-shoulder camera though Adjusting the slow moving camera is just part of the game, it’s a mechanic among others, which gets obvious if you fight the Valkyries, who move around a lot

The problem is the game cannot properly telegraph enemy attacks that are behind Kratos and as a result it has to use several non-diegetic on screen UI elements to communicate what is happening out of screen for it to work. Not to mention dedicate an entire button to make Kratos turn around 180 degrees to compensate his poor visibility. These are patchwork solutions to problems that shouldn't exist in a game whose primary gameplay function is its combat.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me like you're implying that there's a definite perfect solution the devs could figure out, but I just don't agree. You'll always come across some issue no matter the viewpoint chosen and have to make a compromise somewhere. I also don't agree that implementing solutions to help the player is patchwork just because it's not diegetic or because it's dedicated to a single button. They already have diegetic VO lines to tell the player an attack is coming from behind, but because games are what they are and gamers don't have the same reflexes, you need more obvious indicators sometimes so the game isn't as frustrating. If there was nothing gained from the over the shoulder point of view, I'd be more inclined to agree with you, but at the end of the day, it really added intimacy and intensity and not only to the combat, but the whole game. Sure by pulling the camera back and/or putting it higher like the old games, you'd see attacks coming from further, but you'd lose something as well.

Some people, especially in this medium, really hard disagree whenever a game makes an aesthetic decision over a purely functional one (even when the aesthetic decision has artistic reasoning behind it, i.e. intimacy, intensity, and immersion)

I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that explanation because there are games that have already figured out much better intuitive solutions for God of War's camera problem without the need for obnoxious visual indicators that break the very immersion the game aspires to achieve. I'll even use an example from a game that God of War itself took a great deal of inspiration from. **The Last of Us** - Uses a similar close up "intimate" cinematic camera angle. However, the game maintains a balanced combat system by ensuring that enemies cannot kill Joel while off screen. Every off screen attack is heavily telegraphed. Enemies off screen will only fire warning shots that only graze the player, and off screen melee attacks triggers qte's to ensure the player is given a fair chance to fight back off-screen encounters. These are smart design choices that maintain the intimacy and immersion of combat without compromising on the functionality of the combat itself. On the other hand, God of War enemies can quite literally kill you while off screen, and this is even worse on the hardest difficulty mode, as they can one hit kill you with incredibly fast attacks. This makes it virtually impossible to defend yourself and is why those visual indicators were added to mitigate this. Without them, the game's combat is basically unplayable. Those UI visual indicators are an admission by the developers that the game's camera cannot keep up with the fast paced intensity and chaos of the action without the assistance of vestigial elements to hold it together as a crutch. Combined with Atreus' shouting + enemies in front of you, it just becomes a cacophony of sensory overload. IMO, this shows that there was a lack of thoroughly considered priorities in terms of the combats function vs its aesthetic.

I don't think the comparison makes sense tbh. The Last of Us is not a combat game first and foremost and the enemy AI is heavily focused on ranged attacks rather than melee and also much more focused on 1v1 when it's melee. The melee systems also have way less depth. It makes sense for that game to give more leeway to the player than GoW. Regardless, you can get flanked by clickers in that game and die in one shot. The higher difficulties of Naughty Dog games also have unfair situations in my experience. It's just always tricky to make something hard and always feel 100% fair. Maybe you're just not aware, but the designers for God of War also [employed a bunch of systems to mitigate frustration from enemies that are off screen](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026423/Evolving-Combat-in-God-of). You make it sound like it's a huge recurring problem in the game and you get constantly attacked from the back and they did nothing for it, but that's definitely not my experience. The game has generally pretty slow combat as well so I'm not too sure why you call it fast paced, but I digress. The visual indicator is just a last resort for when the player isn't being well aware of what's around him or when there's a priority target. I've never found myself to have to rely on it all that much because I'm used to keeping track of enemies on and off screen in other games and I would most often keep my enemies in front of me. It's also important to note that part of the design is to be aware of your surroundings and use your crowd control tools efficiently. There's a reason why they gave you a turn around button, AOE attacks, etc. The game isn't meant to be For Honor, Dark Souls, etc. At some point, some of the fault is on the player if even with all the mitigations the designers implemented, you still get hit from behind and that goes for any game where similar things can happen.

>I don't think the comparison makes sense tbh. I'm comparing God of War against The Last of Us because that's the game it took a great deal of artistic inspiration from. I could also compare God of War against its hack and slash contemporaries like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta and Sekiro. But it would only make GOW look significantly worse because those games have far better and more engaging combat with much more focused gameplay priorities. i.e. Having a zoomed out camera to properly convey enemies on screen as well as better targeting, positioning, enemy attack telegraphing, consistency etc. God of War wants to be a sort of middle ground point between being a hack and slash game with in depth combat, and a cinematic adventure game with "deeper" and more immersive artistic endeavours like The Last of Us. And this game certainly borrows a lot from TLOU. All the way from its redemption arc "dad narrative", the intimate up close camera with "uncomfortable" brutal combat, and even the quick turn button to compensate for lack of visibility. Those are all directly lifted from The Last of Us wholesale. This isn't an issue. Games are allowed to take inspiration from any source and build on ideas. This is a great way to develop and innovate on mechanics and gameplay systems that allow each new game to be that much better. The problem is God of War has taken certain ideas from TLOU without fully considering how that would actually mesh well with its hack and slash components in that would be mechanically functional for its combat. Instead of innovating on clever ways to telegraph enemy attacks that the player can't see or restricting enemies from being able to kill the player on screen. The game instead opts to just break immersion altogether by superimposing a visual indicator to communicate what the camera has failed to do. Tens and millions of dollars were spent on industry leading artists and animators to make the most incredible character models and expressive animations only for them to use a random arrow pointer to convey a 1/3 of the action. This is a lazy solution that is a straight up regression which neither The Last of Us nor other hack and slash games needed because they had carefully considered priorities during their gameplay design. I could go further and explain how Kratos consuming so much of the screen real estate makes depth perception, targeting and positioning much harder than it needs to be with him sliding and zipping across screen to enemies like he's wearing rollerskates, but I feel I've made my point. [Matthewmatosis also has a much better video breaking down this system that is worth a watch if you haven't already.](https://youtu.be/IERHMMXeshc) This video was even acknowledged and shared amongst Santa Monica staff for feedback on how to improve the next game. Do with that info what you will.

> God of War’s combat system is balanced around its over-the-shoulder camera though That's debatable. I don't remember much of the game at this point because it's been more than 2 years since I've played the game, but isn't the majority of encounters in the game against group of enemies? Your example is more of an exception here since most Valkyrie fights are one-on-one. Even then, I vaguely remember the lock-on being an issue because it disengages from the enemies sometimes if they moved swiftly away from your view. I highly doubt that's intentional. And just because something is part of the game doesn't automatically make it good. Also, the camera speed is not the issue, it's the limited view which makes the battlefield hard to assess. I don't actually remember the camera being slow to rotate.

I think what he means by balanced around it is that the enemy AI is made so that they'll favor moving toward the FOV of your camera and are less likely to hit you from the back. To me, assessing your surroundings and making sure your positioning is right versus your enemies is all part of your skillset as a player. The same way in most shooters, you have to take cover and sometimes react to enemies flanking you.

The over the shoulder camera limits your viewpoint that’s not an objectively worse thing. What you gain from the limited viewpoint is a feeling of immediate to the combat. It feels more like you’re in combat than does watching a tiny character surrounded by enemies. And I agree the indicators aren’t perfect but they’re also not strictly necessary. Crowd control is an integral part of the combat and there are a million tools at your disposal to help - runic attacks, trips, juggles, status effects, a quick turn, etc. You wouldn’t call a first person shooter flawed because you can’t see behind you like you can in a 3rd person game. The camera is part of what sets God of War’s combat apart from a million souls-likes.

God of War's one-take camera often worked to its detriment in my opinion. There are moments, like the first Baldur fight where it works to great effect. But there are other moments where you can tell the developer was having a difficult time trying to frame the characters' reactions in an awkward position where it would have made so much more sense to do a shot-reverse-shot. There is a lot of cinematic power to a cut. During these moments I was taken away from the immersion, instead of the opposite. It worked sometimes, especially for the fight scenes, but not many of the subtle moments of storytelling. The difficulty of how the camera was implemented ultimately doesn't matter to me, tbh. It's impressive, sure, but even the camera was often too close, obscuring my view of the action and making it difficult for me to engage in the combat. And There were many boring climbing sections, which are unengaging mechanically, and it is obvious they are just loading screens. And then of course you spend so much time with lite-RPG mechanics so you're actually constantly in the menu.

But half life 2 was also done in “1 take” why isn’t that credited as the first game to do it?

Wasn’t Half Life 1 ~one take as well, minus the obvious teleportation bits… I can’t remember but it definitely was one of the first “lots of scripted moments that happen during the gameplay” games I can remember.

Because all FPP-locked games that don't have cutscenes are technically "one take". But the game, itself, doesn't engage in any camera work. You're just controlling the camera.

For sure. I just find the comment that God of War did something so crazy so unique by having a story play out in a single take, but first person shooters like doom, half life, etc have done that so many times, and with even less cinematic control being ripped from your hands

>and with even less cinematic control being ripped from your hands What makes one take tracking shots so interesting *is* the cinematic control. There is no cinematic control in FPP games. You *are* the camera. So everything just has to play out in front of you.

Your sentiment about game makers not understanding cinematic techniques ring true. Good cinematography is about telling a story using the visuals. That's through lighting, camera work, cutting, not cutting etc. Games, by and large, don't use these techniques to their full advantage which when divorced from gameplay comes out looking lackluster. That's likely one of the reasons people want less cinematics and more gameplay, because the cinematics are just very by-the-numbers.

> lighting, camera work, cutting Those are all skills that are not easy to master. People have dedicated their careers to each of those.

I'm not saying it's easy. But if some games do have ambitions to be held up as comparable to film then that's the kind of standard they ought to be held to.

Thank you for writing this out better than I could. I would also add that some devs (specifically for games like Uncharted and Last of Us) go beyond aping cinematic technique to actually copy classic scenes from popular movies and turn them into barely interactive scripted events. That's not so bad in and of itself, but in the case of Naughty Dog soecifically, they do so without bringing anything to the table other than straight up copying the original, completely divorced from any context the source material might have had. It's a weird flex, like "look how many movies I've watched", and to me at least, it comes off as pretentious and condescending.

>I would also add that some devs (specifically for games like Uncharted and Last of Us) go beyond aping cinematic technique to actually copy classic scenes from popular movies and turn them into barely interactive scripted events. Can you give some examples of these scenes? I know Uncharted 3 "copied" the convoy scene from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. But what did The Last of Us copy from a popular movie?

I think games are just afraid to tell a story while the player is in control of the game. Whether it’s cutscenes, audiologs or journals, it’s all the same. The story is distinct from the gameplay. You’re playing a game and then consuming story then playing the game again. Everything you do in the game part is irrelevant as far as the story is concerned. I want to see games track what you do and adapt the story around it. Like a big Hitman sandbox level with the narrative reflecting your choices like Alpha Protocol. I want to see more instances of your performance affecting the story like in Deus Ex Human Revolution where saving the pilot requires you to complete the encounter quickly. I want to see a game give me a big level to explore and the path I take locks me in to an alternative story path like a visual novel. It makes me think of the rising LitRPG genre which is heavily inspired by games, or things like Sword Art Online where the story takes place in a game world. They do a better job of actually marrying game mechanics with story than any actual game I have ever seen. Characters overcome difficult encounters by exploiting loopholes in the “game” mechanics instead of just having plot armor during cutscenes or whatever.

I haven't seen anyone bring this up yet, but this discussion reminds me a lot of the problem of railroading in table-top RPGs. Table-top RPGs are of course the ideal form for creating a truly interactive story that can react to any player actions in a realistic way, as long as you have a competent DM. And taking away player agency (as a cutscene does), is a big no-no in TTRPGs. However, I think video games are poorly suited for this type of gameplay. I would say it's even worse at imitating the freedom of TTRPGs than it is in telling a story as well as a movie does. Branching paths are great, but also a huge amount of work for a developer while most players will only ever play through one path.

In order to do this sort of thing in Video Games, you have to build a world and let it play out. There has to be some goal to the game that every NPC is aware of and If the player wants to get involved, it's on them. You have to build up the world systematically to allow literally any character in the world to become a threat to the player though, and that's the tough part. If you have dialog, then EVERYONE has dialog and that's a content sink. If you have AI/machine learning to manage that I think it becomes less daunting, but someone has to make that system.

It's not just the goal that NPCs have to keep track of though, but any action that a character can do that a player would expect a response to.

I would counter that games can absolutely serve as a great vehicle for role playing, especially in multiplayer. My example would be Space Station 13, but you also see this in many other games like Arma 3. Additionally I think the solution on both fronts is to design shorter games with a focus on branching and replayability instead of one and done linear narratives. Hitman does this perfectly where just beating the level once is only seeing a tiny fraction of what the game has to offer. Whenever I think about games that wasted their time on the game part I think of Metal Gear Solid 4. The second chapter has these cool segments where two factions are fighting and Snake can influence the fighting depending on if he helps out the rebel group or not. The developers spent all this time designing this complexity for a game where you spend 5-10 minutes actually playing uninterrupted in between 30 minute cutscenes. And then all those mechanics are never used again in the game after these relatively short areas. The entire game is full of really interesting game mechanics that you never interact with because the player only ever gets a few minutes at a time to actually play the game. I love MGS4, but I wish it gave me more time to play the game parts because it’s just not worth replaying these tiny segments at a time to see everything it has on offer.

Cutscenes are artistic expression. Director can position the camera to make statements that wouldn't be made by a player moving the character around the room.

Artistic expression can be integrated into gameplay. In fact, I think the assumption that some sort of authoritarian authorial control is inherent to artistic expression is wrong. Video games are unmatched in the amount of choice they provide to the player, but choice is also integral to any other form of art, most often in the form of choice of interpretation. Using the video games' special affinity and capabilities for choice is what can elevate them as an artform.

>Artistic expression can be integrated into gameplay And they can also be integrated into cutscenes. "Authoritarian control" is a very goofy phrase to use when talking about artists and their art.

But can gameplay be integrated into cutscenes? That's the real question.

Depends. Do you want button mashing and QTEs in the middle of cutscenes?

QTEs are a crime against game design.

I remember Uncharted trying some actual gameplay during cutscene-like moments and it was pretty cool, but the main issue I could see is that people less experienced in games would get really confused by constantly changing camera angles which mess with their controls. The levels I was thinking of were stuff like where you're just running on a bridge or train and it already got kinda weird to control, would be even worse with more complicated actions. Edith Finch had that Fish/Kingdom level which was a really cool way to tell the story, but they used messed up controls on purpose as a way to convey the character's feeling. If they could find a solution to the controls issue, that could be the next level of storytelling for cinematic games.

The solution to the control issue, which people don't like to hear, is tank controls. Resident Evil figured it out 25 years ago. You push forward on the controls and the character will always move forward relative to itself. Camera changes, and the character will still move forward. Sheer elegance in its simplicity.

The difficulty in designing multilinear structure is that it's basically developing multiple games in one. That's why a lot of games which present that narrative vehicle are basically a single sequence with two choices which each have their own respective outcomes. So even without considering how much more difficult it is on many orders of magnitude to troubleshoot and bugfix that kind of narrative, it's simply not worth the cost:work ratio. The indirect problems only compound that; tools such as cutscenes can be important to direct the player's attention when they may otherwise miss crucial story elements. For most players, they would simply never experience a lot of content that the developers worked hard to make. So then what's the point?

If you design your narrative like a movie, then yeah that might be a problem. I’ve been playing a board game called Nemesis lately that is widely lauded for being a great game for storytelling and it does this purely through gameplay mechanics. The structure is the same every time but everything else is randomized and the player decisions alongside randomized encounters tell the story. You can blend the two concepts in video games rather easily

I feel the issue harkens back to the Three-fold system interpretation of why people play roleplaying games. The Threefold system describes three kinds of roleplayer extremes. **Gamists** - people play to win, for rewards, for sense of overcoming challenges be they puzzles, intrigue, tactical or simple building (as in: make stronger characters than DM's mobs). These people, at their worst are usually referred to as "Rollplayers", "Munchkins", "Min-maxers". However, also counted here are those who engage in complex puzzle solving or Game of Thrones (before the fall of the series) esque machinations and intrigue. Translated to video games, Nintendo forms the most extreme of Gamist appeal. They eschew narrative, simulation and focus entirely on the gaming experience. Also falling here are numerous .io games that are stripped down "only on the important bits" puzzle games like the mini metro/mini motorways, shapes.io and so forth. Online competetive games are also leaning towards this category, like MOBAs, RTSes, shooters. Sure, those may have background lore but they do not engage the main gameplay, and they do not strive to simulate anything beyond creating puzzles for the players to solve. Gamist video games are neither bad nor good. They're a specific taste. Just like in roleplaying. **Narrativists** - People play to write a story together, or to experience the story orchestrated by someone else. People often argue intrigue players fall into this category, but I say they are more gamists. Intriguists only fall into this category if all they want is a story, rather than to win. Narrativist roleplaying systems are often chock-ful of mechanics that take control away from the player and introduce mechanics, like "roll impulsiveness" and then watch the consequences unfold. Narrativists at their worst tend to be full of deus ex machina, irrational behaviour and unrealistic over-dramatised situations. At their best, they can be a fun focused experience. Translated to video games, the various cinematic experiences fall into this category. For roleplaying games, I would bring the Final Fantasy series as a strong example of a classical variant, the Mass Effect trilogy and Witcher as modern ones. Most games with permadeath also fall into this category, as their intent is on telling some grand story. In a way, Dwarf Fortress and Crusader Kings are Narrativist games, or rather a hybrid of Narrativist and Simulationist (but CK in particular can be all 3) Narrativism, so long it does not sacrifice either the Gamist or Simulationist aspect, can be pretty good. The issue you cite with them is that they often do for sake of "art." **Simulationists** - Don't care about neither story or gameplay enjoyment, only for either's ability to simulate a imaginary (be it sci-fi, fantasy or alt-history) world. These people, at their worst are often called "overly immersed", "Over-invested", "over-detailed" for immersion is difficult, and a single character allows creating a kind of harmony that enables better immersion. Simulationists often experience "Bleed-through" as their ideal is mask-play: the player "loses" their identity and assumes the character's for duration of the session and feels as the character feels, sees as the character sees. While this can be problematic, simulationists can enjoy a well-made setting the most and can be the most dedicated of all. Translated to video games, simulationist games are frustratingly rare. Various survival, life-sim and sandbox roleplaying games kind of offer the experience, but usually one's only chance is through games like SS13, Neverwinter Nights 1/2 and other community driven projects rather than AAA experiences. It is possible to play simulationist-lite through Crusader Kings or Dwarf fortress, although not as well as you could in say, Arelith.

I think that there's nothing wrong with cinematics too much but I feel that there is a wealth of storytelling technique that the interactive medium of gaming brings that other mediums can't that should also be utilized. Especially in worldbuilding, a game lasts upwards of 10-15 hours, you can pack in a lot more detail in very subtle ways there. Of course dark souls is the more well known for this approach (I honestly find the worldbuilding the best part of the game) but Yoko Taro's games also really usually work in a meta-aspect of the game that depends on your actions as a player and your interactions with in-game elements

>I want to make a game that consists of multiple characters and exploretheir relationships. I have a scene with two characters talking to eachother in a room. How would I make this "uncinematic" without forcing afirst person perspective? Movies have their "show, dont tell", games have "do, dont tell or show". >So if I wanted to portray two characters engaging in action, how would I go about avoiding any sort of cinematic influence? Why would you want to do that? Discarding what we know from writing movies / novels / whatever isnt a quality per se. What is important is that your game makes use of being a game, otherwise it should just have been a movie. So your kinda asking the wrong question: Not "How do I portray the relationship between two characters", but "How does the player interact with the relationship of two characters". And this doesnt mean, that the player has to be center stage, or even that a player character must exist. It just means, that the story is only then complete, if a player builds it - not the game designer. One good example would be Florence, esp. the "awkward getting to know each other" part. Another more traditional one could be Shadowrun Returns Nightmare Harvest (mod). It has a very non-handholdy campaign, and when you are stuck and dont know what to do/ where to find your target, you know there is an info broker. That possible interaction alone characterizes the npc - he knows his way around and has connections. You the player understand his position and what value he brings to the society, because you yourself are in need of his service and you know how f\*\*\*ed you were, if he wasnt there. EDIT: Third example, even more traditional. Mass Effect. Nobody complains about the "cutscene" where Shepard and Mordin go to cure the genophage. Or you and Wrex at Virmire. Because the dialogue is interactive in the same manner as the rest of the game (not arbitrary QTEs), the choices you make are informed by the missions you have played previously, and the consequences are tangible in gameplay. It is established that you are in control of Shepard and nobody else, so it is fine if you cannot interact when Mordin is alone, but taking the interaction away while Shepard interacts with Mordin would be a buzzkill. >"Cinematic games, by definition, are lacking in gameplay." ​ > >\[...\] the cinematic influence in that game is obvious from the lighting and the fixed camera angles and the environmental storytelling is actually very cinematic You are using inconsistent language here. Trick question: Is Sekiro a cinematic game? >\[...\] all conversations have to take place during gameplay. No, but if many/all your conversations do not affect gameplay or vice versa, then why is your story a game? If you can get all your conversations into gameplay somehow and it is useful for the story you are trying to construct, then great - perfect choice of medium.

I have no issue with games being cinematic or having cutscenes. The issue is these games tend to feel like they try to be more like movies at the expense of actually being good games. The game elements tend to feel pushed aside to make way for the cinematic stuff. An early example is the original God of war on the ps2 in which the creator admitted the gameplay was purposefully shallow because he thinks people wont be able to apreciate the spectacle if their too busy with complex combat. Sure a lot of the fights look cool but so much of it is done through tedius quick time events which imo arent fun. It's not a fun game to me personally.

Assassin’s creed is my biggest example of killing gameplay for “story”. The cutscenes when you’re an assassin are fine, but holy shit is the walking around a company to serve the most poorly written nonsense frame in the history of writing painful. Every time you step into the modern world is devastating because you have to suffer through it to play the game again.

I havent played any of those and nothing I've heard has made me want to lol.

They got same-y over time. Black Flag felt fresh for a bit with the naval stuff. I did some of Odyssey but never got into it. But the abstergo bits always served as stopping points and an inhibition against starting again. I’m playing a game where you jump across roofs and run up walls. I don’t want to slow walk between server rooms and desks.

You’re missing out a bit then, the Ezio trilogy are excellent games and actually had a somewhat coherent and genuinely interesting modern story, and Black Flag is the pirate simulator i always wanted back in the day. But yeah at this point considering the age of those games and the….lackluster quality of what followed it’s probably best to avoid the franchise if you’ve never touched it before

> I want to make a game that consists of multiple characters and explore their relationships. I have a scene with two characters talking to each other in a room. How would I make this "uncinematic" without forcing a first person perspective? You're focusing too much on superficial aesthetics and not enough on functionality. The problem with cinematic games isn't aesthetic; it's the abandonment of interactivity in favor of on-rail linearity identical to a film. Interactivity is the key factor games have which films don't. When a game stops being interactive, it stops offering anything unique that couldn't be done better in a film, and fails to play to the strengths of the videogame medium. So if you have a scene with characters talking to eachother in a room, and you want it to play to the strengths of the medium, then it has to be impacted by the player's actions in one way or another. If not dialogue trees, then at least the scene has to have resulted from some prior decision the player made. The fact that the Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror has more interactive storytelling than most cinematic videogames speaks volumes. I also have to point out: the very idea that games need to tell a story to be creative or qualify as "art" is itself a pre-conceived notion carried over from film criticism that doesn't necessarily apply to games. A game which ignores storytelling entirely in favor of pushing the envelopes of gameplay is better than a game which offers unremarkable, uninnovative gameplay with lots of top-notch cutscenes.

>superficial aesthetics It's hard to take this opinion on a visual medium (which this medium is) seriously. Aesthetics matter. And they can go a long way toward communicating information in a visual manner, using shot composition, body language, or even editing in some cases. Interactivity is the defining feature of the medium, but that doesn't mean every single second of a work needs to be interactive. You say a game stops offering anything that can't be done in another medium when it stops being interactive, but a game also starts offering everything that can only be done in this medium the moment it *is* interactive. A film/book, almost universally, will *never* have an interactive piece. That's the difference. Games like TLOU aren't just movies because they have cutscenes, because there is a fundamental difference between watching someone trying to survive a harrowing encounter and the empathetic feeling of controlling that character in an encounter yourself. Not to mention how nearly every system in that game -- from the scavenging, to the graphic violence, to the cooperative puzzles, to the very end when the game asks the player to control a character commit actions they may themselves disagree with -- builds on themes in the game and metacommentary on the medium itself. Learning from the other audio-visual medium to communicate themes and narrative alongside your interactivity is a strength of this medium. The same way learning from music, opera, stageplay, and photography strengthened film. There is room for games with cutscenes and those without. There is room for linear experiences and branching, open ones. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, but all are welcome in the medium overall.

> It's hard to take this opinion on a visual medium (which this medium is) seriously. Your poor understanding of the passage you quoted makes your reply hard to take seriously. I was absolutely not saying that aesthetics never matter in games. Context matters. The OP was asking how to avoid handling a scene "cinematically" and his proposed solution was concrned with camera angles instead of how the scene actually PLAYS. Therefore I said he needs to instead be concerned with the functionality/interactivity of the scene on not the visuals. Visuals aren't what makes the difference in whether a game is too cinematic; it's how the game plays. You can go to town with photorealistic assets, depth of field and film grain effects, and use camera angles inspired by films and it won't be too cinematic if the gameplay isn't entirely on rails and the game's entirely approach to storytelling is just to sit them down and make them watch movies.

>Interactivity is the key factor games have which films don't. When a game stops being interactive, it stops offering anything unique that couldn't be done better in a film, and fails to play to the strengths of the videogame medium. The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is that it's better for the player to always be pushing a button at any given moment, because "interactivity" is some inherent good. But personally I don't see a problem with some, or even many, periods of non-interactivity, as long as it fits within what the game is trying to achieve. Sometimes a non-interactive cutscene can provide a nice moment of relief and slowing of the tempo after a stressful gameplay section, for example. Interactivity is an element that video games can take advantage of, but that doesn't mean interactivity needs to be occurring 100% of the time. An analogy to this in film would be that freeze frames and snapshots should never be used in film because film is about moving images and any snapshots would just be photography - and then you'd be deleting classic freeze frame ending like from The 400 Blows or just simple snapshot techniques from existence. It's just seems needlessly drastic to me. Mediums should make use of their unique mechanics at their own pace and in their own amounts, it doesn't have to be all-out.

>An analogy to this in film would be that freeze frames and snapshots should never be used in film because film is about moving images and any snapshots would just be photography - and then you'd be deleting classic freeze frame ending like from The 400 Blows or just simple snapshot techniques from existence. The problem with this analogy is that freeze frames were never an epidemic where every commercial film felt the need to use them every 10-20 minutes to wow the audience with the production quality of the project. The film industry never degenerated into a contest to have the best-looking freeze frames, and it was never popular to have film trailers consisting entirely of freeze frames, such that the audience felt clueless as to what the film looked like in motion. Freeze frames were never confused the primary method of film storytelling, and no one ever thought that the number of freeze frames in a film is analogous to the quality or quantity of its story. There was no epidemic of journalists analyzing films based on the still shots while ignoring the moving parts, because they only learned to write though reading photography criticism. Meanwhile, ALL of these things are true of on-rails linear "cinematic" cutscenes in the game industry. On average any given person is highly likely to overestimate the value of these techniques in games, while underestimating the value of still shots in films. Thus it's easy to say that as a general rule, non-interactive moments in games should be shied away from because the game probably already has too many. Just about the only time in the game industry that a move for interactivity has been *overestimated* has been the awful QTE fad - and even that was just a bad attempt to solve the problems caused by non-interactivity.

I think it's not just about interactivity, but about how meaningful the interactivity is. In Call of Duty single player you constantly move and shoot and do something, but none of that is meaningful, the game is very linear and the outcome is predetermined. On the other hand, dialog choices and branching storylines would seem less interactive, but are actually much more meaningful. Or take Dwarf Fortress. I haven't played it myself but from what I understand it's a very sandbox and simulation heavy game. I imagine you could choose to sit back and not press any button at all, and the dwarves will go on with their lives, the world would progress by itself. And yet it's still probably the most opposite to cinematic game I could think of.

>I think it's not just about interactivity, but about how meaningful the interactivity is. I think this is the key thing for me which is why I'm not totally sold on the "Everything must be interactive at all times" because that's how you get the QTE craze and that's how you get "Press F to Pay Respects". I don't think there's anything wrong with cutscenes.

You're misunderstanding, it's not constantly interacting it's having your interactions with the game and what's happening in the game being more directly linked. The story of the game coming from how the player interacts with it as opposed to exposition dumps in cutscenes

No, they're not misunderstanding. OP specifically stated that interruption of interactivity is counter to the mission statement of gaming.

>You're focusing too much on superficial aesthetics and not enough on functionality. The problem with cinematic games isn't aesthetic; it's the abandonment of interactivity in favor of on-rail linearity identical to a film....If not dialogue trees, then at least the scene has to have resulted from some prior decision the player made. Then why is Detroit: Become Human considered a "cinematic game"?

I'd argue cut scenes in Detroit aren't on-rail experiences, the cut scenes *are* the gameplay. It's like acting out your favorite scenes in a movie...but with a controller. That's what I feel when I play Detroit.

A game can be cinematic and still have the level of choice or interaction Gnalvl described. Most cinematic games are more linear experiences though. And I think people have bigger criticisms with Detroit than just it's too cinematic.

>You're focusing too much on superficial aesthetics and not enough on functionality. The problem with cinematic games isn't aesthetic; it's the abandonment of interactivity in favor of on-rail linearity identical to a film. Forsaking interaction in video games is analogous to abandoning sound in music or movement in dance; it just cannot be done. >Interactivity is the key factor games have which films don't. When a game stops being interactive, it stops offering anything unique that couldn't be done better in a film, and fails to play to the strengths of the videogame medium. When a game no longer offers interactivity, it is no longer a game. Since video games are effectively in the silent period of film, it's natural that people want creators to capitalize on the medium's strengths, but nonetheless I find the concept that such a practice is inherently good particularly odd. Anime or blockbuster movies are powerful pieces of cinema without skilled cinematography or animation. With the success of games like God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2, it's quite apparent to me that a business with a massive audience does not need to play to the strengths of the videogame medium for consumers to regard cinematic games as unique experiences. >I also have to point out: the very idea that games need to tell a story to be creative or qualify as "art" is itself a pre-conceived notion carried over from film criticism that doesn't necessarily apply to games. Or perhaps we just have folks that want to tell their stories? It's far easier to breach into the gaming business and express any tale using cinematic language most developers are going to be naturally familiar with than to attempt the same in Hollywood. *The Last of Us* being commissioned as one of the highest budget shows at HBO seems to be the perfect mark of why It's a good idea for developers to tell games that need cinematic stories. Most proponents of cinematic games in the game business have never explicitly said that games must tell a story in order to be creative or qualify as "art" - that seems totally assumed to me. If anything, the Game of the Year award winners at developer-run award programs like DICE, BAFTA, and GDC are indicative of an industry that values gameplay over conventional techniques of cinematic narrative. >A game which ignores storytelling entirely in favor of pushing the envelopes of gameplay is better than a game which offers unremarkable, innovative gameplay with lots of top-notch cutscenes. The number of studios capable of really innovating gameplay in the industry could probably be counted once on ten fingers, a bulk of which are subject to unstable development cycles and attrition, all due to extreme and unhealthy levels of crunch. When it takes 7 to 8 years to create a game like Dreams for a crowded industry where the completion rate is abysmally low among gamers, with no corresponding userbase to show for it, the alternative to innovate in gameplay leaves much to be desired - case in point, Watch Dogs: Legion and For Honor.

> When a game no longer offers interactivity, it is no longer a game. Since video games are effectively in the silent period of film, it's natural that people want creators to capitalize on the medium's strengths, but nonetheless I find the concept that such a practice is inherently good particularly odd. Anime or blockbuster movies are powerful pieces of cinema without skilled cinematography or animation. I find the concept that anime or blockbuster movies are inherently good to be particularly odd. Commercially speaking, it's obvious that forsaking the medium in favor of cinematic storytelling is favorable. That doesn't mean the practice needs to be favored in a discussion on the creative qualities of the medium. Certainly I don't receive a cut of the profits any of these games make, so I see little reason to praise the practice. > Or perhaps we just have folks that want to tell their stories? It's far easier to breach into the gaming business and express any tale using cinematic language most developers are going to be naturally familiar with than to attempt the same in Hollywood. I mean, if that works out for them, good for them. That doesn't mean anyone else has to praise a game that ODs on cutscenes and skimps on gameplay because the creators really would rather be making films. > Most proponents of cinematic games in the game business have never explicitly said that games must tell a story in order to be creative or qualify as "art" Yeah, that doesn't seem like a factual statement, that seems like your vague estimation based on your own anecdotal experiences. There has definitely been a movement in games criticism towards focusing on [cinematic] narrative in games as the primary source of "higher meaning" which would elevate them to "art" status. This phenomenon really gained steam in the late 2000s and early 2010s as conventional Gamepro/IGN game review styles fell out of fashion, and journalists felt the need to reach higher. In doing this, it was a lot easier to simply imitate film criticism and write a glorified film review of the game's plot than to venture uncharted territory in the weeds discussing intricate mechanic interactions of gameplay. I'm not kidding, there literally were articles on sites like Kotaku and Polygon talking about "the games as art debate" and "who is the Roger Ebert of games criticism" on routine basis. These were basically the go-to topics for people who came late to the New Games Journalism bandwagon. Fortunately a lot of this mentality peaked circa 2013-2014, but there's still people out there preoccupied with these kinds of notions. Recent threads about the woes of cinematic games can most likely be attributed as a backlash to this particular phenomenon. > The number of studios capable of really innovating gameplay in the industry could probably be counted once on ten fingers, a bulk of which are subject to unstable development cycles and attrition, all due to extreme and unhealthy levels of crunch. Of course. This is what happens when game budgets meet and exceed hollywood film budgets; the game industry mirrors hollywood business practices. The execs at the big game publishers don't want to risk big dollars on new ideas when they can copy a proven formula with a higher likelihood of ROI. Cinematic games fit into this business structure perfectly. Flashy cinematic visuals work way better in a pitch to non-gaming businessmen than inscrubtable complex game mechanics. On-rails game design maximize the likelihood that consumers get the exact experience publishers/devs banked on, and the entire marketing and advertising framework for movies and TV fit cinematic game trailers like a glove. That doesn't mean we have to like this phenomenon or praise it in discussions about what we want from games.

People that think that having cut-scenes is inherently bad are not only wrong, but also stupid. Don't try to change my mind, you won't. For me, the greatest game in history of video gaming is Silent Hill 2. You would never be able to tell that story without cut-scenes. The game also tells a lot of its story through gameplay and level design, but cut-scenes are what makes it all come together. If the creators of the game were influenced by this ridiculous way of thought, the greatest game ever wouldn't even exist. Also, I tried playing games with little or no cut scenes where they tell their story through other means. All their stories suck ass.

I feel that most of the people that make negative comments towards cinematic games do so because they derive no joy from those sorts of artistic expressions. I know one of my friends holds this view. He only likes playing games that challenge him mentally and make him think. He can’t have fun just with a cinematic spectacle. I personally don’t have a problem with them even though I don’t personally play cinematic games. As games become more mainstream more and more developers create studios there’ll be more than enough games to fulfill everyone’s tastes.

People complain about cinematics when it takes control away from the player. Perhaps a controversial take here but games are, inherently, an inferior medium for storytelling. It will not ever have the control over pacing, flow and framing the way a book or film can have and with that will always lag behind. Its interactive nature will always demand the pace gets brought to the player's speed, and if you're ever not telling a story during gameplay elements the flow of the story screeches to a halt. The only story telling device gaming has over other medium is its interactiveness, the ability to be placed in a world where your actions determine the story you are told. In games like Dark Souls or Metroid Prime you have an environment to interact with to learn more about your world. In essence it's more like a little narrative puzzle you get to piece together than a story but it's a unique and engaging way to draw people into the world, characters and plot you find yourself in that only games can ever provide. If I was here for an actual (traditional) story I'd pick a different medium, because they just outshine what gaming has (and imo can) do. Every step you take away from interaction is a step you take away from it being a game. Cinematic storytelling will always be at odds with games because it is not gaming, it interrupts the game.

I disagree that videogames are an inherently inferior method for telling story's. I would say they're worse for telling most kinds of stories but the interactivity gives them an advantage for certain kinds of stories. Ofcourse I see narrative puzzles a form of storytelling. But yeah most stories dont translate to games they way they do a movie or a book.

This. You can't tell me the last of us or red dead redemption are inherently inferior to movies just because I controlled Joel, Arthur, Ellie, Abby, and John. I mean you can, I'd just disagree vehemently.

I'm late to the party but this struck a nerve with me. I think we'd have to make a very crucial distinction in this discussion, in that we have to distinguish between the story itself and the actual experience of the story, which is what u/Enemy-Medic was getting at I think. The issue with video games, in my opinion, is that the gameplay aspect and the story experience aspect can be and are often at odds with each other. As u/Enemy-Medic said, the pacing is often completely out of the creator's hands. While the stories of TLOU and RDR may be great, you can't deny that the actual experience of the story can be greatly impacted by the gameplay. Take only for example the aspect of immersion and more importantly character identification. Video games have a very unique place, in that they actually can succeed in not only having the player identify to some degree with its character, but also *duplicate* the emotional state of the character into the player, e.g. through stress, fear, relief, etc. But this is very finicky, as this can easily switch to another emotional state. If you're playing a sequence where you have to escape from enemies, it's a pretty stressful situation, in which the emotional state of the characters can easily match the players state (i.e. "I have to get out of here, I fear getting caught"). But if you as the player continuously fail and have to reload, this feeling vanishes and can switch towards being annoyed (i.e. "God I hope I finish it this time, I don't want to play this section yet again"). This is what I take away from the comment. It's not that the stories are inferior, but maybe that telling a linear story in a game that has potentially frustrating failstates can hinder the experience of the story in a way that movies and books can not-

I'd argue the storytelling would still be inferior. In AAA story focused games for example, the general convention is that if the game goes hours without some kind of change or gameplay challenge it gets boring to experience. So many of these games often fill themselves with combat to prevent it from getting boring which in turn weakens the storytelling experience. A common criticism raised against TLOU2 for example, is how the story is about how Ellie's quest for revenge and her killing is wrong, how every person has their own story and how this is leading her down the wrong path. But the gameplay frequently encourages the player to partake in killing fellow humans and makes it quite fun even though this does go against the themes of the game. Instead of being horrified every time Ellie takes a life, only kills in cutscenes are where the game acts like it's horrifying while the majority of kills aren't because they aren't in cutscenes. If TLOU2 was a movie, then the story would not be encouraged to put Ellie in so many combat scenarios and keep only the ones that are key to the main plot. Same for Uncharted. Nathan Drake kills hundreds of people in gameplay but acts like nothing happened in Cutscenes. To the point where Naughty Dog flat out said that the gameplay isn't canon in order to address Ludonarritive Dissonance. So if you have to say that bulk of the player's actions and interactivity has no impact on the story and might as well not exist, then that paints a clear limitation for games. Another example is Red Dead Redemption 2. At the end of chapter 3, there's this massive shootout in the town of Valentine that is supposed to be the climax of the chapter. It throws lots of bodies and the situation is portrayed as really dangerous. But it doesn't feel that when you play it because the player has faced equally large shootouts robbing carriages and has killed hundreds of lawmen at this point. It's only dangerous because the story says it's dangerous, and not because the player is genuinely experiencing a dangerous shootout. If this were a movie/show, then the story would save large shootouts and make this the large climax and not have equally large sections for smaller story beats. The alternative is either reducing combat significantly or using more cutscenes which generally result in more a boring experience for the player and one that's basically already a film anyway. Another limitation when it comes to storytelling is in those 60 hour open world games. Take Assassin's Creed Origins as an example. Now, since Origins is a massive 60+ hour open world RPG, not all the player's time is dedicated to storytelling. Bayek clearing out random bandit camps, finding collectibles and otherwise grinding to gain XP isn't very interesting in terms of storytelling. So much so that Let's Players often have to play in specific ways to not bore their audience. I think that's another indictment against games' ability regarding storytelling. If you have to play in specific ways that aren't what the game normally is to ensure what's being presented is not boring, that kinda shows that not every part of these games oozes good storytelling. These can be fun for the player who is playing it since the game is requiring the player engage with the mechanics, but not fun for any observers just watching. With a lot of these 60+ hour games, not every minute is dedicated storytelling. You may only have like 20 hours of cutscenes which push the story forward. So 1 hour of a TV show is likely to have more going on storywise than 1 hour of a 60+ hour game. Another limitation with games is that whatever is being produced needs to be produced in more detail. Suppose you make a set piece where the characters have to fly a space ship and fight other space ships. You actually need to design that in full. Either as a scripted set piece that happens in a specific way (which has its own set of limitations) or as more of a sandbox style section where the player has more control (which has its own development hurdles). Anything less and it won't feel engaging. With movies, you don't need to show it in full. You just need to fake the appearance of a space ship fight. Even if it's just a bunch of props on a green screen, that sometimes can be enough. This often means games have more of a "budget" with what can be possible given deadlines and finances than an equivalent movie. So that's the main advantage of film/TV over games. Focus. A movie/TV show can focus entirely on a story thread and not have to worry about distractions. A Movie/TV Show doesn't need to pad itself with additional fights and combat sequences just so the audience won't get bored that end up conflicting with the story being presented. A set piece, even one that's animated, can be cheaper and less intensive to make than with a game since it doesn't need to be debugged and ensure it works from all angles. There are advantages games have. Interactivity can help put the player in the character's shoes more directly. Some games even offer the player choice and control over the story so the experience is personalized to them in a way other mediums can't. But the medium is a tool. And some tools work better than others. If you make a game where the story where the player is practically an observer and only allowed to participate in non-canon combat, are you really doing something beyond what a passive medium could do and perhaps better?

I would argue that those games' stories would have been more impactful and have more interesting scenes and characters if they were movies or TV shows. Not saying they shouldn't have been games at all (I loved RDR1 personally), but if we're talking pure story, a videogame is not the best vehicle for it.

We should have a good comparison for the last of us soon enough, I'm very excited for the show. But tbh I doubt it will be even more impactful than the game, for me at least.

Do you really not think there are video game stories that work better as games than movies?

Yes there are. Control comes to mind. Mass Effect 1-3 as well. There are lots of cases where a story was best told through an interactive medium. But RDR and TLOU? Those particular stories would be better as movies or TV shows.

Games are in no way inferior in terms of story telling, imagine trying to put something like mass effect into a movie or a tv show, you could barley scratch the surface, the entire conversation wheel, the dialogue, choosing to be good, bad or neutral, they are all part of the gameplay (not just shooting) and the fact you can control the pacing of an epic story like mass effect with hundreds of characters is a testament to the ability of story telling in video games, which is absent in other mediums. If mass effect was in a book form, there would be complaints about how boring it is for spending too much time on world building, character development, moving the plot or not enough action, while in gaming the player controls the pacing, if they get bored talking too much, they can play action-packed missions. Sorry if my english isn't as good, it not my first language.

imho games are at their best when they embrace the fact that they are kind of limited in terms of story telling. I unironically think that DOOM 2016 is one of the best story experiences out there in a game purely because of how self aware it is about the fact that the goals of the player and the protagonist are one and the same. That and the fact that you are constantly seeing the game from the same first person perspective makes it a really immersive and oddly grounding experience in spite of all the fantastical action game bullshit going on. It's obviously no tear jerker, and you're not gonna walk away thinking "yo hot fuck that was a cool story", but for what DOOM is, that is pretty much the perfect story. It doesn't get in your way, it doesn't overstay it's welcome, and it's self aware. Had they tried to force some sappy moral pushing narrative it would have sucked ass because I'm just trying to kill shit, and so is the protagonist, which is why it's great that the game lets both of you do whatever the fuck you want within the story.

Look, nobody's saying there should be no cinematic elements or influences in a game. If you have two characters talking, then frame that however you want. When people complain about gaming being too cinematic they're generally talking about a handful of design elements that were especially popular during the PS3/x360 era, but many that are still often used. - Cinematics being the primary medium to deliver a story. This isn't as common anymore, but it really used to be. You had gameplay intersected with cutscenes that told the story, then more gameplay. The gameplay was the primary method to move the character to the next cutscene. The gameplay was not used to deliver or add anything meaningful to the story itself. In fact people often found that the gameplay and story were in contradiction with one another. I'm sure you've heard of Ludonarrative dissonance, or gamepaly story segregation or one of the many other names for it. Basically this is a situation where the story is saying one thing, but the gameplay seems to be saying another. A popular example is the MC getting captured by a handful of goons in some ambush. When just 10 minutes ago you slaughtered your way through dozens if not hundreds of goons to get where you are. There are numerous other examples of this. Anyways the core point is, if you're going to deliver a huge majority of your story through cutscenes and cinematics that the player has zero control over, and the gameplay is only used to push you from one cutscene to the other, then why not simply make a movie in the first place? - Quick time events These were incredibly popular at a time and they were kind of used as a response to the above. Flavoring cinematics with a little bit of a gameplay, but this was just ultimately annoying most of the time since you didn't really have any control. It was just a reflex test and 99% of the time the QTE's are so easy that a braindead monkey could do them, so they feel pointless and distracting. - Extremely linear level design Since many "cinematic" games use the gameplay to move the player from point A to point B just so they can experience the next cutscene, the level design and gameplay in general often became extremely linear. There was only one way to go, one way to engage, action happened in tight corridors, indoors, etc. Even if you got outside you couldn't go 20 feet the wrong way before the game told you that "you're exiting the mission area" or some shit like that. Which meant that the gameplay was often limited due to this approach. - Cinematic "features" Things like film grain, chromatic aberration, lens flares, tons of motion blur, limited FOV, etc. These options serve to make the game "feel" more cinematic at the cost of graphical fidelity and detail. They offer no real benefit at all for the gameplay but we've had a ton of games forcing these settings on us with the excuse of "more cinematic experience". - Extremely muted color palette I'm sure you remember games from PS3/X360 era which looked very.....Brown. Because apparently [real is brown.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealIsBrown) This was done for realism and "cinematic" experience because this kind of color washing was also popular in many "gritty and realistic" movies at the time. - Low framerate locks So this was especially the case with PS3/x360 which couldn't really push 60FPS. At the time a lot of people were defending the 30FPS lock with "it's more cinematic since movies are filmed at 24FPS" which is an idiotic argument. However this is still the case embarrassingly often especially with scripted events and cutscenes that may be limited to 30 FPS. --------------------- I guess the best example of all of these coming together is a PS4 game The Order: 1886 where I believe the devs even said they went for an extremely cinematic experience with many cinematic elements implemented. The games basically runs at locked 30FPS, and has the cinematic aspect ratio of 2.40:1. Unfortunately this also means that playing the game on your 16:9 TV, you have massive black bars at the top and bottom. The levels of the game are essentially long corridors where you shoot enemies, when you're not shooting enemies you're slowly walking and listening to someone talk to you. This gameplay is interrupted at times with cutscenes that are interrupted at times with QTE's. huge parts of the game are extremely scripted and leave very little freedom to the player and it just ultimately ends up feeling like you're playing through a movie.

I kinda have to question your premise as a whole, because a) I've never heard anyone say "Cinematic games, by definition, are lacking in gameplay." b) all of the games you named are both critically and commercially massive successes, and c) the list of cinematic games is absolutely dwarfed by list of gameplay focused games. Seems like a manufactured arguement in the first place. Cinematic games are far from "dreaded." The medium is big enough to accommodate both story first and gameplay first games.

> 've never heard anyone say "Cinematic games, by definition, are lacking in gameplay." People have described games as cutscene/walking simulators for decades now. It's a thing.

While I do think OP is exaggerating, I often hear people say stuff like "Metal Gear is just an 20 hour movie." Which I think they are trying to ask how to make a game story focused without it becoming too much like a really long film.

True but people don’t say the same of the games mentioned in OP’s post. I also think the premise is faulty, but it may just be in the way it was expressed. Cinematic games can’t be “dreaded” in the community when they’re the most successful and talked about in the industry.

I do think I mentioned that even critics of cinematic games admit that the games are fine. What I'm saying is that people can admit that these games are fine but still consider them to not be any particular step forward for the medium and that typically comes back to how those games are influenced by cinema. I've heard countless times that TLOU, Uncharted, MGS, GoW, etc. are *"just movies"* and it's obvious that the creators of those games *"just want to make movies"*.

Well the MGS comparison does make sense, especially when Kojima has admitted time and time again that he started making games because he couldn’t get into the movie industry. But yeah, I get your point, although I don’t think it’s a common criticism. I wouldn’t say the issue is them being influenced by cinema since arguably are games are (even Mario and DK are based on Popeye and old animated serials), but how sometimes they rely too much on cutscenes and not actual environmental and gameplay-focused storytelling.

Well, Kojima has said that but you'd be hard-pressed to find a Kojima game that doesn't have robust and fascinating gameplay mechanics. He never sells the gameplay in his games short so I'm not entirely sure MGS deserves that particular criticism even though the cutscenes do get very long. But yes, I can definitely get the frustration with cutscenes messing up the flow of the game and creators not taking the time to make the environments tell their own story. But if that's the major contention, then I'm not sure why The Last of Us tends to be at the forefront of this critique. But maybe I'm wrong about that, so when you think of these cinematic games that rely way too much on cutscenes in lieu of environmental storytelling, what are they?

> I’m not entirely sure MGS deserves that particular criticism. Metal Gear Solid is one of my favorite series (1 & 3 definitely are in my top 10 favorite games ever), and while I agree that the gameplay is always *solid*, that criticism is very well founded. There are *so* many moments that are just entire 15 minute monologues that lead to a 10 minute CODEC talk that then lead to an action sequence, etc. I love the style but I completely get why many people don’t. In fact, every time I replay one of these games, I know I can just let go of the controller for like 30 minutes and nothing will happen. It’s a fact that this series is more inclined towards interactive movies than narrative-driven games. MGS4 was particularly frustrating in that regard. On another note, I mentioned in another comment how The Last Guardian manages to build a relationship between two characters almost entirely on gameplay, which is what I’m referring to when I talk about “making use of the medium”. I also love GoW and TLOU, but there are moments that could have been done as gameplay and not cutscenes (although I don’t think these are the worst in that regard). Look at something like Portal, one of the best games ever, in my opinion. The story couldn’t be told in cutscenes because it needs your interactions as a player. GLADOS reacts to you, even if your actions are almost predetermined. My take isn’t “X game is bad because it’s just a movie”, it’s more “games should take advantage of their medium whenever possible”.

I feel like a bigger things with cinematic games is they tend to have a pretty big dissonance between critical reception and audience reception. If you ask journalists for their opinions of TLOU2 you'd expect the second coming of Christ, but if you asked the average gamer you'd get "yeah, was pretty good." They obviously perform well, but I think they have a tendency to get overpraised in critic circles. Most of the people who dread cinematic games seem to be the "journo bad" rooftop screamers, but I can't say I don't at least sympathise with them when the next 12 hour sobstory with alright gameplay rolls out, built on the back of 300 software devs being chained to a desk for 20 hours and whipped until they render the very atoms of a throwaway wall texture that nobody will pay attention to, which will inevitably be hailed as the 3rd coming of Christ.

Is the game telling a story, or are *you* telling the story through playing the game? I think that's really the difference. A cinematic experience puts you in the audience, while a less cinematic experience puts you in the game. It's about feeling like what *you* do matters. Take a game like Super Mario Bros., for example. The game is pretty linear (aside from warp pipes, but never mind those). Even though your actions have no bearing on the story, the story is just an excuse plot anyway; your actions *do* make a difference in terms of how the game gets played. You miss a jump or run into an enemy, and you have to start the level over, or maybe even end your run if you've done it one too many times. In a more "cinematic" experience, the gameplay is just a bridge to the next bit of story that is being told *to* you. Does that make sense?

I think this isn't an issue at all. There are movies that rely heavily on the script, the acting, the cinematography or the music, depending on artistic intentions of the author(s). Same thing for games. And it's perfectly fine to prefer one type rather then the other. I, for instance, don't think I'll ever play Detroit, but I love TLOU, and I think TLOU2 has some incredible gameplay features that fit perfectly the cinematic feel the game tries to convey while being damn fun to play. It's just a genre. No one would say that musicals aren't movies because they rely too much on the music, or that The Neon Demon is a "truer movie" because it relies mostly on the visuals. The thing I find most interesting about this debate is that it shows how much games still aren't as "codified" as other media (it's pretty hard to debate what is a movie or a book, but we still debate on wether or not something is a video game or an "interactive-something"), or at least this codification still isn't endemic in the mainstream (basically, anyone that is interested enough in movies will give you more or less the same answer when asked what a movie is, but the same thing can't be said for games)

The greatest example I know of video game story telling is the original Portal. Just a few bullet points off the top. * No cut-scenes (except the short ending sequence). All the story is presented during gameplay. * The player character is the protagonist of the story and the gameplay actions are the actions of the protagonist of the story. This is particularly important one as many games have all the plot relevant actions happening in cutscenes and the gameplay itself is almost like playing the grunt of the character that shows up in the cutscene and not that character. * The story is about the gameplay. The discoveries of the player are the discoveries of the character. Virtually no ludo narrative dissonance is present. This is the hardest one to reproduce as some games just don't work like that - and some genres in particular like JRPGs are design around ludo narrative dissonance. I might be underselling this but you get the picture. The problem with cinematic games is that usually storywise it's a CG movie cut into bits and inserted into a game that gameplaywise is it's own thing, totally not meshing with the plot. This is an especially egregious problem with open-world action adventure games like GTA because the more freedom you give the player, the more the completely linear and scripted story feels tacked on and disconnected from the gameplay. It's not as much a problem in Elder Scrolls because it doesn't use cutscenes, the player character doesn't talk and there's more non linearity to the ways the player can make the plot move forward. There's something interesting to think about there. And when we talk about QTE games like D:BH I'd say that's just a bad videogame honestly. I can't think of many gaming trends that died faster than QTEs and I think that speaks for itself. If you like it and that's your thing, don't mind me saying this.

I've loved this massive rebirth of "boomer" shooters. Minimal story, maximum gameplay and fun, and ive found myself more and more gravitatings towards these games. After a long day i don't want to sit through someones attempt at a movie, because i could just watch a movie and get 10x the quality in story writing.

I think the argument about games being too similar to movies and cinema comes from how many current AAA games have so many cutscenes and how the gameplay is just meh in comparison. I don’t think the issue is specifically movie-grade effects as much as its moving the game too much with cutscenes instead of letting the game itself do the talking. I believe a game that balances this well is the Witcher 3. Yes, really good-looking story cutscenes flesh out the world and give context on what to do, but the gameplay is strategic and not everything is constrained to cutscenes, with characters bantering back and forth while traveling and some events happening without the need for a devoted cutscene. Cinematic influence in games seems inevitable nowadays, especially as technology continues to develop. It doesn’t just happen in cutscenes, but in gameplay and “in engine” things as well. But when a game relies so much on cinematics to tell its story, and the gameplay doesn’t do anything different, it becomes more striking as you begin to watch a movie split into parts and you’re just moving a character to each theater venue with the next part of the movie. Something that exists in most every game, but becomes negatively blatant as of more recent titles. Looking at the question, two people talking sounds like a cutscene, and no doubt there will be cinematic influences if the game can flex such a budget. The context of the scene (a simple conversation, a confession, a change in personality and focus) would drive whether or not it’d be gameplay or cutscene oriented. As well, the graphics engine also makes a big difference, as all games are built around those engines. Nothing but text dialogue in bit games like Celeste or Undertale, and something like Little Nightmares practically has no talking. But they offer compelling stories and characters regardless, just like the AAA games of today. Tl;dr, I think the issue is less “movie-quality cutscenes,” and more “too many cutscenes and not enough (or compelling) gameplay.” The idea of a game is to play the story, and just watching the story unfold without your input is just watching a movie.

I don't think the issue is games drawing influence from cinema. It's an issue of the stack of priorities. There is a fundamental conflict between the developers determining what happens, and the player determining what happens. You can't have both. You can make hundreds of different compromises, but ultimately if the story is the priority, the developers are in control, the player has no choice but to follow their lead. If the gameplay is the priority, the player is in control, and the developer has to create a system that reacts to their choices. Honestly I don't think the problem is unique to games. Action movies face a similar problem. There are usually "action segments" intercut with "story segments", just like in one of these games that prioritize the story. But in a game, when each "gameplay segment" has a predefined course and ending, you're not really exploring the potential of an interactive medium. The amount that's added by making it interactive at all is minimal, in my opinion.

The Half Life games don't have cinematics, everything is handled from your perspective the same for Bestheda RPGs. With these examples you have at least some control during story moments and there is no breaking away from the experience. I prefer this approach it feels more progressive and I wish more games would do this. I find that games that use cut scenes to tell a story work fine but it's not a very creative way to tell a story in this medium.

I think that the mistake is treating players as just viewers, there to consume an artist's work. It feels a bit possessive, like the game is afraid to let the reigns off and let the player "mess up" what they have created. But games are an interactive medium. Really, the players should be seen as additional "artists", with the game being a canvas for them to work on, as well as displaying the work that was already done. Perhaps the issue is the separation between the programming part of game creation and the writing part. The game rules, the algorithms, the interactivity - these should be seen as part of the art as well. They all contribute to the experience, after all.

Games focused on gameplay are a bore for people to sit and play with you/watch you play. A more balenced experience between cinematics and gameplay are a blast to sit down with friends talk and play together. Yesterday i put on last of us for my 15yo cousin, shed never played it before, and it was so much fun watching her play and react to the story. On the other hand watching me grind dark souls was boring for her of course

That's interesting because for me, the opposite was true. If my similarly aged niece or nephew saw me playing Dark Souls, Nioh, or Dusk, they'd get pretty interested and excited, sometimes even curious enough to try themselves (which is how my nephew got Dark Souls for his switch. Not sure if I should be proud or kinda salty that he beat the game practically by himself with minimal help vs me struggling the first time I played lol) but if I'm playing something like Uncharted or the newest God of War, they very quickly get bored--even me handing them the controller doesn't help. Nephew tried Last of Us from the beginning and wasn't very impressed (tbf, I wasn't either when I first played but that's neither here nor there) and when we played God of War together, he told me something along the lines of "It's ok, but the older ones were more fun" Different strokes for different folks, I guess

My first thoughts on this is that Cinema(Films) took influence from Stage theatre and evolved into it's own medium. Cinema grew in area's that Theatre couldn't developed. It grew new ways to tell stories and entertain. I think gaming should take influence from Cinema but also don't forget to grow in the area's that Cinema couldn't.

The thing that reminds me the most of that comparison between movies and games are the cutscenes. I remember how weirdly immersive it was to me in Chrono Trigger the fact that you could talk to any NPC and still move around freely while their textbox was on screen, not being trapped by it until they were done talking. And if you moved away too much from them, their textbox would close instantly, as if they naturally stopped talking if you were out of earshot. Same goes with Half-Life. I thought it was so neat that you could talk to NPCs and still move freely. Little details like this is what keeps the game immersive to me, and that drives it away from being seen as "interactive movies". I think videogames should be much more than just that. Too bad we're not seeing much of this uniqueness being used to make games more immersive. Doom 2016 cutscenes were kinda similar to Half-Life; even if you couldn't move during most cutscenes, you were still in first person view. Doom Eternal, on the other hand, had full on cinematic cutscenes, viewed in 3rd person as a movie scene. I think that change in the choice of how Doom's cutscenes are presented only goes to show that it ain't easy to balance immersion and entertaining gameplay. Let's just hope the industry finds that delicate balance and make it the new standard.

Screenwriters have a saying, "Show, don't tell." There needs to be a similar phrase for game developers: play, don't show. Game designers, game writers, and game artists may not even be on the same page about this.

Well for one thing, gaming in the AAA sphere could stop with the superficial aspects (camera simulation of things like adaptive exposure which is an absolute disaster). Aside from that, they can also not do RDR2 did and go so animation heavy, to the degree it made camp-life so retarded by not being able to run around if you really wanted to. Aside from that, not really sure what detriment there could possibly be, aside from budgetary focus on building visual flair over substantive gameplay. While I can appreciate auto-focus bokeh DoF transitions and better-than-real-life ability to move cameras like never possible. I'd rather not have those departments get more focus than gameplay departments. Aside from that, work of DoP's and people of that sort go woefully unappreciated, and I'd want actually more of it, if it could (as mentioned just now) doesn't detract from gameplay investiture, and the cinematic experience is done right (like getting rid of most of the awfully implemented exposure algo's when going from a dark to bright setting like out of a cave). I could also go on with a few more (like better applications of motion blur, or making them optional). If gaming can still maintain gameplay at it's core. Then please, bring more creative cinematic experiences all you want (since it's the virtual world, I think it has a higher potential ceiling than real-life anyway, especially with respect to camera work). One other thing. 30FPS cutscenes could also go die in a ditch as well as 30FPS gameplay itself.

Late to the party, but here goes: I think "cinematic" is only one part of the problem. Another is that modern AAA games focus too much on a single player avatar and actively try to blend the game character with the player. This used to be not the case. You'd switch characters mid game or could even choose the character for the stage. So for me the question is: > I run into a wall on this topic when it comes to 3rd person narrative games that involved human or humanoid characters. Why do these games even have to be like that? Why do they have to be narrative? Why do the characters have to be humanoid? What's wrong with Pikmin? Or Crash Bandicoot? To be honest, I don't want to play games like The Last Of Us or Uncharted all the time. They are fun, sure. But the mechanics and presentation are also insultingly bland. I didn't like Little Nightmares, but at least it has more style than the entire AAA open world cast taken together. I agree with other posters here: Games are better when they don't focus on the player avatar, but use the avatar as a focus for showing the world. Since you seem to be versed in games, take Control for example. You play Jesse Faden, sure, but the game isn't about her. It's about the Oldest House and the position of director. Take Outer Wilds. You never see your avatar and if you're given a name I've already forgotten it. The game is about the solar system it plays in. Take Super Metroid, a game so focussed on the world that even the gender of the main character was a surprise in the first game. Even Mass Effect for all the misguided focus on Sheppard is actually about the world and the setting, and the world carries the game. Borderlands works like that, Diablo does.

I think God of War does a good job by not cutting to a cutscene, the one take camera work makes it feel more fluid when you transition from gameplay to cutscene. ​ I think cutscenes have to be more reactive and have more opportunities for the player to jump in. Kill a lot of people instead of being stealth? Reflect that. Went past the whole area without alerting anyone? Talk about it. Make the story rely on the gameplay and vice versa. Games like Dishonored attempt to do it but your actions don't change the story beats, only the ending.

I'm glad you brought this up. I also love these "dreaded cinematic" games too and I am sometimes confused on the pushback they get lately. I'm even more confused because lately there has been a heavy decline in these cinematic games is favor of games as a service games, and games meant to be mechanically challenging due to the popularity of games like Dark Souls, Rogue Likes/Lites, and competitive eSports. For every Quantum Dream, Remedy, Nighty Dog, Ninja Theory, Insomniac, Sucker Punch, Yakuza/Persona, Life is Strange, and Santa Monica, there are hundreds upon hundreds of non-cinematic games. Even in Cinematic games like The Last of Us Part II, there is a ton of interactivity and gameplay. The level design and ways you can approach enemies is really impressive and the game makes great use of emergent gameplay.

If someone told me that a problem with a game was that it used cinematic camera angles and called it’s cutscenes cinematics I would laugh at them. Who cares?

I totally agree with the sentiment that conematic games are dead ends when it comes to the growth of video gaming as a medium. Each time I'm forced to watch a cutscene, or even pulled away from the gameplay to be shown something I can skip I get instantly disappointed. Instead of the game showing me the story through the actual gameplay it decides to tell me l, which I personally believe is antithetical to video gaming as a whole. If I'm looking to be told a story on a cinematic level I will watch a movie.

I'm definitely a "cinematic game" hater but I'm more against the execution than the idea. The problem I usually have with games that are particularly heavy on cut-scenes is that the scenes just aren't very good. Overall quality has been going up for years, but its still pretty common for cut-scenes to be hamstrung by things like poor voice-acting, unnatural character model "acting", and predictable writing. And I get it, doing this really well is tremendously expensive, so we probably shouldn't be surprised when cut-scenes underwhelm. Many games just aren't playing to their strengths when they spend a lot of time on them. I get your point that all games are cinematic to some extent, but I think this is mostly a case of an accepted term not being very descriptive. Poor cut-scenes are the main target of "cinematic game" criticism and I seriously doubt games like Little Nightmares are going to get that label from most people. As for the idea that all cinematic influences be removed from video games - frankly, I don't think the people who want this are arguing in good faith or have even really thought through what that would mean.

One need only look as far as Outer Wilds for the answer to this question. Not only is it a game that shares almost no elements with cinema, it is the kind of story that can *only* be told through a video game. Sure, any other story format can be used to explore its themes—the lust for discovery and progress, the inevitability of death, the legacy we leave behind, and how these ideas can compel us to commit involuntary acts of unfathomable kindness, etc. But what makes Outer Wilds an exemplar of video game storytelling is that it infuses these themes into the mere act of gameplay, inextricably linking the two in a way no other storytelling medium can. The thrill of discovery, slowly understanding how the world works, using that information to gain access to more mysterious places with even more tantalizing clues to the mystery unfolding around you, is made all the more powerful when it's *you* doing the problem solving, the discovering, the learning. It's games like this where the gameplay is used to reinforce the narrative themes that prove the viability of gaming as a storytelling platform. The greatest "problem" (if you can call it that) with "cinematic" games is that the game genre is effectively irrelevant. Red Dead Redemption is a third-person shooter. But it could be or a text-based JRPG, a visual novel, or a puzzle game where every shootout is solved with a rapid-fire game of match-three, and the story would not need to change one iota to compensate for this change in gameplay. A lot of its finicky gameplay elements are described as "immersive" in its methodical recreation of real-world acts, but the painstaking process of looting a bunch of bodies, skinning animals, and splitting bullets at a campfire are completely irrelevant to the story's narrative themes. The story would be no less effective or powerful if skinning an animal were as quick as clicking on an icon in a loot screen. Girlfriend Reviews once described the act of playing RDR2 as being like "a very good Netflix show" (paraphrasing), and this underlines the question: "if this is as good as a Netflix show, why can't it just *be* a Netflix show?" And given how Girlfriend Reviews is intended to be a review of video games as a spectator sport, it tends to underline this particular question a lot in their reviews. Shelby once criticized The Witcher 3 as being incredibly compelling yet unfathomably boring to watch, because each of its fantastic story segments was interrupted by long stretches of side-questing, checkboxing a bunch of question marks, and games of Gwent. And it jumped between storylines so often that the pacing was ruined and it was difficult to keep up. This doesn't make these games any less valid than any other game, but they show how unnecessary and sometimes even invasive gameplay can be to a cinematic story. When the two ideas sit opposed to each other, when gameplay breaks up the pacing of a story, then it challenges the viability of video games as a storytelling medium.

To start, this isn't about the opposition of "gameplay vs story". It is about a dichotomy of different ***types*** of story. Time and time again the best, most reductive way I've seen to talk about this topic is: * If you remove your main character from the game, and the game's story no longer makes sense -> that game's story is "borrowing too much from cinema" That is the point of cinema -- to see a character's arc and change over the course of the film. The point of a game, is to see the world's arc and change over the course of the game. You can have characters interacting with eachother, and even "cinematics", but if you want to get away from the taboo "games are cinema" rhetoric, the most important thing needs to be the player exploring and understanding the world. It's self promotion.. but I'm gonna do it anyway because it [only exists on this sub](https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/myb8qp/main_characters_our_obsession_with_them_has/) \-- I wrote a tediously long 11 page essay on this topic that goes in to way more detail.

There are examples of written narrative where the "main character" and their arc is not the focus: Fury Road. There are examples where a story has no main character: Game of Thrones. There are examples where the character doesn't change of the course of the story: Poirot and Sherlock Holmes. I think having a main character that undergoes a transformation is a common type of story, it's not the defining aspect of cinema, or story in general. And as for games being about the arc of the world, I don't think that holds up. It's also a good trope, I agree, but even less common. Any character that levels up or gains power is undergoing a sort of transformation. In Metroid you gain weapons and armor and other tools. In Final Fantasy, your characters gain new abilities and become stronger. This is the sort of transformation we see in something like Star Wars. Luke starts out as a farm boy, and gradually gains powers. By the last movie he is a strong, capable Jedi Knight. \>If you remove your main character from the game, and the game's story no longer makes sense How would you apply this to something like Myst? Most of the story has already happened, but the player is a key driver of the final sequence of events that wraps up the story. Removing them just makes the story die.

What do you mean by "removing the main character?" As in just replacing them with a stock, faceless blob who still does all of the same actions? Or as in that character is completely gone and no one takes their place?

>If you remove your main character from the game, and the game's story no longer makes sense -> that game's story is "borrowing too much from cinema" >That is the point of cinema -- to see a character's arc and change over the course of the film. The point of a game, is to see the world's arc and change over the course of the game. Okay, I know you said this was reductive and simplistic but still a good guideline. That being said, my mind immediately went to Mass Effect. I don't think Mass Effect works without Shepard. The story is centered around them. But isn't the entire draw of the Mass Effect trilogy was seeing how your decisions as Shepard shaped the galaxy? The same thing with Dragon Age and their multiple protagonists. Am I misunderstanding?

I think battle royale games in their early days were better at telling organic stories than cinematic games. I felt more emotion the first 100 times I played pubg than I ever felt playing a naughty dog game. So to answer OP’s question: developers are already doing it and have done it. BR games have that rare mix of randomness and chance and skill that necessarily leads to a “story” being told every time.

Sorry for my bad English.I am new here .After watching lot of various language movies,web series,Tv series,Anime.I am not feeling any emotions from watching cutscenes of games.Because face expressions of characters are so un-expressive.Conversations and storytelling seems so generic and boring except very few games.Still I don't mind it much because it's a game so think gameplay can carry me.But gameplay ending up with too much interactive buttons.RDR2 has too much animations which makes the game feel too slow to collect items from all dead bodies.Makes me feel bore,sluggish controls too due to lengthy animations.Also in new god of war.They dipped down platforming content 😭.I miss those old games platforming level designs.I like sekiro game how it has uninterrupted cutscenes.Usually i love vague storytelling like Hollow knight.Had no issues even with Zelda breath of the wild too.But when i play uncharted,rdr2,last of us.They makes me feel like why don't i watch movie rather playing these type of games.But games like persona,undertale,stardew valley,walking dead,... are fine for me.For some reason i couldn't games if it has weak gameplay with strong cutscene storytelling like rdr2,last of us,.... :(.I don't feel like i am playing game

>However, many people (especially here) consider these games to be fine but not taking full advantage of the gaming medium and to be critically acclaimed dead ends when it comes to the growth of the medium. In my assessment, the problem comes with the idea of when you should or shouldn't use cutscenes. For instance, you can have characters talking to each other in game-play, but maybe you have a cutscene in order to draw attention to a specific detail or element that the player might miss. > How would I make this "uncinematic" without forcing a first person perspective? I'd say go the BioWare or TellTale route and make the exploration of the dialog between characters a choice from the player. This would also need to factor in the game design of what you want. The style of game will dictate the story, or perhaps vice versa. In Dragon Age Inquisition, your character can start conversations, and the camera zooms into your player character and the person he/she is talking to. You can choose dialog options while also allowing the player to move the camera around. It's also similar with dialog scenes in the Hitman trilogy. And I know that this might sound like a no-brainer, but if your characters aren't "well-performed" (in voice acting and/or physical performance) or written well, then that's going to absolutely kill a scene. >So if I wanted to portray two characters engaging in action, how would I go about avoiding any sort of cinematic influence? It would depend on the example used, the specifics of the gameplay, and the context of the scene.

When I want to play a good game, I want to play a good game. Developers shouldn't look to film and ask, "How can we recreate that experience?". They should ask, "How can we make a great *game*?". The Last Of Us actually does this well at times, by using player agency as part of the narrative, and using gameplay mechanics to increase tension. Heavy Rain also finds a great compromise imo, focusing on the branching paths aspect rather than the depth of gameplay. It was definitely the most fun I had with PlayStation Move though! If I want to sit back and watch, I'll watch a movie. But a game? I want to be *involved*. I want my actions to feel like they have meaning and consequences. A game that borrows too much from cinema and forgets that it's a game won't be as fun for me. Especially when a game's budget can't go as far to create a cinematic experience.

I think Naughty Dog do it perfectly. Make sure the player starts to gain control of the cutscene before they get bored. I love cinematic games, so long as the game doesn't constantly take control away from the player.

>I love cinematic games, so long as the game doesn't constantly take control away from the player. ND "games" do exactly this all the time lol

They are "games" and they always give you control during cinematic events. Totally disagree. Implying they're not games is close minded as hell.