As long as they arent KINGDOM HEARTS long, then Im cool.

When it comes to RPGs, stories are just as crucial as the gameplay itself

I think they are nice in most cases because they give an incentive to finish the game. However, cutscenes for the most part are currently not very well done. They should be shorter and there should be more than one (preferably a LOT more than one) possible cutscene for each "gameplay break." There is a very good reason why I will never play CoD3 again except to get the trophies if they ever patch it (which I doubt) and that is because I know what is going to happen in every cutscene. (and more than 95% of the gameplay, but that's another issue...) So yes, stories and cutscenes are a good thing, but only in measured amounts.

Kingdom Hearts, Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy, and Metal Gear Solid are examples of well done cutscenes.

I usually don't care about the stories used in video games because quality gameplay comes first. That being said I do enjoy seeing well developed stories in the games I play. A good story is a bonus in my eyes.

What NJ5 said.

DTG, if all you want from a game is story, why do you play? There are movies and books out there. Tons and tons and tons of them. They should provide you with any type of story you can possibly want, told in any type of way you could possibly enjoy. The thing a game can offer you than these platforms can't, interactivity, is what you seem to not want.

The storytelling in games is usually subpar, not only because people in the gaming industry are bad at telling stories, but also because when you add interactivity to the whole thing it gets so much more complicated. I could bring up tons of examples of simple things making it complicated, but let's take a quick example.

GTA: you do a mission and a person with you dies. Then you go back to restart a mission, and the character is alive again. This messes up a lot of things. First, it makes you care less about the characters. It makes the feeling of interactivity drop like a bomb. The story is revealed as a static thing, and not like we are used to in life, where choices actually has consequenses. If you're using a passive medium to tell a story, you are in control, and the illusion is not broken as easilly. When you're creating a game, you are not in control, the player is. This makes things SOOO much more difficult.

The closer to movies games get, the less interactivity we get. The further away from movies you go, the harder it becomes to tell the story properly. This is a conumdrum for most developers. One way to solve it is the Valve way, which involves a lot of psychological control over the player. Basically, they trick you into looking the right way, going the right way and so on. You can choose the way you do things, but Valve can guide you toward the right choice without you knowing it. Another way to try to solve it is to build the gameworld so massive that everything a player can do is responded to by that world in a controlled manner (Like Bioware tries to do).

But all in all, storytelling will never be as strong in games as it is in movies and books if all you try to do is copy the passive entertainments way to do things. Never. No game has ever come close to making me feel as close to the characters as virtually any good book does or movie does. That's why I am wondering why you play games instead of watching movies or reading books. It's also one of the reasons I am not sure whether I like cutscenes any more.

Good storytelling in games require new methods, tons of resources and really good storytellers. It also requires testing and a lot of trial and error. Real research in the area would also help, as well as taking influences from more interactive forms of entertainment.

Really good ways to tell a fully interactive story might not even happen in our lifetimes, but I hope they do.

Story: Only if it's done well. That means that, in 99% of games, the answer's a no.

Cutscenes: I HATE cutscenes - or, more specifically, the over-use of them. One would think that developers would have learned by now through games like Half-Life 2, Bioshock, and Portal that not only do you not need cutscenes to tell a story, but for the most part, stories in games are better without cutscenes. The only time when cutscenes are appropriate in a game is when they're both exceptionally awesome and use sparsely (a la No More Heroes), or when it's appropriate to take control of the game out of the player's hands (a la The Darkness). Ideally, I'd even eliminate the first category, but cutscenes like NMH's are sort of a guilty pleasure of mine.

Only because the gameplay in traditional J-RPGs is complete crap and tremendously boring. Cutscenes are fine, as long as I can skip them, since most times I'm only going to want to see them once. And they shouldn't be too long. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd watch something tons better than any video game story (they all, without exception, suck).

I think that anything included in a game should be a compliment to it. Sometimes a game need not be story heavy to be fun. Cutscenes are like anything else, they should compliment the game. Cutscenes aren't necessary and when used should not be overbearing so as to not break the flow of the game.

I give this thread a 9.5.

Not particularly.