Gameplay elements, evolution, and enjoyment not for everyone? [2019+] *spawn*

[JoeJ]

If that actions you are taking are not in settings -> controller -> button mapping; then it's a one off action that doesn't exist anywhere else in the game except specifically for that moment.

Now i could argue early text adventures often had sentences to type in just for one situation, while 'standart' controlls like North and South worked in general. I still prefer to look at cinematics as gradual evolution in games, unlike the invention of something truely new like a new genre.

But...

If that actions you are taking are not in settings -> controller -> button mapping;

... this really nails the true evil
Personally i like cutsecens. If i'm interested in the story ofc, which rarely is the case but can be fixed.
I also like listening conversations during regular gameplay, like travelling. During shooting is ok too, but often i have issues to follow the conversation because guns are too loud. Reading subtitles then is stressing, and more often than not the volume problem can't be fixed buy turning speaking up and sound effects down.
But smashing a button to escape a monster is just boring. Please let me just watch the cutscene passively instead. I feel like a idiot if i have to do this.

One see Arthur roll the body over pick up the body and go through the pockets; the other is a flat screen menu with quick collection. By seeing all these actions happening, it drives itself towards realism, and further away from a game.

Yes. This is also one major problem i see with robotic ragdolls in games. Even i had proposed this as a potential solution to lift animation restrictions, i also expect this new problem: The more realism we get, the less sufficent are our input devices to let the player control those new options. I'm not even sure if the player chracter should be represented by such a robotic ragdoll, or if the current abstract player controllers feel just better. Maybe new VR controllers can solve those problems...

As of most recent; The Outer Worlds.

For me that's still very cinematic because of the many dialogs. The definition of 'cinematics' is just too loose. (hehe, maybe because the term does not fit games at all )
Such games are also overwhelming with skill trees and all this stuff in the menus. I perceive this as tedious. I want simple but immersive / impressive games, and Sony does pretty well here. (If only they would add trackball or touchpad for mouse look...)

 

[iroboto]

Now i could argue early text adventures often had sentences to type in just for one situation, while 'standart' controlls like North and South worked in general. I still prefer to look at cinematics as gradual evolution in games, unlike the invention of something truely new like a new genre.

hehe, Sierra titles. I think that was a restriction on their UI. When mouse came along, they switched to something much easier. The monkey island titles were designed around touching the action and the thing on the screen. In general I feel they were the same; UI approaches were different.

... this really nails the true evil
Personally i like cutsecens. If i'm interested in the story ofc, which rarely is the case but can be fixed.
I also like listening conversations during regular gameplay, like travelling. During shooting is ok too, but often i have issues to follow the conversation because guns are too loud. Reading subtitles then is stressing, and more often than not the volume problem can't be fixed buy turning speaking up and sound effects down.
But smashing a button to escape a monster is just boring. Please let me just watch the cutscene passively instead. I feel like a idiot if i have to do this

I would prefer cutscenes as well. RDR2 is probably the strongest definition of a cinematic game I can think of in this regard. You feel like you are an actor, and the person you are acting is Arthur, at least, with respect to the main questline missions. The open world portion of the game is grounded in the controls.

Yes. This is also one major problem i see with robotic ragdolls in games. Even i had proposed this as a potential solution to lift animation restrictions, i also expect this new problem: The more realism we get, the less sufficent are our input devices to let the player control those new options. I'm not even sure if the player chracter should be represented by such a robotic ragdoll, or if the current abstract player controllers feel just better. Maybe new VR controllers can solve those problems...

I'd find it tedious; and unless that was specifically the experience you were looking for; I think the more realistic we get, the more sim you get; the more you're going to lose people. There is a reason flight sims died out. The players for that niche is not very large.

For me that's still very cinematic because of the many dialogs. The definition of 'cinematics' is just too loose. (hehe, maybe because the term does not fit games at all )
Such games are also overwhelming with skill trees and all this stuff in the menus. I perceive this as tedious. I want simple but immersive / impressive games, and Sony does pretty well here. (If only they would add trackball or touchpad for mouse look...)

I don't think listening to someone say dialog would necessarily mean cinematic. It's an immersive way to go through dialog; not to mention; it's more accessible to people. At the end of the day you want/need that information to play the game. in a table top RPG; a DM would read it to you. In a CRPG you would read it, remaining, is to visualize it or perform it. The latter two is probably where cinematic gets its chops from.

 

[JoeJ]

I'd find it tedious; and unless that was specifically the experience you were looking for; I think the more realistic we get, the more sim you get; the more you're going to lose people. There is a reason flight sims died out. The players for that niche is not very large.

Yeah that's definitively not what i want. It should not feel much different than now. Likely the solution is to detach the camera from the ragdoll head, so it moves more with the input allowing some tolerance.
But the remaining issue is slow real life walking speed. Similar to VR games, the solution would be to concentrate interesting things so you can walk shorter distances for the same action... a serious limitation.

Just now i had a friend here who said walking in RDR2 feels sluggisch, because it's real life like. Same issue, not good.

So, as we talk about cinema here, maybe we can borrow one more idea from great Hollywood. Similar to VR teleporting to avoid motion sickness, maybe it could work to click and teleport to another place in view, to shorten the walk. Cut - and there you are, with some seconds of game time that has passed meanwhile.
Sounds terrible at first, but maybe an interesting idea worth to try out...

 

[Nesh]

Just now i had a friend here who said walking in RDR2 feels sluggisch, because it's real life like. Same issue, not good.

These elements may not even be related to an effort to make a game "cinematic" but to make it as believable and realistic as possible which makes it look cinematic as a side effect.
So this begs the question....is realism the problem in games?

 

[iroboto]

These elements may not even be related to an effort to make a game "cinematic" but to make it as believable and realistic as possible which makes it look cinematic as a side effect.
So this begs the question....is realism the problem in games?

I’ve been debating if we have been accidentally been using these terms interchangeably when in reality they may not be at all.
I mean it’s worth outlining since you’re also on the same wavelength here.

 

[bgroovy]

These elements may not even be related to an effort to make a game "cinematic" but to make it as believable and realistic as possible which makes it look cinematic as a side effect.
So this begs the question....is realism the problem in games?

There's nothing realistic about how slow it is to do stuff in RDR2. Searching a cupboard takes a fraction of a second, but Arthur Morgan takes forever to awkwardly square up to the drawer and slowly go through the motions of opening and looking inside. In cases like that an abstracted "swipe" where you magically collect loot is actually more realistic.

 

[PSman1700]

If this argument is to be furthered, you need to start providing actual datapoints

It's the other way around too then, why shouldn't the opposing side not have to provide any data that these games are not containing, lets say, more non-playable moments, or didn't get more 'cinematic' then previous generations big AAA games, aside from MGS offcourse?
How about the first GoW to GoW 2018? I personally see a a move towards more cutscenes and scripted events there for sure. UC4 being 40% non-playable seems more then Drake's Fortune to me, played both. From say the 2000's to now, it's clear as day that modern big AAA games are being more cinematic.
Also, just providing the number that 10% of the ps4 userbase has bought it doesn't mean that all those who bought it could prefer a game with abit less of those cutscenes, and more gameplay, as an example.

Look, i see where this is going, voicing opinions about this isn't very welcome (due to bias or not) and i will let it from here

 

[iroboto]

It's the other way around too then, why shouldn't the opposing side not have to provide any data that these games are not containing

It’s a matter of process. If you make the claim that something is or is not; it is on you to provide the evidence backing it. It is not on the people questioning your assertion that should be providing evidence; their only job is to poke holes through your line of reasoning.

 

[BRiT]

This thread still going? Even the commercials warn you that Death Stranding is Not Actual Gameplay.

/Thread.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I don’t particularly care if an animation is slow to execute as long as it’s executing what I intended to do: get on the horse, look in the cupboard, pick up the deer, drop the bound man off of a cliff in front of a train.

The issue I have is with micro interruptions where I lose control, or sections where I’m executing empty inputs. I think some of the best examples come from Tomb Raider and Uncharted though I like both games. Imagine climbing a series of wooden boards. Inevitably one breaks and your character falls, catches themselves with one hand and swings wildly until you press a button prompt rapidly or the character secures themselves on their own. Either way it’s basically window dressing on a very shallow experience. Both game series feature elaborate climbing set pieces that look exciting, demand little more than pushing up and pressing the jump button at pre-determined jump points where the jumps really never fail.

Uncharted kind of invented the 5-10 second cutscene. You play for a minute, shoot a few enemies and then when you walk to a set point a helicopter blows something up and Nathan Drake falls and slides and gets up. Every couple of minutes you get another interruption. It looks exciting but you aren’t doing anything in those moments.

I thought it worked incredibly well at times in Uncharted 2. It felt new and the combat gameplay was very good. Then I got to Uncharted 3 and I felt like all of the most exciting moments were playing themselves and I got bored and never finished it. I remember I was at a part in an old castle or ruins where you had to run across a wall or roof while enemies shot rockets at you. I realized if you stopped running the enemies would fire rockets until you stepped into certain spots. And if you tried to shoot the enemies they were invincible. The game wanted you to run and watch Drake flinch from the explosions around him. It was very simple and looked great, but the spell was broken and I knew I wasn’t really playing. I don’t have a ps4 so I can’t comment on how Uncharted 4 handles those issues.

Tomb Raider is at its best in the combat and in the play forming sections where timing matters and you can actually die. But it largely adopted the Uncharted design and has the same issues, at times executed better or worse.

 

[JoeJ]

These elements may not even be related to an effort to make a game "cinematic" but to make it as believable and realistic as possible which makes it look cinematic as a side effect.
So this begs the question....is realism the problem in games?

If we talk about things like sluggish movement, waiting until a corpse has been looted by seraching all of its pockets, the problem is the same no matter if we call the reason 'realism' or 'cinematic look', because movies inherit realism.
Movies solve it with a cut, skipping time, to focus on the things that matter.

So maybe using cuts in games like it is used in movies really is a useful idea.
Problem is in games we lack camera direction becasue it is fixed to 1st / 3rd person perspective.
Doing a cut in a movie without a significant change of perspective is a no go - it breaks both flow and illusion and is avoided.
Although, in the last decade it became modern to do it rarely on purpose, first seen in reality TV shows, later also in some movies. They do a cut just to skip time, which looks amateurish but fresh and real life, becasue nobody did it before. But still it feels very bad.

A fast-forward-time-button would be another (such dumb) idea

I agree realism will become a huge problem in games. It opens new doors, but also closes many.
Stupid example: A game like PacMan would be impossible with physics simulation, because it has infinite acceleration to switch between zero and constant velocity.
Better example: Fast movement like in Quake does no longer work, and many miss this already.

Things like looting taking too long can be solved: Just stop having hundreds of boring items in inventories but focus on less, more significant objects. So less looting. I would not miss huge RPG inventories, which are unrealisitc themselves, and i don't like to loot, personally.
Hanging on a cliff on UC / TR and button mashing is also something i would not miss.
But slow movements certainly is a huge issue...

Uncharted kind of invented the 5-10 second cutscene. You play for a minute, shoot a few enemies and then when you walk to a set point a helicopter blows something up and Nathan Drake falls and slides and gets up. Every couple of minutes you get another interruption. It looks exciting but you aren’t doing anything in those moments.

Could be solved eventually by showing the helicopter cutscene action in an inset, similar to this:

Very promisong approach i think.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's the other way around too then, why shouldn't the opposing side not have to provide any data that these games are not containing, lets say, more non-playable moments, or didn't get more 'cinematic' then previous generations big AAA games, aside from MGS offcourse?

I'm not trying to prove they haven't. If they have, I'm willing to accept that; I even suggested that might be the case. I'm not willing to accept it as fact though without facts backing that up.

Also, just providing the number that 10% of the ps4 userbase has bought it doesn't mean that all those who bought it could prefer a game with abit less of those cutscenes, and more gameplay, as an example.

Indeed, it doesn't. However, it points to something, whereas you present no data to point to anything. That is, you link to opinion pieces and tweets that have no clear public backing, so they aren't at all proof of anything.

Look, i see where this is going, voicing opinions about this isn't very welcome (due to bias or not) and i will let it from here

What's going on is this is B3D. There's nothing wrong with different opinions. However, if one wants to make an argument and try to sway people, one needs to present facts, data, and solid arguments, and have them challenged. If you can't provide any of this, the argument breaks down. It has nothing to do with whether people like or dislike your opinion, and everything to do with the quality of argument you're presenting, which is just personal opinion (yours and those you link to).

 

[Xbat]

For those that don't enjoy cinematic games you should not get Star Wars Jedi fallen order. Starts like an Uncharted game. I'm enjoying it so far though.

Walking and running animations aren't the best though

 

[BRiT]

Might as well include this here as it was one of the reasons for spawning this thread...

or

 

[Nesh]

I wont even dare to play any of these. Super spoilers
But I suppose a lot of the video content mixes it with a lot of gameplay, in game dialogue etc to connect the cut scenes and make the story coherent.
Then again what's the difference between this and the old school RPG's or click adventure games we used to play in the 80s 90s apart from text and sprite story telling being replaced with modern methods and extended in time because games got lengthier?

 

[Nesh]

Games of the Decade: The Last of Us is a masterclass in silent storytelling

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...of-us-is-a-masterclass-in-silent-storytelling