James had the strangest experience with Yakuza Zero.
The game was about 30% cutscene the way he played it
And. he. didn't. mind?
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Cutscenes have long been a whipping boy of game design.
We joke about Kajima and Naughty Dog games just being movies.
We groan when any game is released with cutscenes that you can't skip.
In fact, among designers, cutscenes have been seen as an inherently flawed design element for so long,
That it's sort of become a mantra.
"Cutscenes are bad, or at least lazy, game design."
"Never do in a cutscene what you could be doing through gameplay"
And, I get where that's coming from.
But if I may just pump the brakes for a moment here,
I think it's important to take a step back here and remember that nothing is inherently bad game design.
Anything that we can do within a game is a tool.
One of many in our designer's toolbelt
Now, some of those tools may have incredibly limited applications,
And some them can be disastrous when used wrong,
But that doesn't mean that we should throw them out entirely.
I mean even something as seemingly bad as terrible ragdoll physics
Can be harnessed to give us something like Goat Simulator,™
Ant the entire genre of "comedy physics sims" around it.
So everything has it's uses.
With that in mind, I think it's time we take a second look at cutscenes,
and just for the sake of clarity,
Let's define the cutscene in this case as:
A portion of a game where control is taken away from a player so that a video can play out.
Maybe it's pre-rendered, maybe it's all happening in-engine,
but the player is just sitting and watching, pressing no buttons while a little movie plays.
Now, for one thing, I think there's a case to be made for the merit of the film-game hybrid
like Metal Gear Solid™, or Uncharted™.
we readily embrace book-game hybrids in the form of the visual novel,
so why shut the door on games built with cutscenes as part of their core experience?
But, I realize that's sort of sidestepping the whole discussion.
So, let's just tackle that designer mantra head on.
"Don't do with a cutscene, what you could do with gameplay."
Alright, but what if a cutscene CAN do something that your gameplay can't?
Think back to what cutscenes did for us in the old days.
Why did we start using them to begin with?
Well, in an era where real-time graphics capabilities were incredibly limited,
cutscenes allowed us to show things that we could never do justice to in-engine.
But lets go a little deeper.
If you go all the way back the the days of Final Fantasy VII™,
The game that launched a thousand cutscenes,
What did those cutscenes often show?
Well, sometimes they showed establishing shots of your location.
Other times they highlighted key story elements,
but most often, they showed you action.
Mako Reactors exploding.
Cloud jumping on a train amidst a hail of gunfire.
Your party making a daring escape as a city collapses around them.
They show the characters doing amazing things,
way cooler than anything that happens during gameplay.
And that trend continued as the series grew.
Cutscenes showed your characters rail grinding down airship cables,
fighting in epic battles,
or matrixing their way through train cars full of heavily armed guards,
and the goal in all of this was to give the imagination a crutch.
After all, final fantasy combat wasn't super exciting to look at.
But when you pressed the buttons to choose attack commands from a menu,
this was what you were supposed to imagine.
When you used your small handful of moves over, and over, and over again
to fight back waves of generic enemies,
You were supposed to envision it as the sort of action spectacle you saw in those cutscenes.
Cutscenes attempted to bridge the gap,
To help you imagine a spectacle that the game just wasn't capable of.
But this sort of backfired.
As players, you watched those cutscenes and you think "I wanna do that,
I want this game to be that",
Creating this expectation of the gameplay experience,
and setting you up for disappointment every time you went back to...
this.
So we started trying to figure out:
"How do we make our gameplay look like this?"
We tried turning action cutscenes into Quick-time events,
to make them at least somewhat interactive.
We started making heavily scripted, action set piece sequences
to help make certain segments of our gameplay feel like those cutscenes looked.
Even Final Fantasy™ has strived, and succeeded to a degree,
in making their gameplay combat more like the spectacle you saw in their cutscenes.
Heck, NaughtyDog has nearly perfected the art of transitioning between cutscene and gameplay,
So that the player is given control over as many of the exciting action moments as possible,
without breaking the flow of things.
Slowly over the years, we've tried to transition all of that cutscene action spectacle,
into gameplay action spectacle.
We've been reasonably successful in this effort over the years,
and I think it's been a change for the better.
In fact, I am prepared to go out on a limb here, and say that,
in most cases,
We should not ever be using cutscenes for action sequences.
Sure, sometimes those scenes are cool,
but they just invoke in the player the sense of wanting to do rather than just see.
Which of course leaves us asking:
"What should we be using cutscenes for?"
And to that, I answer,
The thing we used them for originally.
That which our gameplay or graphics cannot do.
So, let's go back to Yakuza Zero for a minute.
Playing the game, you might notice that many of the cutscenes aren't just action sequences.
The game lets the player handle all of the action stuff.
It lets them do the flips and the kicks and the punches and feel like a yakuza while doing it
And why not? Today's games can deliver on action spectacle like never before.
No, Yakuza [Zero]'s cutscenes are saved for the quieter moments,
moments that show off subtlety of character that we simply couldn't as clearly express through gameplay.
A flicker of a facial expression,
or, drawing attention to the way someone nervously adjusts their tie in a tense conversation.
Yakuza [Zero] uses its cutscenes to round out and fully realize its characters in ways its gameplay cannot.
Without cutscenes, the Yakuza Zero experience would actually lose a great deal.
And that, I believe, is the way that we should treat the cutscene going forward
Not as the shortcut to spectacle but to subtlety.
Because quiet character emotion can be incredibly difficult to deliver on within the confines of gameplay.
At least, right now.
And in those places where our gameplay cannot deliver,
Sometimes the humble cutscene might just be the best tool for the job.
Always be wary of accepting conventional design wisdom as design law.
Don't just write off a potentially useful tool as inherently bad design,
or as a lazy way to approach problems just because it's fallen out of favor.
Instead, ask, "how can this be applied?"
and "In what scenario would this tool be ideal?"
Sure, conventional wisdom is often conventional for a reason.
Cutscenes may be a terrible choice in many cases,
but if we just throw out a tool like cutscenes entirely,
We only hamstring ourselves.
See ya next week!
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