I like Cinematics with one exception. Ones that happen right before a boss fight that are unskippable. You die, reload, and walla cut scene again... So if you are going to have cutscenes give us the ability to skip it. Heck I don't even mind watching it the first time. Allow me to skip it though. Better yet give me a system that lets me go back and rewatch the old cutscenes whenever I want to when I've unlocked them.

This is also a handy feature for games that people might want to replay.


One of my biggest pet peaves was ghost recon 2 I think. Anyhow it was a FPS with multiplayer coop. Every map started with some form of a cutscene. There was one that I vividly remember having a minute long cutscene in a helicopter every single dang time the group died completely. It took a fun game and ruined it for me because here I am forced to wait out the same dang helicopter ride...

I'd be very interested in that book of yours, stimarco.

My problem with integrating a story directly into the game is that the interactive game distracts the player.
Half-Life² is the only game that comes to mind right now, when thinking about how to keep interactivity. It's cheap to lock the player in a room and make him watch, but HL2 pulls it off perfectly most of the times. It's still just a cheap trick that is not much different from a cutscene.

Quote:Original post by Hegemon
I'd be very interested in that book of yours, stimarco.

My problem with integrating a story directly into the game is that the interactive game distracts the player.
Half-Life² is the only game that comes to mind right now, when thinking about how to keep interactivity. It's cheap to lock the player in a room and make him watch, but HL2 pulls it off perfectly most of the times. It's still just a cheap trick that is not much different from a cutscene.

Portal seemed to do a good job without cutscenes. Now the story itself might be arguable but to me it did an excellent job with it. It just wouldn't be the same game without GladOS there.