[QUOTE="TheGrayEye"]
[QUOTE="hakanakumono"]
Here's where the "you might as well have made a movie" argument falls apart: Film is time constrained. No one is going to deliver a 60 hour movie. Games, like books, can tell stories as long as they want because they don't have to be consumed in one sitting and a lot of the story takes place through the gameplay.
And that's not true. A lot of the story is told through the gameplay in RE2. But it's also told through the cutscenes when it makes sense to have a cutscene. It wouldn't make sense to take these things out of cutscenes and put them into gameplay. Some things simply can't be turned into gameplay. What happens when characters top and talk? At what point does it stop being gameplay and transcend to cutscene? It doesn't make sense to limit stories only to action sequences.
hakanakumono
Keep in mind that like I said earlier, I think cutscenes can be used to tell a story in a game, but using movies to tell a story in a video game isn't pushing the video-game medium forward in any real storytelling sense. Also, in games like Metal gear, the only time you're usually playing, is when there is action or sneaking around, most of which isn't really critical to the actual story, and thus not much story is really being told at all through the gameplay, especially when compared to the incredibly long cutscenes.
Also, having charcters stop to talk worked just fine in HL2, at no point in the game (except perhaps the very beginning) was a cutscene really used in the game, much less needed. It starts transcending into a cutscene, when I have no control over the gameplay, and I can set the controller down to watch (like the clicker for a movie).
System Shock 2 is just as innovative as Half-life 2, because the story is told through both the environment, radio/audio diaries, and self-discovery. You walk around the spooky space ship, finding bloody writting on the wall, and audio diaries lying around from dead crew members, giving insight into the story and what happened. Also, the only real conversations that occur through the game, are characters talking to you over radio, while you are playing, this makes it so gameplay is never interupted with a movie, and instead, we can actually take advantage of the mediums ability to create a interactible world that the player is free to explore and learn about, rather then limit our discovery to specifc cutscenes and camera angles.
There is no real difference between movies and cutscenes besides the graphical fidelity and the way in which the game handles them. The sneaking around is part of the story int he same sense that a novel regarding a spy would describe the sneaking. Without it, the game lacks framework.
It may have worked just fine in HL2, but there are a lot of stories where it would not work. A lot is dependent ont he story content. Abstinence from cutscenes is an unhealthy restriction to place upon oneself, imo, because it limits what you can do.
That sounds like backstory, but it's not a narrative. Those kind of things are great complements for a narrative, but they cannot substitute for a narrative itself. It should be noted that this is typically done in Japanese Survival Horror games.
"same sense that a novel regarding a spy would describe the sneaking"- Ah, but when a novel is both describing scenes of dialog between characters, and someone sneaking around a base, it is seamless, there is no medium-level distinction in between it. Reading can only be based around our ability of sight, there is no sound or real level of interaction. There is in a game though, and when you take that interaction away, it ceases to become a game, even if it is just for a minute or two.
I think it's the opposite, cutscenes (for video games) limit what you can do. If I want to sit down on that chair while talking to a character, I can't because the cutscene is fully scripted, and out of my hands. Cutscenes take away the player's ability to make choices, and most of all, to interact- which is a staple of video games. Imagine if you were watching an actual movie at the theaters, and then all of a sudden one of the characters in the film pulled out a book, and then the only thing that was on screen were pages and silence for ten minutes, as the shot consisted soley of pages from the book (ones that the audience were expected to read)...
Also with System Shock 2 (and Bioshock), it actually managed to take audio diaries, which are often used soley for collectible bits of simple backstory nowadays, into a front that can actually be used to discover the reality and secrets of the actual story. You could play through Bioshock without really listening to the diaries, and understand the story at a basic level, but the audio diaries were the actual star of the narrative, they allowed you to discover entierly new levels that the plot had existed on, critical storylines that were central to the main plot, making it more than just backstory material. It's the type of story that works in a video game, the way 2001:a space odyssey works the way it does as a movie.
It also allows for a great level of subtly, because with Bioshock, so much of the environment and art deco (statues, etc) speak volumes about the mindset of Andrew Ryan and the characters in Rapture, without needing to have a huge cutscene explain all that in flashbacks (like Metal Gear would do).
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