8th August 2018 - Cinematic Games

Today's Topic - 8th August 2018

Submitted by @Peppers (Peppers) Peppers

What are your thoughts on 'cinematic games'? Games wherein a notable amount of your time is spent in QTEs, cutscenes, or dialogue as opposed to actively playing? Does it offer a more efficient/effective method of showing the story, engaging the player completely, or could it be achieved whilst actively playing?
SuperuserLast Monday at 6:16 PM
I have no problem with cinematic games, in fact I am a great fan of Yakuza and MGS, which are known for very long, uninteractive cutscenes.

The benefits of a cinematic approach are mostly obvious, but I want to touch on one that's a bit less obvious. It helps the game steer clear of ludonarrative dissonance, as well as enable it to do story-related things not available through gameplay. You can convey a much greater range of actions and events through cinematic mediums as opposed through gameplay alone. 'Non-standard' gameplay (i.e. outside of the interactions immediately available on your control device) can be mixed in in the form of QTEs or a dialogue wheel.

I find purely cinematic games such as visual novels or the stuff Quantic Dreams does can suffer due to exposing cinematic elements through the wrong medium. For example, it's tiring in visual novels to read 2 lines most of the time; in 3D games, character models will never look as good and in in-game cutscenes (Yakuza does this), the animation is much simpler and indeed clunkier.

There are games that have a strong link between narrative and gameplay, such as Dark Souls. But many games cannot feasibly achieve this and that's absolutely fine; in those cases, a cinematic approach is best.(edited)
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traderLast Monday at 6:16 PM
I think that most cinematic games aim to tell a powerful story but fail in the actual game part. I personally find a lot of these games lack in the game play department because the gameplay I almost always put seccond instead of being an important part of the experience. You can see this with life is strange and the walking dead. They're both great games but no one is there for the gameplay. I think that current cinematic games aren't great but hopefully soon, we'll have a good example of a cinematic game thatll set a great standard for everyone to follow
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Mala(just ask)Last Monday at 6:18 PM
The QTE heavy games Ive played so far have been: Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and Telltale Games.

I personally love them, they focus on story and give you a feeling of watching a movie while providing you with the constant need for awareness due to the QTEs.

I dont think they are more efficient at offering something but rather they are forced to focus on story rather than say gamplay, physics, ballance and everything else a game like Fallout NV or Pillars of Eternity would require.

The QTEs themselves serve more as "Im awake I swear!" moments, often enough scaring the shit out of me due to the movie mood the story had placed me in.

The game that I personally think did the gameplay and QTEs combo really well was Modern Warfare 2 (the ending for example where you can literally feel the pain Soap must be feeling while he slowly pulls his knife out of his stomach while you spam a button).

QTEs can be done well, they can also replace gameplay if applied well. There have been cases where this has gone sidways and games like that have been called out for poor design. They are just another tool for devs to design the vision they imagine.

edit: stole Superuser's paragraph editing(edited)
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Maxios7Last Monday at 6:32 PM
I don't have much experience with them, if "Life is Strange" counts then yeah, i've played some.
they can be pretty boring if they didn't work much on the story elements, like they didn't put much effort on the gameplay, but that will make a must to put the needed effort on the story elements. like in Life is Strange, it is mostly cutscenes and conversations, but the story is so exciting and the player even have a hand in the flow of events.
a "choices-matter" is not a must for this genre, but it is a must to have a game that has a good story elements and make the player feel excited to play more to know more, because a cinematic game without a good story is just like going to the movies to watch a boring movie that you will not enjoy.(edited)
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SciLast Monday at 8:31 PM
In my own opinion "cinematic games", as you put them, aren't utilizing the medium to it's full potential. They can be enjoyable and well written but there isn't much videogame about them. They could exist as a Netflix tv series and deliver the same experience more or less.

I can understand why they exist, they have the unique power of investing the viewer directly to the narrative instead of simply passively watching things unfold. But very few times do they use this for anything meaningful.

In my opinion a game that manages to blend gameplay with it's story seamlessly is still the ideal for videogames. Subnautica is famous for it's conveyance of terror of the unknown through gameplay. There's no narrative written to make the player scared, the game makes them scared without telling them why they should be.(edited)
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GREENMANLast Monday at 9:32 PM
I buy games to play them, not watch them. If I can watch a YouTube compilation of a cinematic game and get 95% of the experience, then that 5% missing value isn't enough for me to actually play the game. Pushing quick time event buttons to get to the next scene isn't fun, it's mild torture. And if the gameplay is more complicated than QTEs like with Metal Gear Solid then I better be having fun with the gameplay or I'm back to YouTube. I'm not going to play something where my only fun is the reward of a cutscene or plot point.

The market success of cinematic games are bad for gamers like me because it doesn't push developers to innovate gameplay when they know they can rely on story to sell the game. And if you don't buy that argument then look at Nintendo where story is practically ignored, but each release of their first party titles almost always have incredible gameplay innovations. Seriously, what's the greatest story Nintendo has ever told? Ocarina of Time, 20 years ago?

There is a sweet spot of great gameplay + great story, but it's rare. On that list, I'd put Bioshock, Halo 1-3, the Modern Warfare series, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Red Dead Redemption, and GTA. Probably forgot a few and it gets pretty subjective, but I hope there are more games like them in the future rather than purely cinematic games.(edited)
KirbsLast Monday at 10:02 PM
I guess it depends on what the player likes and doesn't. I would compare cinematic games to reading a book. You craft the world with your choices. The part in which you shoot the bad guys up and move around is left out on purpose, because cinematic games are for people who don't want to do that.

Cinematic games are beautiful because they are so simple.
August 14, 2018
menewbLast Tuesday at 1:09 AM
I would like to have a balance of both. Maybe have the diffculty settings tweak on the gameplay. Games like these are for people who would like to experience story than gameplay. It has been done now. We just need to wait someone who does it right and set the standards.
SilenLast Tuesday at 2:25 PM
Personally, I'm not a fan of cinematic games, because games can make you experience things directly rather than invoking compassion for the characters on the screen. A cinematic game is pretty much a movie but with some action needed, which is usually clicking a few buttons meaninglessly or choosing an option presented on the screen. While cinematic games can have the potential of ''creating your own movie'' so to speak, they usually fall flat at that and just make you watch a 5 hour movie while holding 3 buttons to progress it further. It's like having to walk across the room and back to flip a page while reading a book, which is meaningless and boring. If more cinematic games find the unique balance of having meaningful choices or actual gameplay in them combined with long cinematics maybe I'll change my mind, but as they are, they don't seem very appealing. After all, what's the point of buying a ''cinematic game'' for 20-40 euros with 3d computer graphics when you can just go watch a high quality/high budget movie masterpiece for 5-8 euros instead?
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August 15, 2018
Lemon (Elliot)Yesterday at 11:48 AM
If these tools are used effectively, and in places where it makes sense, they really do work. Games like bioshock, or just the immersive sim genre as well in general have found the solution of using a lot of audio files, which you can listen to while you play, and that you don't necessarily need to listen to either if you don't look for them, and you can pay as much attention as you want while you are playing. This method i think is good, especially in that genre, as it never takes you out of the game (or as rarely as possible). However, this method can be problematic in games some games. And can probably not be used for all storytelling as it may result in the player missing something crucial about the narrative (if the narrative is really important for your experience). Since you can end up just not reading something or paying attention to something if a lot of the stuff that is delivered through the same way, is just optional world building and things that aren't really to relevant. This is why cutscenes and such can be useful because they tell you "hey, focus, this is important".
However, in action games especially, which i think is where this hate for qtes and endless
amounts of cutscenes mainly comes for is when the story just really isn't interesting and the main reason you're there is because you want to rip demons in two or something (Doom was in many ways most likely a reaction to the modern fps campaigns we find in for example battlefield.) And the problem is that stories in these game are typically not very well written or come of as feeling really tonally weird. Because one moment you’re shooting down hordes of enemies,the other you’re having a straight conversation with someone (this is one of the problems with the battlefield campaigns). And you just end up not really caring, because 1. you aren’t there for the story, and 2. the person who wrote it probably knows that and doesn't care much either. Or when something cool happens in a cutscene when you're playing a action game, you may end up just thinking “ehm, didnt i buy this so i could be directly involved in these cool things that are happening on screen”.