Hi everyone,

To be honest I am frequently asking myself about why cinematic games are so popular among the majority.

I have played Assasins Creed III in early 2013.

All in all i could not manage to play it more than two hours in total.

What i would discribe as really disturbing were things like i simply press the stick forward and the main character I controll (dont know his name anymore) rolls and jumps and balances and climbs and everything looks so difficult, but actually I was doing nothing. Its like somebody wants to praise me because i did something great, but i just moved forward.

The other thing is kind of the same - at some special position i just could press a single button and the character jumped to the enemy, backstabbed him and - while doing this - also still did all kind of acrobatic stuff.

I mean this is so exxagerated ... for me, this really is killing the fun. I have to wait untill the scene is over and it feels like the game makes fun of me.

More fun-killing stuff is a cinematic where another person and my character (i can not control him at this moment to not miss the unbelievable important story) are walking minutes long through a building - or whatever - and this guy is telling me stuff after stuff after stuff ... I have watched a Lets Play Video of Deus Ex Human Revolution some weeks ago and for me it was - already in the intro part of the game (until the main character gets severly wounded and when there is the skip to the hospital, where the main game seems to start) - so annoying because of all the ingame-cinematics. It was really like I can do nothing, but have to wait untill its over. Going a few meter, getting some cinematic, again going a few metres, getting some new cinematic.

To be honest I do not care about the story - and i will also not do so in future, because in most(all?) games there aren't so important facts, that you can not continue the game without listening to the plot - unless its a trigger^^. Its like in games "hurry up or the evil demon [give-him-some-name] will destroy our world - we can not afford to lose any more time or the whole universe will get devoured" ... and then the dialog is simply over and i can to whatever i want without having a countdown timer or something else. but yeah sure - i really need to hurry now...^^

I assume these points (except the part directly before this^^ - i added it only later) are the main features of today's cinematic western games - everything looks so spectacular, even when you do nothing at all (lets make a automatical 30 hit combo in Killer Instinct by just pressing A+B at the same time^^ - Ultra Combos are excluded ;) ) - each few minutes there is some cutscene or cinematic in which somebody tells you something - and a bunch of quicktime events.

I watched a friend of mine playing the Shadow of Mordor game and it feels sooo unsatisfying to see that regardless that you only pressed one button there is action happening for seconds automatically on the screen.

And where is the sense about autosave points every few metres? It seems to be completely irrelevant if i die in some games and how often I die. I just start the battle again and again and again - and to loose no time, of course, i respawn directly at the start of the battle. People complaining about Metroid Prime like save systems are in my opinion too lazy to take a bit care about what they are actually doing and so are not willing to replay 10-20 Minutes when going from Savepoint to a boss enemy and fail to beat him.

It is like if in Mariokart8 you can restart every race as often as you want. Then you can drive it unlimited times in a row and only go on to the next race if you managed to come in first. If not - one more try, one more try, one more try.

For me it was really really satisfying and motivating to go for the 16 tracks cup in MarioKart DoubleDash on gamecube. Sure it can also be a bit frustrating when you won 14 tracks and in on the 15th track you only rank second and so don't manage to get a perfect score. I experienced it a couple of times - indeed i think i never got 160 points in the extra/mirrored CUP with all tracks, but thats perfectly fine.

What is the fascination about all of this happening?

I can not really follow and like it. It is like If an older lady was asking me to guide her over the street and would give me 100 bucks for it, i would not accept it because there is no relation between "what i did" and "what i get". Sure i would guide her over the street, but then just wish her a nice day and leave.

So getting some cool moves as a reward when i did a chain of some good actions is fine for me, but not simply for pressing a random button once.

If i mess up at some point, then i have to bear the consequences.

I am not sure if someone somewhere in the universe feels the same, but i am deadly serious about it.

Too much cinematics, too much automatic stuff and too less gameplay --> better not buy for me.

Why do people like doing virtually nothing but still getting rewarded?

Sorry, the post actually was barely half as long as it is now as I afterwards added quite some text in between. So i guess it could be a bit confusing, but i guess you guys can do it ;)

Best Regards

You can eat pizza at the same time.

no but seriously.

But I am not sure if Assassins Creed really counts as a cinematic game.  Sure its more cinematic than say NSMB which has probably 1 cutscene   but Cinematic for me is stuff like  BeyondTwoSouls.

I feel like more often than not, most companies use the word "Cinematic" experience to make an excuse why the game is 30fps and not 60fps. But in terms of cutscenes and etc, its very game dependent. I love story but I also love gameplay and the best games are the ones that have both in harmony while the worst are the ones that usually focus tooooooo much on story and not enough on gameplay. And obviously, both have to be good to begin with in order to make the game interesting so in terms of cutscenes, I don't mind them most of the time (again game dependent) but I do hate this "We are making the game more cinematic so we are targeting 30fps instead of 60fps" nonsense

Cause gameplay design kinda stopped.. Game designers can't wow people with gameplay anymore so it shifted to visuals and story.. The focus isn't on the enjoyement of the players but some cocky gamedeveloper who wants to tell a story..

Never done that. Were you forced to do that or something?

Different folks different strokes, ain't worse than that.

The west has always been trying to turn games into movies, just look at the SEGA CD and all the failed CD based consoles before of past eras.

The difference between then and now is that instead of FMVs we have "epic" cutscenes where your only interaction is mashing a button or a trigger or just moving the camera in a 30 degree cone, because we can't have the player miss this amazing cutscene we blew 15% of our budget now, can we.

Why do you think some publishers are soo butthurt at let's players, when some of the best bits of their games are the cascade of cutscenes between the lumps of banal gameplay that also happens to be in a corridor.

As for why do soo many people injoy them? Because they're very easy to entertain, same explanation as Michel Bay's movies.

"cinematic games" aka "press X for awesome" are just easier to play. Thus more accessible. And ultimately sell better.

Not everyone has what it takes to play games like Demon's souls, Ninja Gaiden. Resogun, Wipeout HD...etc. But be rest assured, there are lots of those kinda game out there.

There's a few reasons.

1: Many people buy games that look good. And they look good with good graphics and high-intensity "cinematic" scenes. These scenes are much easier to do when they're scripted, and the player has limited (if any) control.

2: Console hardware is very limited. To get the good graphics for those cinematic scenes, developers have to make compromises somewhere. And framerate is always the first thing to go.

3: Developers then use the excuse of "30fps is more cinematic" and try to convince us that 30fps was the right choice all along. This is a blatant lie. If any dev that says something like that, what they actually mean to say is "We want our game to look really pretty, so we nuked the framerate and hindered the game's playability in favor of some extra eye-candy"

4: Reviewers are also to blame here. If a game has good graphics, it always receive praise for it. Good graphics is guaranteed to earn a game at least some points in a review score. However, they'll rarely (if ever) praise a game for a good framerate, and framerate is never really brought up unless it suffers from frequent sub-30fps dips.

The real question is What's wrong with them?

And what games would be considered cinematic?