The importance of small cut scenes or sequences?

I was doing some research - I just started working on various small scale 3-10 second animation sequences. And I went back to look at XCOM (I think one of the best examples of a modernized strategy game).

The cut scenes in xcom total over 40 minutes! It blew me away realizing the scope here. Admittedly a lot of them are extremely similar with different voice over - but most of them are between maybe 5 and 10 seconds.

These include introductions for aliens, unloading the ship, landing the ship, launching the ship, the little "we've got new research" things, council reports, etc. Played back to back, there is over 40 minutes of solid content here.

Despite having put over 100 hours into XCOM, I really failed to realize how much work they put into all those small transitions, all the little introductions. Each step, each milestone, each stopping point. Almost every single one has some kind of animated or voiced sequence.

My question - for anyone who's played this game is - how important were these, all these tiny accent marks? Are all of these little elaborations part of the secret to why xcom, as a whole, feels so good as a game? It's a strange topic, because I would have never ever thought of XCOM as an example of a 'cut scene' centric game, but the sheer quantity of very small cut scenes they leverage is astounding.

 

I never realised it was that much either. Some of those animations were used to cover scene loads I think so I don't know if that alters how you count them but to me they helped maintain the flow instead of the old blank screen with a few words of lore popping up. I was going on a mission etc so seeing my troops loading/flying/unloading fitted in with that. The ones that I really noticed the repetition of was the research ones.

 

Yeah - the loading screens with your guys in the ship. They had a sequence for every autopsy, every interrogation, the introduction 'pose' for each enemy pod you discover.

But each of these things definitely added something - helped the flow out, accented some kind of achievement or progress. Fraxis clearly considered these elements important, 40 minutes worth of voice work and various animations is not trivial.

When you look at it as a whole - it's kind of shocking - you take these things for granted. But what would XCOM have looked like without all these little accents? How important were they to the total goodness that XCOM was?

 

While those scenes can add to a game, they do take up a lot of production resources. In some ways, scenes like those will matter less if you have replayability of a game. To use the Civilization and Alpha Centauri series as an example, I watched the various wonder videos the first time I played, and watched a few of them more than once because they were really cool, but generally after the first playthrough I was skipping past them or turning them off because I wanted to get on with playing the game.

 

To be a bit snarky, one could say you are asking if it is worth to put a lot of resources into something that players end up taking for granted and not really think about .
To me some of those micro cutscenes are even annoying. There is this well established trope that every new monster has to somhow face the camera and make his trademark scream to introduce itself. I really hate that, because it makes the whole monster aspect feel so generic and interchangeable. I much prefer approaches where the monster just is there and does its thing without being put in the spotlight for the spotlights sake. I also didn't like how in xcom you'd end up triggering groups of monsters that would become active at certain points of your advance pretty much no matter what you do. I understand the function for the pacing but I found how they handled it too obvious and immersion breaking.

If you are tight on resources I'd spend them first on things that you get a lot of bang for your buck out of. I don't count cutscenes among those because you shouldn't reuse them often or they will become annoying.

Plus, if you don't have absolute experts doing your animations they will probably look like crap and as a gamer I'd always want to have no cutscene over a less than great cutscene. The standards people expect from those things are AAA so imho you are better off not trying if you can't deliver something very close to that.

If you want the effect of a cutscene without the production cost I suggest looking into things like comics with high quality audio, like the cutscenes in the first Max Payne game. But those are better for scenes between levels and not for e.g. introducing an new monster or advancing the story mid-gameplay.

 

I got pretty sick of them also. I downloaded a mod that turned them off. Personally, I found that taking them out really made combat feel more mechanical and less dramatic. I ended up re-enabling them.

I really wish it were possible to take a game like XCOM and just incrementally remove more and more of it. Like actually deconstruct it in some playable form.

So far, in my experience, very very short sequences like 2-3 seconds are often worth it - these usually only take a couple hours and can really help accent something like a boss fight intro. Anything more ambitious can become "tons of work" with marginal results very very fast.

XCOM is one of the only games I've ever seen that adds these kinds of things to the research tree with such frequency though. Highlighting your progress here is really interesting to me.

 

Want the scientific answer? A few years ago, we researched the impact of cutscenes. This was formal, scientific research conducted by the University of Central Florida. Our findings showed that any motivational impact of cutscenes was overwhelmed by the actual game play, within a few minutes. So, for educational games, where budgets are small, we advocate against cutscenes.

The informal answer is that it depends. In GTA5, the story cut scenes REALLY matter. Whereas, in Destiny, I couldn't care less. In some genre's, players expect them. Violating expectations is tricky business.

Gigi

 

Cut scenes in general have the ability to harness all the power of cinematic language- you can use angles, lighting, and editing techniques that would not be suitable if the player had control.

Most of the time, Cut scenes are used to establish context, and make sure the player starts the level or boss fight on the right footing in regard to atmosphere, tension, and narrative.

In the case of the XCOM clips referred to, I believe they function most as a reminder to make the narrative conflict personal again. They stand in stark contrast to the "God's eye" view that you experience the rest of the game in. Those clips take you from looking at the whole of XCOM to right up close and personal to the people you're working with and who are depending on your choices. They serve to re-engage you in the narrative struggle.

 

Can you link to the research? Are these focused on longer sequences or very small ones?

How objective or definitive can this kind of research really be?

Damn man, now that's a bloody great description/analysis. Absolutely spot on!

Many cut scenes in xcom do multiple things: they establish context, re-enage you in personal narrative, they also act as tutorials, guiding you through many of your choices, they accent accomplishments as well as highlighting challenges.

I think that you really nail it though - no matter what the technical goal is for a given clip - the reason they spent so much time on it is to make the game feel more personal, less detached from the 'god view'.

 

There were a few games I played where cutscenes broke the gameplay and felt artificial. They broke the immersion of the game because you lost control of your character. The ones I like are after achievements, as mentioned, the Wonders movies in Civilization, or the final death scene of some boss.

It also depends on what type of game you are making. If it is a story heavy game like Mass Effect or KOTOR, then it makes sense to use more cut-scenes, but stuff like action RPS they should only be used sparingly and outside of normal combat time.

 

If you go back in time and look at much older games you'll discover the reasons for the cut scene. It was not originally so much to add to the gameplay. Due to technology limits there were long load times (floppy disk etc), and therefore it was useful to display at least a nice static image that people could gawk at while they wait. This sort of evolved into animations, and usually the animation could do more than the game could, like build a bit of background story or lay the foundation for an introduction/premise of the game. Then of course this all become more elaborate over time as technology increased. But now we're at the point where the in-game quality is so much higher than games used to be, that practically most of the game experience is above and beyond the cut-scene quality of old times... so I wonder what role it really has anymore unless you can really add to the story or background with it.

 

I played and enjoyed XCOM: enemy unkown and enemy within. I also played a less fancy game called Xenonauts, that is a clone with 2D sprite grafics and more simplistic looks, but with a lot of extra options (including a mini-game for aerial battles).

While I think xenonauts is a better game in mechanics and options, XCOM has a more satisfying gameplay experience; maybe is because the 3d graphics, but I'm sure that all the cutscenes do have a big impact. All the scenes at the base when developing something important or completing a key mision, but also the "killing shot" camera or the "over the shoulder" traveling when moving the last soldier. I'm a big fan of making those kind of additions to every game (in fact, I remember playing the KO replay on SoulCalibur or Fight Night over and over).