Cinematic Gaming

I miss boss fights. They used to be the ultimate expression of gameplay. Now they're the ultimate expression of the Anti-Climax.

Developers have gotten lazy knowing a QTE is all they need to satisfy the new generation of gamers (I should call them Fuse Playtesters for what they did to Overstrike. Cancer killing gaming)

Don't you know anything? Bosses are too video-gamey according to Casey Hudson from Bioware.

edited 28th Nov '12 1:18:51 PM by LDragon2

Quoting without giving any context.

Here, let me give you some congratulations.

-Sarcastic Clapping-

Donate money to Skullgirls, get a sweet poster.

You are trying to cause me anger. It will not work. There is no anger, there is serenity. Ohmmm.

-Murders a stray dog-

edited 28th Nov '12 1:22:03 PM by ShirowShirow

There are plenty of games with poor storylines. Hell, Metroid Prime's has a big glaring plot hole in it. The thing is, presentation (and pacing) matter, and if you present the worst storyline in a good way, it can still be palatable. If you present a mediocre storyline in the worst way, it will be unbearable.

I didn't think about RE 4. It's one of the few games with frequent QTEs I can stomach. I still think the first Krauser fight is excessive and relies too much on trial-and-error.

Ugh, I'm now thinking of Space Marine. I liked a lot of things about the game, but its final boss sucked because, after a whole game of playing one way, you were suddenly pressing buttons as they appeared on the screen to take out the final boss. It was stupid.

Not only is Modern Warfare not a sandbox, it suffers from many of the "too cinematic" flaws.

The game you described sounds like Dark Souls. Seems fun to me.

edited 28th Nov '12 1:34:57 PM by Scardoll

Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.

We desperately need more Dark Souls in gaming.

We're still in the Co D generation. After this comes the Minecraft generation.

Also, Dark Souls is not a 'sandbox' unless our definition has gotten very loose. It's like Monster Hunter, a game that does very little but does it extremely well.

edited 28th Nov '12 2:43:25 PM by Recon5

Dark Souls may not be sandbox but it isn't linear.

And...Minecraft generation? What?

I like Minecraft but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

edited 28th Nov '12 2:49:22 PM by Thorn14

Dark Souls is a Metroidvania.

edited 28th Nov '12 3:21:16 PM by ShirowShirow

0__0
I now know what I want 3D Castlevania to take the form of.
WHY DID I NOT REALIZE THIS BEFORE!?
WHY HAS KONAMI NOT REALIZED THIS!?
ARGHLFARGLAGHADABARGH!

Seriously though, a modified Dark Souls makes too much sense as 3D Castlevania now that I think about it.

Nope, enjoy your God Of War clone.

I'm thinking less of Krauser and more the context sensitive attacks on enemies(you know, like the suplex or the round-house kick).

Umbran Climax◊

Well, there's this.

Has there ever been a good Metroidvania that used cinematics? Castlevania Lords Of Shadow and Other M completely abandoned roaming when they embraced cutscenes.

edited 28th Nov '12 9:41:04 PM by ShirowShirow

...I dunno, Shadow Complex? (I never tried it though)

Give me cute or give me...something?

Shadow Complex was great. Metroid Prime is good too, but it had very limited cinematics.

Regardless of what else people think of Lo S it was hands-down better than any of the previous 3D Castlevanias. Those games also had non-interactive cutscenes and Lo S beats them in that department simply by having a much more powerful graphics engine.

It may have been the best 3D Castlevania, but that really doesn't mean much given that all the 3D games preceding it sucked in an extraordinary way.

Now, imagine Dark Souls. Make it a tad more forgiving. Add in Dracula. Add in Death. Give the character a tad more mobility. Make the weapons an appropriate weapon/sub-weapon system. Set it all in a giant ass Gothic castle and the surrounding countryside. Yes.

Well, I played the N64 castlevanias, Lament Of Innocence, some Curse Of Darkness...

Considering I'd rather poke hot spikes into my eyes than play any of them, saying Castlevania Lords Of Shadow is better than them is the very definition of Damned by Faint Praise.

I'd hardly call those games cinematic though. Yeah, they had a few cutscenes, but the focus was still on the gameplay. The terrible, terrible gameplay.

Humorously, all the games relevant to this line of thought are pretty non-cinematic.

That would go from Dark Souls to DMC. A major part of the challenge in DS is the clearly defined limitations on your character, versus the bosses' lack thereof.

B'aww... I didn't mind Curse of Darkness. It just had monotonous and boring environments, which made exploring kind of suck.

this place needs me here

Regarding the whole interactivity/control issue mentioned about a page ago, I think it depends heavily on whether or not the game goes by the notion that the protagonist is the player. There are plenty of games with cutscenes which I've loved, and I've noticed they are always games where the protagonist is a unique character in and of themselves, as opposed to a generic one the player is supposed to shape. For a couple well-known examples, take Paper Mario, Professor Layton, and The World Ends With You. The latter two would shape and develop their protagonists in cutscenes, because you basically have to take control away from the player momentarily to do so. And Paper Mario would use cutscenes for plenty of self-aware humor, something that would've been significantly harder to do well if they were simultaneously trying to immerse the player in the game world through Mario's eyes.

They also all have a second trait: You can generally fast-forward through cutscenes at your will by mashing the A button (or for Professor Layton's FMV cutscenes, skip them entirely with the Start button). I suspect this is the root cause of the whole no-control complaint: If a game forces you to sit through the cutscenes, those who have seen the same scene before (or just don't care) will be bored. If you can skip them, they no longer get in the way if you don't want to (re-)watch them. No harm, no foul.

And of course, exacerbating that problem are incompetent developers who see players complaining about lack of control and decide to just add Press X to Not Die, which is even worse. At least with the excruciatingly slow unskippable credit roll in the otherwise enjoyable Tales of Symphonia, I could opt to face the final boss at at approximately 10:45 Eastern Time, and then switch over to The Daily Show while the names of half the population of Japan scrolled for half an hour.

edited 29th Nov '12 1:06:36 AM by PoochyEXE

Extra 1: Poochy Ain't Stupid

Like all things, it needs to be in balance. 99% of the game should not be cutscenes. That said, it doesn't mean that they're bad.

Mass Effect is an example where the Cinematic approach worked to make the game better. If you remove them, you've really got a generic sci-fi game with a bs plot. But by making that game more cinematic it did become a more effective and well liked game.

Metroid Other M has already been used earlier in this thread as an example of how it can go awry and I'm not going to retread that territory.

Then there's the third version of this. And I'm going to use too extremely similiar games to show how it can be done well and mediocrely in a medium: Fallout New Vegas and The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim.

These two games, that run on the same engine, involved many of the same people (tho Obsidian did most of the work for NV and Bethesda solely did Skyrim) and yet their stories show vast differences in cinematics.

New Vegas used Cinematics as a story telling point. The scene where House/Yes Man shows off the upgraded securitrons is plot point about how that faction is now capable of holding its own. The Battle of Hoover Dam is mostly cinematics as a climatic point to show your efforts in game coming to fruition. Dead Money is cinematic in a noir sense to make the player paranoid while Old World Blues is cinematic for comedic sake and Lonesome Road is cinematic to show the effects of the storyline on the blighted land. And while thats only the largest cinematic moments, they're done with a point: to convey that something has happened and move the story forward. The rest of the story is through environmental story telling and mostly background remarks. This is an example of moderation and well executed.

Skyrim uses cinematics as a point for "this is cool, check it out." Indeed the main storyline gets too wrapped up in the OMG DRAGONS! for so long that it fails to provide any depth. Alduin is depicted fairly one dimensionally and his final battle in Sovngarde is very short and easy but very cinematic. But the plotline that most people remember from that game is the Civil War arc which has depth and moral consequences yet, it's not very cinematic besides the large battle sequences (ie the Battle of Windhelm). And yet, generally speaking the game fails because the cinematic main story is treated as this epic event when to the players dungeon crawling is significantly harder. This is an example of flash without substance for the story of the game. Ultimately, it's really redeemed by the exploration factor because if it had failed that, it would have been a god awful game.

edited 29th Nov '12 12:37:28 PM by sirboulevard

The NCR is like Tim Taylor. We need more POWER!!

I still haven't actually met those damn Greybeards.

Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.