What's up with games trying to be movies?

I'm starting to notice it, and it seems to be turning into a trend.

I'm talking about situations when there are way too many cutscenes, they're all using mocap, high detail actors and camera work.

Examples so far:
Max Payne 3, Mortal Kombat 11 (it is an action movie on unreal engine, pretty much), and to a degree Red Dead Redemption 2.

 

It lends an air of prestige because film is taken very seriously as an art form and that same air of prestige allows games to look like they're more than they really are. It's pretentiousness, basically, in the purest form. They use the big aspects of film that people respect without truly understanding them to make themselves look like something they're really not.

 

This sort of thing kinda bothers me.

For example, Red Dead Redemption 2 had some value as a movie, but gameplay was generally awful (at least in my opinion). Extra details didn't work for me, as I saw Witcher 3 before, and it wouldn't make much difference to me if the world was built in low poly style. Mortal Kombat 11 story mode unexepctedly turned out to be a multi-hour long action movie where most of the time I was waiting for it to end with gamepad in hands. There's even mass crowd battles in there, VFX, and all. However, I kept thinking how much it all cost and how much I'd prefer more playable characters instead. As some of the props there don't even make appearance in the rest of the game, at all.

So I've been thinking what's the point and decided to post about it here.

 

I think last of us of is the best example of this. Way too little actual gameplay in my opinion. But i'm a old PC master race gamer which for a long time have hated the dumbing down becasue of consoles.

edit: when the CD-rom was new there was a few games that only consisted of video clips and you should press the right button at the right time in the video. We are back at that

 

This is nothing new. Remember Metal Gear Solid 4?

Released 2008

longest cutscene 27 minutes

game finale: 71 minutes of unplayable watching of things.

And yet 94% on metacritic. Seems people like movies.

 

Valve showed with Half Life Alyx that they are still the kings of not cutting gameplay with cutscenes while still having epic "cutscenes"

 

Actually no, I haven't played this one (Guns of Patriots).

 

Well technically, no one has ‘played’ it. XD

 

It's just a form of entertainment really. For every movie like thing, there's a ton of other games, I think it's just it's own AAA demographic, which is about showing off hardware, the spectacle, the show - it's truly the domain of AAA blockbuster.

But I think it's settled into it's own profitable niche now (yes AAA is actually a specific market, most games are not AAA).

Sometimes you'll get a kid making what looks like AAA more often than not, which will be lacking all the cutscene movie polish, and that's basically an AAA-looking game to most players without everything the OP dislikes.

This kid has >8m dollars guaranteed right now just by even casually sniffing around how many bought it on steam alone. Took him a year for the first draft and he's been working ever since.

 

Exactly. Cut-scenes are retro.

More seriously, back in the day with crude graphics, it was pretty cool to see a high-poly cut-scene of what your little guy really looked like. Some even showed your currently equipped armour and weapon! It was like the Establishing Shot in film, helping your imagination fill things in later. Having a few, sort cut-scenes was one of the special touches an AAA game could have. Then Grand Theft Auto Vice city, in 2002, used cut-scenes (I think, maybe it was only San Andreas) to really set the mood for the missions.

Over the past decade I've seen more and more top-10 "games as art", or meditation Apps, or whatever. Games that you mostly just look at are a thing.

So sure, some action games overused them, but they're something to put on the list of things to add to your game if you have time: "upgrade back-and-forth dialogue into a cut-scene".

 

Hmm. This actually turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

You know, thinking about it I don't have a problem with MGS cutscenes, even when they're long and cinematic.
However, cutscene heavy approach in Max Payne 3 and in Mortal Kombat 11 felt extremely weird and even disruptive.

In MK11, there's 3.5 hours of cutscenes during main storyline, and turned out to be a half-decent movie with some sappy melodrama, pretty much. Max Payne 3 has the same amount of thhem.

Spoiler

I wonder if dissatifaction/confusion comes from expectation of the genre, because in a shooter game normally I do not expect hours of cutscenes aside from maybe intro/outro and some sort of level introduction (optional), and in case of a MK11 being a fighter, normally you'd expect very little in form of cutscenes, again, except beginnign and ending cinematic. You're supposed to get into action quickly.

And in case of RDR2 there was a conflict between what I wanted to do in the game, and the game trying to force its predetermined narrative, or trying to make me sympathetic towards some character. However, there was no such issue, for example, in metal gear solid.

I do agree that it is a niche of its own now. Cinematic experience. And great point about using high fidelity as a way to attract funding.

 

Just noticed? I happens for a while now, since game devs have given up on doing real games they just do S***ty movies with quicktime events, you dont have to invent anyting, very easy to calculate, easy money, only backside you ndee tons of money to do it.

 

If the game is more story-driven, like many RPGs are, then it makes sense to have lots of cutscenes. To me it's just a natural evolution of the sprite-based cutscenes from the 16-bit days. Not that huge cinematic cutscenes excuse bad game design, and if some companies are focusing too much on cutscenes, than maybe they should do movies rather than games.

 

Western visual novels (literally in the case of Red Dead Redemption).

 

Erm.... "cinematic novel" maybe?

Western Visual Novel would be Cinders.

 

I'm showing my weeb here, but we call them "OELVN"s.

As for cinematic games, the focus isn't on writing ("novel") but on, well, the cinematic design.

 

I will express my opinion. The best games that were films were the games from Tell Tail Games. But they are interactive cinema, and games with cut scenes remain them.

 

The real reason is that they want to reach as much people as possible, because the budgets are high, and those 60$ AAA games aren't for everyone, as much as big publishers would love them to be. So they've been trying to dumb them down, turn them into interactive movies, just put a lot of cutscenes and slap some generic gameplay on top of that, so that they can reach a broader audience, because everyone can watch a movie, it's a passive activity that doesn't require any skill or thought, unlike deep, complicated gameplay mechanic.

Besides, games trying to be cinematic has always been a thing, but only recently thanks to advances in technology big budget titles are closer than ever to being that. Since AAA generally lack any innovative gameplay and can't risk being too difficult to play, so they happily replace gameplay with cutscenes. At least back in the day they would put a QTE, now it's just "hey watch a 2nd rate wannabe movie for 10 minutes".

Also games are a weird and unique mix of software, movies, books and music all in one, and often are 2nd rate products to those (aka derivative) so they sometimes lack an identity of their own and try to be like something else. I think it's wrong path though. Games for me are always about gameplay, not listening to characters talking or watching cutscenes.

 

It's not that big budget games try to be movies... it's that they try to be hollywood movies. In other words, stupider than hell. Nothing interesting to say. Nothing insightful or challenging. Nothing even vaguely interesting. Just trite, over-acted and meaningless nonsense!

Everything is a stereotype, archetype, and it's all false. Always the opposite from reality.

 

I finally got around to play A plague tale, a collouge of mine been on me forever to try it out. I like the mood etc, but the gameplay is very, very basic.

It feels like this is the way triple A is going, pretty simple mechanics with high production value.