Words Of Wisdom said:
TheBigFatJ said:
Words Of Wisdom said:
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 given 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. |
I'd concede that there are times when cutscenes are useful, but you can usually do things in a better way with games. Look at the example with Half Life: you worked through the entire story, setting, etc. This is a very simple example of a back story, but it made the game all that much more interesting. |
Look at my example again and consider how to do it. Skies of Arcadia obviously put lots of time and effort into a clever and creative battle system for airship battles but when you have one airship battle in the game (and not 20-30), how much effort do you think this merits?
I agree with the point that a developer should do as much in-game as possible, but I think the choice is rarely as simple as "Do we do this in-game or not?" |
It's harder to implement the story inside the gameplay than paste come cutscenes. It can take more talent, more time, and therefore be more expensive... but the harder it is the more potential it has. Planescape: Torment is the perfect example of it (I'm not sure if any game will ever surpass it in terms of story).
I never played Skies of Arcadia so I'm just following up on your comment, but there are always limitations such as budget, time constraint and hardware limitations. However, if you had none of those limitations, what was there to stop you? Did Kojima have any limitations at all? Certainly not budget or hardware. And possibly not much on time either.
