"MGS4 has two cutscenes nearing the 90 minute mark" - EDGE

[shio]

DTG said:

shio said:

DTG said:

shio said:
The excessive rely on cutscenes proves once again that Kojima is not a great storyteller, and he cannot tell a complex videogame story well.

Peoples idea of a complex video game story told well seem to be the Half Life series and Bioshock. I'm sorry, but those games were not complex by any stretch of the immagination. Deus Ex is another popular example, and while telling a great narrative, it was nowhere near as fleshed out in either creating it's universe, characters and storyarch nor in exploring it's themes it clearly tried to pursue as was MGS2.

Of course not every game should be like MGS2, but my point is that Kojima's ambitions simply cannot be presented through gameplay alone. They need hefty scenes of dialogue and lengthy exposition to translate in their complete form to the player that is willing to listen. It's an aquired taste.

My barometer is Planescape: Torment, which has a superior and deeper story than the entire MGS series. What I was saying is Kojima can't make a great videogame story without resorting to cutscenes only. It's fine if it's a game where the story is not the main concern, but when it's a story-centric game, using only cutscenes to tell the story is fatal.

Not only that, but the stories in MGS are convoluted, and then everything must be explained in the dialogues in order to be understood. Kojima simply is not able to story tell in the gameplay (interactively). That is common in most japanese developers.

As for Deus Ex, it does approach alot of subjects, and as deeply as any MGS game. The difference between Deus Ex and an MGS is that Deus has a far superior writing, presentation and interactivity; so it doesn't need to explain things as if it was a documentary or an interview.

Planescape Torment did have a deep and excellent storyline. However saying that it had but only a few cutscenes is an understatement of the most extreme. The game has been referred to as an interactive novel for the amount of dialogue it contains. PT's script contains between 800 thousand words to over a million, easily trumping the size of even MGS2's 800 page magnus opus script. Most of the game involves extensive reading. I suppose it depends what you define as being a "cutscene" exactly. I consider any non interactive story exposition to be a cutscene. While PT's conversations often contained multiple choice answers which were interactive, much of the dialogue was still presented to you in a relatively linear fashion despite the instances of branching conversation tree's. Furthermore that sort of presentation would only work for an RPG game, it would be far too slow and sluggish for an action/stealth game such as MGS4.

That's the thing, usually an action-oriented game wouldn't have 10 hours of cutscenes in it, so it doesn't need to have some way to integrate the story into the gameplay... cutscenes would be fine. But since MGS4's amount of story is comparable to an RPG or an Adventure game, then it would be best to disperse the story other than cutscenes.

MGS series are sluggish to begin with. The games are slow-paced, so using an interactive dialogs scheme wouldn't hurt, especially when there are already several scenes where it's pretty much conversations between 2 people, one asking and the other explaining. That way, it would allow part of the story inside the gameplay, even if there's no real choices in it (the illusion is good enough most times).

I think Deus Ex is a perfect example of it. It's as much story oriented as MGS yet they tried to have interactive conversations instead of only cutscenes. It worked perfectly.