TheBigFatJ said:
What a lot of people are talking about is how story integrates in one medium as opposed to another. A weak way to run a movie story is to paste pages of text on the screen to tell you what they are incapable of showing you. With games, "showing you" can be done in different games, since you can actually participate in the story rather than merely watching it. I think his point is that simply pasting some rendered movie into a game is an obsolete method. It's a lazy method, and it's a sloppy method. It's old timey and qaint. Rather than showing us clips of the story, let us play the story. |
My interpretation of the point was different.
Essentially consider this: You're plaing a standard turn-based RPG game and the developers want to enact an airship battle. Now unless you want to take this to new levels of awesome like Skies of Arcadia did and have an entire 2nd battle system dedicate to airship/monster battles, you make a cutscene. You could also make a minigame just for this instance but many people hate stupid minigames in RPGs so that's probably a bad idea unless you plan to do this a LOT and can put a lot of effort into the minigame.
The point I am making with the example is that there are times when in order to tell the story, the best tool is a cutscene. This is particularly true where the system would not give the player involvement anyway and rewriting it to do so would not be worth the time/effort. I much prefer to play the game rather than watch cutscenes (heck I'd rather read text than listen to voice acting because it's faster and I get can get back to playing quicker), but I understand that there are times when they are very useful.
